Operational promotion: How to increase active users?

Having a growing pool of active users is the ultimate ideal for every content product. Rome was not built overnight, and the maturity of a content product community naturally requires careful cultivation and long-term efforts.

In this era of widespread anxiety and endless fake trends, more and more products are trying to motivate users by building communities and promoting social interactions. However, many functional requirements and social scenarios are nothing more than wishful thinking of product managers. In order to keep users and the community together for a long time, it is important to give users a reason to stay at all times.

There are a number of foreign Internet products that may not be as well-known as Snapchat and Instagram, but they are also doing well in their respective fields. Let's see how these products use successful communities to attract new users, promote activity, and drive content production.

From Novice to Master: A Clear Promotion System

The more people feel that they are valuable to the entire community, the more willing they are to create value for the community.

For example, spectators and lurkers may just flip through the homepage, close the page, and forget about the existence of the community; whereas users with a large number of followers who need to constantly post content and reply to private messages are more likely to stay in the community for a long time.

Therefore, for users in the community, role awareness can bring a strong sense of belonging, and a sense of mission is a lasting adhesive. If you want to cultivate a mature community, you must work hard to build users' sense of role and mission.

A straightforward "cultivation manual"

When they first enter an unfamiliar community, novice users often feel like outsiders: they have trouble using product functions, are confused by community jargon, and have very few fans. Seeing the complex sections and real-time updated content of the community, there is only one thing in my mind: "The excitement is theirs, I have nothing."

In order to reduce the feeling of helplessness among new users, the question-and-answer community Quora has prepared a complete set of straightforward "training manuals" for newly registered users. It appears on the right side of the information flow, guiding new users from the simplest way of following topics and asking questions, gradually getting into the role, enhancing their identification with the entire community culture, until they completely immerse themselves in the vast world of Q&A.

Beginner's Guide to Quora Pages

The more complex the community, the more detailed the “Newbie Guide” needs to be. In this regard, WikiHow, a community focusing on life service guidance, has almost reached the extreme.

The core content of WikiHow is a illustrated manual on daily life services , which provides illustrated guidance for readers on various daily matters. The WikiHow community breaks down each grand manual-making task into small steps: asking questions, writing text answers, adding pictures, adding tags, checking for typos and reviewing, etc. Once every user registers, he or she can immediately see various to-do items and know clearly "what he or she can do for this community."

WikiHow's Detailed To-Do List

The difficulty of to-do items varies. Some tasks require users to have knowledge and experience, while others only require users to have patience. Everyone can have a name in the community moving forward if they want.

In many product communities, users want to stand out, but they don’t know where to start. The wisdom of WikiHow's design lies in that it divides the production process of core content products into detailed steps, allowing both novices and experts to choose the parts they are good at and show their skills. The clear to-do list and promotion system are easy to see at a glance. Users can start with the lowest threshold operations and gradually cultivate a sense of belonging in the community without wasting their enthusiasm in helpless loneliness.

Community contribution driven by word of mouth and equity

Platforms try every means to motivate users to continuously contribute to them. One effective means is to quantify and make visible user contributions, reasonably design the relationship between user activity/contribution value and community rights and reputation, and use indicators to motivate users to climb the community's hierarchy.

Contribution value of personal business card

For the platform, users’ browsing, posting, commenting and following behaviors can all be regarded as “contributions” to the liveliness of community content. The form in which the platform displays user contributions not only involves incentives for users, but is also part of the user's personal identity and reputation on the platform.

In Github, a famous community for programmers to upload and share code, each user's contribution will be counted in detail and displayed on their personal page on a daily basis. The more active and contributing a user is in the community on a certain day, the darker the color of the square representing that day. Therefore, when others click on a user's page and see the dark green color on the calendar, their respect and trust will naturally increase, which will correspond to higher popularity and reputation.

Github's statistics on user contributions

At the same time, Github will also classify different types of user contributions and display them in the form of a radar chart , so that other users can view the sections they are good at or the most active ones. These indicators are like personal business cards, carrying the users' efforts and experiences, and also motivating users to continuously contribute more to the community like "brushing up their resumes".

Binding of Level and Permission

On some platforms, level not only means stars or diamonds next to the avatar, but also means more permissions. When platform level and rights are bound together, users will have a stronger motivation to continue to make contributions in order to gain more opportunities to "be the master of their own house."

Helper can answer questions for newly registered users; Guide has the right to host topics in the chat room and mark users who violate community speech rules; and Super Guide has the authority to ban users and can send push notifications to specific groups. Unlike general tiered payment platforms, high-level users in Wisdo do not enjoy more functions, but have more management rights and voice. The platform motivates users to upgrade through a real sense of ownership and cultivates a healthy community ecology through them.

Conversations between Guide and ordinary users in Wisdo community

Every festive season brings more activity: the community’s “festival-making movement”

Activity operation is an indispensable part of activating users. In real life, people’s love for celebrating festivals also exists on the Internet platform. It is unrealistic to want to create a large-scale festival like "Double Eleven", but event operators can start small and give users reasons to rely more on the platform on certain days.

Create special time nodes

For a platform, some days are just extraordinary. This could be the anniversary of the platform’s founding, it could be a discount day for the platform’s mall, or it could be the date when users spontaneously organize an event... The specific connotation of the "festival" itself is not important. The most fundamental thing is to artificially give special meanings to some time nodes, so that users can feel that "this day is different", thereby enhancing a sense of belonging and creating more value.

Moreover, these special time nodes will also become part of the community culture, setting it apart from other similar communities.

Postcrossing is a global postcard sharing platform where users from more than 200 countries get to know each other through the platform and send postcards to each other. It is worth mentioning that since users can contact each other through email after they get to know each other, offline behaviors such as writing physical postcards, mailing, and receiving postcards have no strong relationship with the platform. Therefore, users are likely to gradually leave the platform after accumulating a group of "friends" who send postcards to each other. In order to retain users, Postcrossing seizes every opportunity to create special anniversaries and allows users to continue to participate in activities that only the platform can provide.

For example, Postcrossing packaged the concept of "Letter Month" and encouraged users to participate in the activity of writing letters to each other in February 2019. For example, February 4th of every year is "Thank the Postman Day", and the platform will launch a large number of related activities such as sending gifts to postmen and drawing pictures for postmen.

Postal Month and Thank You Postman Day

In addition to date-oriented anniversaries, Postcrossing also creates event-oriented anniversaries. For example, the platform will commemorate the sending of postcards with specific numbers. Whenever the number of postcards registered on the platform reaches the milestone of n million, Postcrossing will hold a guessing game for all employees. Hundreds of thousands of users on the platform stare at the countdown and look forward to the time when the 10 million, 20 million, etc. postcards will be registered. Users who successfully guess the time and minute will receive a reward.

During the "created" festival, a large number of users gathered on the platform and gained joy from watching. At the same time, if these anniversaries are important nodes in the development of the platform, and the operator pays attention to emphasizing the user's contribution to the arrival of this node, then the user will feel that "they are growing together with the platform" during the participation process, and their emotional connection with the platform will be deeper.

Offline activities promote online activity

For purely online activities, people can often complete them with just a few clicks on the screen. Although these activities with low thresholds and simple operations can easily attract a large number of users to participate, it is difficult for them to form lasting appeal and recall value. When the activity becomes an offline behavior, users need to take more steps, and people's sense of participation and memorableness in the activity will be greatly improved.

In Imgur, an American community that collects emoticons and is a source of happiness, users' daily activities are nothing more than uploading funny animated pictures and emoticons, and clicking "like" with their fingers, and the happiness they get is nothing more than "superficial and short-lived". During last Christmas, Imgur launched the "Secret Santa" event, allowing people to send a physical Christmas gift to another user on the platform.

Christmas Events on Imgur

It is indeed troublesome to prepare a gift for a stranger and send it by hand , but the psychological nature of human beings is "the more you give, the deeper you love". Ordinary users who complete complex activities are more likely to develop into loyal true love users, continuously contributing money, time and talents to the community.

Taking the Postcrossing mentioned earlier as an example, another manifestation of its "strong operation" feature is that it encourages users to hold offline gatherings. When an interest-oriented Internet platform can provide you with benefits beyond interests, allowing you to expand your real-life network and gain real-life friendships, how can you easily abandon the platform?

Postcrossing global offline gathering schedule

Connecting multi-dimensional needs: the tool attribute of community

A successful platform can often give users more than just "poetry and distant places", but can also solve immediate needs. By adding small functions of the nature of tool services, the platform can provide users with a stronger sense of gain.

For example, job hunting is one of people’s basic needs. On Dribbble, a community where designers gather, there is not only a waterfall flow where users showcase their works, but also design-related job information. For independent designers, if there is a platform that can be used to showcase their works and talents, as well as to find jobs and put their talents to use immediately, they will definitely want to join such a community even if they have to sell tickets.

Jobs section on Dribbble

Perhaps for most information products, it is too difficult to accurately meet the broad and urgent needs of users, but it is feasible to increase the added value of the community through tool service functions .

The Skimm, an American women's news and information platform, has launched a calendar information product where users can see a large number of dates related to entertainment, travel, etc. For example, the timeline may show the date when Netflix launches a new drama or the date when a local concert starts. Users can not only learn about these events by reading information, but can also synchronize this function with their mobile phone calendar, turning the information product into a reminder to watch new dramas and grab concert tickets.

Source: All Media