As a community operator, do you still want to stick with it?

I think there is some truth to these three doubts. Due to limited space last time, I did not elaborate on them. Today, I would like to elaborate on what I think, what I have seen, and the practical experience I have had.

01

First of all, I do not deny the value of the community. I believe that the community still has important value in certain situations and scenarios.

This value includes 4 points:

1. Product testing, iteration, maintenance of seed users in the growth stage, and collection of first-hand feedback from core users.
2. Early user explosion in marketing communications projects.
3. Limited, targeted and efficient operations.
4. Low-cost customer acquisition for startup teams.

The first point is very easy to understand. At this stage, major Internet companies need first-hand feedback from users during the initial product function creation, internal testing, and user research. This user feedback mechanism is very efficient and cost-effective to operate and collect in the form of a community.

For example: During the product function research stage, after you have an in-depth conversation with each user, you can add them to a WeChat group. During the subsequent function polishing and online testing process, you can continue to ask users in the group about their usage experience and bug feedback. It can not only create enough "sense of participation" for users, but also receive first-hand complaints from every user in the first place, thus avoiding encountering bugs after going online.

Generally speaking, many product teams in large companies have multiple such user communities. They come together based on their love for the product, offer suggestions during product iterations, chat naturally based on common interests, or participate in various activities held within the product. This kind of community must be valuable to the company, products and operations.

I support this kind of community operation ! Because it is light enough and the workload is small, it does not take up too much time. But you can get a higher cost-effectiveness.

The second point is also very easy to understand. At this stage, fresh food e-commerce, social e-commerce, or many marketing H5 screen-sweeping cases similar to NetEase, all have more or less community participation in the promotion process.

In addition to posting some pictures and texts on public accounts, these promotions based on marketing behaviors will also allow KOLs or some high-quality users to post on their Moments, so as to trigger the marketing cases through the nodes of these social relationship chains as early as possible at the beginning of the marketing communication.

As for the management of these high-quality users, it is very good to use a community approach.

For example: I was fortunate enough to be invited to join a high-quality user community of an accounting APP. In addition to exchanging accounting methods, financial management methods, and joking in the group, everyone also talked about other things. Every time a product launches a marketing campaign, the community operator will pay us to forward the campaign to our friends to help spread and explode the campaign.

I support this kind of community because the time investment is not high and it is convenient to quickly gather a group of high-quality users and spread the message quickly when doing communication projects.

The third point is also very easy to understand. If you can improve your operational efficiency through a small-scale community, that is also very good.

For example: A certain community content APP has a large number of resident writers. By forming a community with these resident writers, the operators can not only standardize the content operation of the community and optimize the content and send it to the group as soon as possible to inform everyone, but also maintain the relationship with these writers through daily community operations, allowing them to continue to output content.

For example, a certain e-commerce platform has formed a community with a large number of merchants, regularly notified merchants of platform rules in a timely manner, or informed merchants at any time to form groups to participate in promotional activities, and often held various e-commerce operation lectures in the community to improve merchants' sales ability.

I support such communities because the time invested is also not high, but they can make operations more efficient.

I also support the fourth point.

Many startup company bosses came to me and said: After you wrote this article, our small company doesn’t know how to acquire customers.

All startups do not need to read this article. As long as the startups can survive, they can acquire customers in various ways, even through social networks or fission. As long as you can acquire customers in large quantities at low cost, whatever you do is valuable and correct.

If community operation can really help you acquire customers in the early stage of your business, then I also support it, because the survival of a startup is the most important thing.

02

So what am I denying?

What I deny is that a large number of young people invest excessive time in community operations, invest all of their daily work, and invest one, two or even three years of their careers. However, they ignore the fact that there are actually many things worth studying and learning in the field of operations. Their best years are wasted on social networks, repeating repetitive tasks such as being a WeChat customer service representative, attracting new members, and fission day after day.

What else am I denying?

What I also deny is that many startups do not think about the essence of their business and products, do not look at which promotion ideas are suitable for their products, do not polish their products, and do not polish their services. Instead, they blindly hope to acquire customers at low cost through communities and fission. Even after the company has grown and is able to fight a regular battle, they still delve into the art of opportunism, hoping to continue to reap profits and go astray.

This is using tactical opportunism to cover up strategic laziness. There will be no growth or progress. The company will not only hurt users, but also employees working in the company. Employees will never grow and will be confined to the "fire pit" of only being able to do community operations and mess with people all day long.

What else am I denying?

What I also deny is that a large number of micro-businesses, those selling fission courses and community courses are changing the concepts, deceiving the majority of users and their bosses, saying that community operation is community operation, not WeChat group operation, and that my articles are all about WeChat group operation, not community operation.

This is like covering one's ears and stealing a bell, deceiving oneself and others. This is obviously shameless and one does not even realize it.

As of now, 80% of social communities are based on WeChat groups, and it is unlikely that new platforms will be derived. So the fact is that a large number of marketing activities and operations are built on the basis of WeChat groups. Your concept of using social community operations to replace WeChat group operations is pure bullshit.

Do you think that giving lectures, brainwashing, expressing feelings, sending distribution links, and encouraging everyone to sell goods in thousands of WeChat groups every day and night is really community operation?

If you are selling fake facial masks, cutting leeks to sell courses, or selling your crappy knowledge planet, don't elevate yourself. You are just the manager of a WeChat group and a community operator. Why don't you give me a face?

What else am I denying?

What I also deny is that these scammers have been working tirelessly, reaping one crop of leeks after another, cheating the bosses and then the newbies, cheating the Internet and then the traditional enterprises, cheating the first-tier cities and then the second-tier cities, misleading the operations, misleading the business, making the circle impetuous, and making newcomers confused. They have the community in the left hand and fission in the right hand, which are the two magic weapons of the scammers in the world.

So, to sum up, I do not deny the value of the community. What I deny is the distorted demands and cognition of the community.

There is value in community.

But the value lies in the proportion of your investment, your company's strategy, the adaptation of your product, and the stage of your career, which will determine whether your community operation is really valuable.

The value of truth lies in the fact that it is the truth itself. It does not become the truth just because many people do it or hype it.

The same is true for communities.

03

It’s ridiculous to say that I don’t understand community.

Three years ago, I wrote many articles on the topic of community operation.

While today's charlatans are everywhere using so-called community courses to cheat people, I had already researched this area three years ago. But when it comes to bragging, creating concepts, using terms to make money, and fooling people, they may not be as good as the "big guys" in community operations.

I need to conduct a deep review in this regard.

In addition to the theoretical foundation, I personally brought the company its first 10 million in sales in 2016 through micro-courses, communities, fission, and distribution, and have accumulated successful cases. I can briefly share this case with you. This case is actually very simple from the perspective of the current Internet routine, but the biggest feeling I gained from this experience is:

Community operation and fission promotion are more of a means to achieve the goal. If you really want to make the operation successful, you still have to focus on the essential things.

In 2016, I joined an online interest and skill education startup and became an operations manager of the company (I was a lone commander at the beginning).

When I joined, the company had just received a small round of financing, and the entire company had less than 30 people. Due to the limited amount of financing, the promotion expenses that the company could provide were not high.

In addition, we are an online education product based on interests and skills (the market demand for the product had been fully verified at the time and there was a strong demand), which resulted in our users being very vertically segmented (6 to 12 years old, and must be entry-level users of this interest and skill). There is no website, platform, or public account that gathers such a vertically segmented user group.

So I have only one goal, which is to bring low-cost, large numbers of accurate users to the company.

Low cost, large quantity and high precision. The three most important indicators at that time.

In the beginning, we tried every possible way to find users, such as offline marketing and handing out flyers, but there were only a few users; we launched a public account, which was expensive, but the customer acquisition effect was very poor; and we basically couldn’t even think of using other promotional channels that required a lot of money. So when we were looking for users in the early stage, we encountered many setbacks.

Because our users are too vertically segmented, they sink like sand in the vast ocean of the Internet.

However, through continuous analysis and research, we later discovered that there is a point that is still worth attacking.

That is our user group. They are distributed in the form of small circles, and there is only one person at the center of the circle, and that is their teacher. In other words, if we can find the centers of these circles, find their teachers, and convince the users' teachers to promote our products, then we can break into these small circles and obtain accurate users.

Readers may be wondering here, why would teachers recommend students to take online courses on external platforms? This logic seems to be invalid.

This requires special emphasis on our product form. We are an interest and skill education product that tends to be an assistant teacher. We will form a closed loop of "learning in class - after-class tutoring" with the user's main teacher, so it is logical to ask the main teacher to recommend students to take our assistant teacher courses. Because the products in our industry have this characteristic.

So our question becomes: How do we find the main course teachers and convince them to recommend our courses to their students?

04

We decided to adopt a referral rebate and commission model to encourage teachers to recommend students to experience our products. The next step is to find a teacher to implement this model.

We tried every possible way, using various means such as giving red envelopes and asking for connections, to join the WeChat groups where the main teachers were. We added them in the name of sending teaching materials, and then introduced our products to them, and told them that as long as you recommend your students to experience our courses for free, we will give you a bonus.

After optimizing our wording and hitting a wall many times, more than a dozen teachers recommended our students to experience our product for free. More than 20 parents of students thought our products were good after trying them for free and purchased our courses.

This brought us more than 100,000 yuan in revenue. Correspondingly, we also gave teachers commissions and rebates.

The model worked, and we finally found a way to tap into these vertically segmented and precise users!

That is to find their teachers first, and then reach their students through the teachers.

After the model is running smoothly, the next question arises: relying on this method of joining groups one by one and convincing teachers is really too slow. How long will it take to achieve a sales volume of 10 million?

We must have a fast and efficient way to attract a large number of teachers and improve the efficiency of persuading teachers so that more teachers can promote our products and increase sales.

So the question is, where can we get so many teachers? Because it is a vertically segmented industry, teachers in this industry are also very difficult to find.

Continue to add WeChat groups one by one? And then add one by one?

No, it's too slow.

Later, through research, we discovered that this group of teachers had an urgent need, which was that they desired more teaching and research learning.

Teachers in this vertical sub-industry are actually the same as Internet operations, product, and technical workers. They are eager to continue their studies and improve their abilities at work. Only in this way can they cultivate more outstanding students and charge higher tuition fees.

I was leading three operations teams at the time and conducted an in-depth study of the teaching, research and training market in this industry, and found that it was very promising.

Because there are a large number of teaching, research and training institutions in this industry, there are also good and bad ones. What they often do is to find a slightly famous professor in a university, package him, and then create an offline training class, encouraging teachers from all over the country to come to Beijing and Shanghai for training, charging 2,900 to 10,000 yuan per person. A week's training is not only expensive, but also tiring, and the final training effect is also disappointing.

This is simply an opportunity for Internet practitioners to launch a dimensionality reduction attack.

We quickly adjusted our plan and decided to penetrate this industry with free online micro-courses, but we did not intend to make money from it. We had only one goal, which was to attract more teachers through free micro-courses and let more teachers promote our online interest and skills education courses. After all, that is the company's main business and the future direction.

Thanks to the boss’s connections, we invited a lecturer from a well-known school, paid him several thousand yuan, and asked him to give us a one-hour teaching lecture in the WeChat group.

The lecturer was skeptical at the time. Giving lectures in a WeChat group? Are you kidding me?

Then we made a very beautiful lecture poster with our customer service QR code on it and the corresponding scripts were also prepared. Then we started with our seed teacher group (the role of the community, the initial burst of dissemination), and the slogan we put forward was: Take the master class for free without leaving your home!

The requirements are very simple. As long as the teacher forwards our poster + copy to the circle of friends and takes a screenshot to us, we will add him to the WeChat group for the class, and the poster in the circle of friends will attract more users for us.

The promotion was of course quite successful. We prepared two customer service WeChat accounts, which were paralyzed by the additions. Because this industry is so vertically segmented, there must be a large number of teachers in the teacher’s circle of friends.

At that time, the two operations colleagues were inviting people to the group through friends, sending out scripts, distributing posters, and maintaining order in the group. Their hands were cramping from clicking so much.

We quickly succeeded in acquiring 1,000 targeted teachers through a single lecture. He must be accurate. If he is not accurate, there is no need to add us to the class. This is much better than adding teachers to WeChat groups one by one.

In this way, we held one online lecture after another, attracted more than 10,000 teachers and more than 30 WeChat groups. We usually held lectures and distributed teaching knowledge in the WeChat groups, and the teachers chatted enthusiastically in the groups. In private, our sales staff will follow up with each teacher via private messages, introduce our products to the teachers, constantly polish their sales pitch, and ask the teachers to recommend the free trial classes to their students.

For example, we would tell teachers: Teacher, you can let your students experience it for free. They don’t need to spend any money. As long as they come to experience it, we will give you a bonus.

Because our lectures were so great, most teachers, although somewhat resistant to us at first, gradually began to trust us and started recommending students to try our courses for free. And when we really gave the bonus to the teacher, the teacher finally thought that we were not scammers, trusted us more, and worked harder to promote our courses.

In this way, in order to find these precise users in vertical segments, we almost went around the world.

First of all, we don’t look for them directly, but find their teachers first.

When we found their teacher, we found that the speed was too slow, so we did online lectures first. After the online lectures, we continued to output, recruited more teachers, and formed a very active teacher teaching and research community with them. We hold lectures and teaching exchanges regularly, and the group is extremely active every day. Then, when teachers gradually gained trust in our platform, we began to introduce it to them and asked them to promote our courses.

That’s how we achieved the company’s first $10 million in sales.

05

But do you think this is a successful case achieved through community operation?

Not really, because community and fission are just our means.

The essence of our success is that we have polished the best online lecture column in this vertical field!

We spent a lot of effort to polish the content of this lecture, including how to choose the topic, how to meet the teachers' teaching and research needs, whether the content can solve their pain points, how to prepare the course outline, what are the key points of the course, how the lecturer packages it, how to write the speech, how to control the tone, including how to design the materials, the copy of the poster, the location of the QR code, etc.

We know that whether it is the community or fission, the reason why we can attract a large number of users is because of the high-quality content of our courses. Because only with high-quality course content will these teachers be willing to participate every time, forward every time, and enthusiastically support us every time, and continue to bring us a steady stream of new users.

And most importantly, we are free.

Gradually, many research and teaching institutions in this industry that were cheating people out of money and making money by profiting from others were directly wiped out by us.

Do you still think this is a successful case achieved through community operation?

Not really. We still spend a large part of our working time polishing the promotion distribution system, distribution background, and distribution products. We started out by manually sharing profits with teachers and settling commissions, all in a manual process, and later on, it became fully automated, streamlined, and systematized. It has greatly improved the efficiency of teachers in promoting our products.

Once the teacher is convinced by us and is willing to promote our products, he can directly promote our products in the circle of friends in just two steps, because we will automatically generate copywriting and promotional materials for him.

Our backend data system is also well polished. After he shares it, he can quickly see the effect of attracting new customers, as well as commissions and cash rewards. We have comprehensive monitoring of costs, risk control, and fake orders, which always ensures that our promotion ROI is positive.

Do you still think this is a successful case achieved through community operation?

No, we finally discovered the drawbacks of the community, so we recruited a lot of interns, and every day we were setting up groups, recruiting people, and answering user questions. I feel miserable every time the lecture day comes. Even after using the automatic tool, WeChat is still often blocked. Therefore, we decisively gave up the social network and put the courses on the official account. Users can unlock the courses and listen to the lessons on the official account by simply forwarding the courses to their friends.

We continued to polish the landing page and the conversion process, and soon this public account reached 100,000 people.

Please note that these 100,000 people are precise users, very precise vertically segmented users.

We have also connected a CRM system to the background of the official account. Our sales staff no longer have to manually chat with teachers one by one on WeChat. Instead, through the CRM system, they can automatically classify and divert teachers who have communicated with us, teachers who have not communicated with us, teachers who have been recommended, and teachers who have not been recommended, thereby greatly improving the efficiency of sales promotion.

So later on, our WeChat group was completely disbanded. Even without a community, we can still acquire customers efficiently.

Do you still think this is a successful case achieved through community operation?

Not at all. We can be successful because the company's products are of very high quality. It is precisely because everyone in the company, from the boss to the colleagues, has been constantly polishing the main products that the quality and reputation of the courses we sell to students during the promotion process are very good, which has greatly promoted each business line.

We never felt particularly tired or painful while running the community, because the quality of the courses was indeed effective, so the teachers only gave us praise. Although there were complaints, they were very small. Even though we were very tired, we were still very happy.

Although I left the company later, it completed several rounds of financing and gradually grew into a small unicorn in a niche market. Later, this promotion method through micro-courses-fission-distribution was gradually abandoned by the company. Now the company has begun to do performance advertising and brand advertising on a large scale.

Because that is the formal battle that a company should fight after it matures, because it is more efficient and can grow faster.

In the past, because we had no money, we had to rely on the community for support. But when you have money in the future, you must abandon such means and bravely fight a regular war. This is the operational growth of a company, and this is also the growth that operators should have.

So after I left my job, I didn’t look for community-related work again, but instead explored more advanced methods of operation.

Because you can’t keep doing community operations until you’re old, so if you say I don’t understand community operations, I definitely won’t admit it.

With those simple things, can you blow them into flowers?

Therefore, community operation workers must have this sense of crisis. If you understand the basic logic of this job, you must get rid of it as soon as possible.

06

So how do community operation workers get out of this fire pit?

I personally think that seeking an internal transfer within the company, or whitewashing the identity of community operation by constantly doing new work, is the best way to jump out of this "fire pit".

For example: You are working in community operations for an e-commerce company, and a lot of your work every day is posting posters and coupons in the community. What do you do if you want to get rid of it?

You can take a closer look at other positions within the team to see if there is any work you can insert yourself into. For example: event operation, you can plan more activities, first plan activities within the community, and then slowly help colleagues to plan activities within the entire site. Gradually, your own identity will change from a community operator to an excellent event operator.

When you change jobs to another company, you can apply for the job as an event operator, and then you will be completely free from the restrictions of the community operation position.

In fact, breaking through the boundaries of work in the company and slowly transforming one's job position into another is an essential quality for an excellent worker. This quality is very necessary for transforming out of community operation or getting rid of the identity of community operation.

Of course, this will inevitably involve some overtime, and you may be misunderstood. But in order to escape from the "fire pit" of community operation, I think these grievances are acceptable.

During this process, please firmly believe in the sincere words of this big brother who has 5 years of rich operation experience, and who only tells the truth. I will not sell you courses, I will not sell you the Knowledge Planet, I will not cut your leeks, but will give you advice from the bottom of my heart.

Because the Internet's promotion methods and operational ideas are constantly changing every few years, the method you use today may not work tomorrow. If you still stay in the low-tech, shallow-level job field of community operation, which is crowded with slackers and scammers (because they are not good enough and cannot explain complex things), then your best years of youth will be wasted.

07

This article will be my last article on community operation. I will no longer write about any community operation content in the future, but will continue to focus on writing in-depth content such as user growth, user operation, growth of operation practitioners, product operation, etc.

I also sincerely hope that if you see me one day a few years later, I hope:

You are talking to me eloquently, telling me which channel has high-quality users, which good channel that has been overlooked but has not been discovered, how to carry out wave-by-wave advertising, how to continuously occupy positions with various keywords, how to use various technical means to wake up users in the background, which platforms are more effective after the product goes overseas, how to conduct channel delivery tests, and compare real and fake samples. With a budget of hundreds of millions, what strategy should be used?

You are talking eloquently in front of me, telling me how to optimize data in product operations, how to do AB testing, how to do growth marathons, how to optimize the entire user chain, how to do user tiered operations, how to summarize experience through data every day to arrange optimization points, and how to make user-related recommendations.

You are talking to me eloquently, telling me how to do product brand marketing, how to occupy the minds of users, how to polish high-quality brand content, how to write tonal copy, how to do full-case marketing, and how to do a brand linkage.

You in front of me...

At this time, you must be calmer, more confident, more determined, more professional, and better.

It must be much better than what you are still saying, such as "Community is a group of people doing one thing together", "Community is established by soul", "Which fission tool is the most stable", and "The 250 rule of community".

I have felt this beauty, and I hope you will feel it too.

Time will prove everything you do, and time will prove everything I say.

Okay, I have finished talking about the community. Once again, I beg you to stop arguing. Those who understand will understand.

Thanks!

Author: Liu Weidong

Source: Liu Weidong's Operation Notes