Community Operation: How do I operate the community?

The essence of a community is connection. It is a collection of connections between people, resources, information, and products and customers.

The nature of community

I understand that the essence of a community is connection. It is a collection of connections between people, resources, information, products and customers, and so on. QQ and WeChat are just carriers of social networks at this stage. If there are more products for connection in the future, then when we talk about social networks, we will not focus narrowly on QQ, WeChat, and Telegram.

Why do we say that the essence of community is connection?

A community is not necessarily composed of just one person. It requires at least three people to form a group. The connections between these three people can be infinite. A WeChat group can have a maximum of 500 people, a QQ group can have a maximum of 2,000 people, and a Telegram group can accommodate tens of thousands of people.

Where there are people, there is a world. The tone of the group is what they connect. There are blind date groups and recruitment groups for connecting people; there are knowledge payment groups and resource matching groups for connecting information and knowledge; there are fruit selling groups, lipstick selling groups, home appliance selling groups, etc. for connecting goods and people; there are photography groups, weight loss groups, King of Glory groups, etc. for connecting interests. Based on people’s needs, communities can make many connections.

The value of community

As long as there is a connection, it must have value. Let’s take the simple community operation method I use as an example to look at the value of the community.

One thing that needs to be made clear is that connections must be made to meet certain needs. If there is no value, there is no meaning for the community to exist.

I started to run a community in 2015 and have run many groups. In the end, I only kept the Internet Operation Cooperation and Exchange Group (the predecessor of the Jianfa Operation Group 1). First of all, let me explain that I am a lazy person. I don’t care about the group when I am busy. The community has grown wildly, but there are basically no people who break the rules in the group. Once they do, I will never tolerate them. Later, I thought about it and realized that the group has not died in these 4 years and has developed into 2 groups, which shows that there is community value.

So I have sorted out my experience in running groups. However, I am afraid this experience cannot help you to split into 100 groups, nor can it help you to make 10 million a day. It only tells you how to survive first.

Let’s start with what services I provide to community partners:

• Daily Internet News;
• Cooperation information within the Internet operation circle;
• Internet operation recruitment/job search information;
• Internet classified product user survey report and data analysis report;
• Discussions on Internet operations topics, online operations sharing, and offline operations gatherings;
• Company gossip in the Internet circle.

Through the above services, let us take a look at the value of the community. Some people may ask, these are what most communities provide, what’s special about you? I have only two words to say – persistence. Persist in serving everyone in the group and help them connect.

I have summarized the following points about community value:

1. The community connects people with each other, connections between 500 people, and connections beyond 500 people. Group members can initiate requests within the group, and the group will respond to all requests and help each other.
2. Output knowledge value, industry information, and industry reports to enable group members to expand their knowledge, improve their cognition while communicating, and continue to grow.
3. Output benefit value, recruitment information, internal job referrals, reverse company background checks, and understand a company's true internal structure and business situation. Connect cooperation information, operate on behalf of others, develop on behalf of others, promote on behalf of others, etc., so that there can be actual interest exchanges within the group.

The above is from the perspective of personal value, so what is the value to the company community? Why do many companies set up community positions? I have summarized the value of community to the company in four points:

1. Obtain accurate traffic at low cost. Online traffic is getting more and more expensive, and activation and monetization are more difficult than before. Communities are based on relationships between friends, and there is a layer of acquaintances or light acquaintances. Therefore, accurate traffic can be obtained, such as: operation groups, business groups, mothers groups, travel experts groups, etc. Known user tags can be used to capture seed users and obtain accurate traffic;
2. The product quickly reaches users and obtains feedback. Testing and feedback within the community are much faster than on the APP. For example, product internal testing groups, new function experience groups, etc. can obtain users' feedback in the first time, and the user reach is much higher than SMS and push methods;
3. Build a trading platform at low cost. Sometimes it can be zero cost to build a community, and then sell goods in the community. Generally, such communities adopt the distribution or dropshipping model, and do not do their own supply chain, so this kind of business is very simple. As long as there is conversion in the community, it is a trading platform that continuously produces transaction value.
4. Save brand marketing costs. Due to the nature of the relationships among people in domestic communities, communities replicate and split very quickly, so it is still relatively cost-effective to use them for corporate brand marketing and promotion at the moment.

To sum up, these are the values ​​of communities. Of course, these values ​​actually have a potential premise, that is, these communities themselves are not dead groups, and the people in the groups are active fans (real users). Only then are they valuable. Those communities with a bunch of fake fans and that only post small advertisements are not within the scope of what I want to discuss.

How to operate a good community

1. Quality vs. Quantity, Choose “Quality”

Most people who do community operations should have heard of these indicators, such as "the number of groups created reaches X", "the number of group members reaches more than XXX", "the conversion rate of orders within the group is X%", etc. I also created many groups at the beginning, such as "Internet operation recruitment group", "reading group", "craft beer drinking friends group", "offline sharing activity group", "special air ticket group" and so on.

It didn't take long for me to realize that the value I could provide to community members was far from enough, and the time for maintaining the community was limited, and the corresponding resources were limited. We reluctantly disbanded all the groups and only retained the Internet operation cooperation group, which was also a group operated by Jianfa.

Now that we have decided to choose quality, how do we set the standard? How do you judge whether group members are of high quality?

• The original users added to the group by the group owner/group manager all know their identity tags. These users have their own tags, so the quality is controlled by the group owner/group manager.
• Group member invitations: For this type of user group, the identity labels of new members are mainly reviewed. There are two ways: one is to directly ask the person who invites the group member, and the other is to ask the members to change the group nickname and label themselves after joining the group, so as to control
• Regular cleaning, in addition to regularly cleaning out those who violate the group rules, also requires regular cleaning of those who add people in batches and those who bring external robots.

A plug-in robot mainly judges through red envelopes, and tests the speed of receiving red envelopes from time to time. At the beginning, there were many red envelope plug-ins that automatically grabbed red envelopes. I would do tests from time to time to clean out the people who received the red envelopes first every time to ensure that the group members who grabbed the red envelopes were real members.

B's routine for adding people in batches is usually to join the group first and not speak, but you will find that there are some patterns in their nicknames, such as "A XXX-Operations Director/Person in Charge", "XX-General Manager/CEO", or a beautiful woman's avatar nickname without much pattern. This means that founders or CEOs will not mark their positions, and most of them use real names or nicknames that are well-known in the industry.

There are several categories of people whose nicknames start with A: insurance practitioners, micro-business practitioners, marketing practitioners, community fission accounts, etc. Take the operation group for example, these are not my target users, so I will clean them up. Friends in the group will also give feedback about who added them and who harassed them. Of course, if the group is cleaned up at this time, it will have caused some disturbance to the group members, and the experience will be much worse.

In short, to ensure the quality of people in the group, supervision must be done when they join the group. The process of later maintenance does not seek rapid fission, but only precision. This cycle will become more and more positive. Of course, you must be talkative and maintain activeness. This will slow the initial accumulation, but insisting on output and constantly creating value, attracting B-side cooperation through small group operations, and creating valuable IP is the only way for long-term development.

2. Group rules must be in place and bottom lines must be observed

A country has its own laws, a family has its own rules, and a group must also have group rules. As the saying goes, there is no order without rules. Now that the rules have been established, everyone must abide by them. If they are violated, they will be dealt with according to the group rules, or "given a ticket" (kicked out of the group). People who are familiar with me know that in the group, no matter if it is a CEO or an operations newbie, as long as they are in the group, they will be treated equally. If they violate the group rules, they should be fired. I have been called an idiot and blocked by many people in private messages, and I have also been slandered behind my back.

But it doesn’t matter. We have persisted for 4 years, and no one will touch the bottom line of the community now. So the group rules I have summarized are that there shouldn’t be too many of them, as long as the bottom line and principles are made clear and don’t change them all the time.

3. Connect value and achieve positive growth

A community must continuously produce value to last, and this is also discussed in the value of the community. The value of individuals in the community is mainly connection and growth, with the transmission of positive energy as the main focus. The value to enterprises is mainly accurate customer acquisition and monetization, with the revenue or marketing promotion value brought by the community as the main focus. Only when a community continuously produces value can it have meaning of existence. Otherwise, it is just an abandoned factory, which is a pity to throw away but tasteless to use.

4. Governance by doing nothing, community autonomy

The group owner or group manager must have a basic understanding of the backgrounds of at least two-thirds of the group members. In addition, the entry review must be well controlled and the community’s withdrawal mechanism must be made public in the group rules. This is the most basic. In addition, we must persist in and continuously produce community value and spread the energy of positive influence. After operating like this for a while, you can achieve a hands-off approach. Partners in the community will manage themselves, and if any problems arise, the group management will handle them quickly.

Take the Jianfa Operation Group 1 for example. I will only show up at key times such as the morning report, recruitment information, knowledge sharing, resource matching, etc., and you won’t see me at other times. In most cases, people look for resources, share topics, and share content spontaneously or with simple guidance. When someone violates the group rules, the partners in the group will spontaneously organize to diss them. In short, the community relies on everyone and serves you and me.

The future of community

As long as there are people and connections, the community has meaning and community operators have value. In the future of retail industry, community operation will redefine the relationship between people, goods and places. The support and changes it will bring to new retail cannot be ignored. WeChat business is a good example. In addition, social e-commerce and content e-commerce are also closely connected with communities.

In addition, communities will also bring about disruptive changes to Internet social networking. The forms of communities in the future should be richer than they are now. In addition to WeChat and QQ, there will be more carriers to carry them.

At this stage, social products are all cutting into vertically segmented traffic. Maimai is doing workplace social networking, Tantan and Momo are doing stranger social networking, Yinyue and Weiguang are doing interest-based social networking. These social products all encounter a common problem: users are shifting to WeChat.

Therefore, the community and the bond between them in social products will become more important. Making good use of the community can better support existing products.

In short, I hope that business managers can abandon the mentality of pursuing short-term growth, and I hope that community operation practitioners can work hard to create communities that are valuable to group members and build good connections. At this stage, the monetization capabilities of communities are far from being fully utilized, and community operation practitioners do not need to worry too much. As long as they continue to improve their knowledge reserves, do not just do execution work, and gradually cultivate user thinking and community monetization thinking, they will never be eliminated at any time.

Author: Wang Yanfei

Source: Wang Yanfei