Community operation: 2 steps to make a good community operation plan!

Nowadays, everyone is talking about community operations , and various methodologies emerge one after another. However, methodology will soon become outdated, but the way of thinking can last for a long time.

I have read many articles on community case analysis and taken courses on community operations. However, once I started to put them into practice, I found that these methods were very messy and even outdated. This prompted me to think - what should we learn when we come into contact with new knowledge?

Finally, I came to the conclusion: see the essence through the phenomenon, and see the logic of thinking through the method.

I may be the first one. I will not only provide you with cases and break down the methodology, but also teach you how to think and learn so that you can quickly understand and master new concepts.

This article will talk about the preparations that need to be done during the community preparation period.

Preface

When I first came into contact with this new knowledge of community operation, I saw others doing it with great enthusiasm. Most people around me were very excited and rushed into it, only to leave in a hurry. Why is it that some people do well while others do not, using the same methodology?

This confused me for a long time until I encountered a problem - the dividends in the post-Internet era were getting smaller and smaller, and traffic was becoming more and more difficult to obtain, forcing me to find a new operating model that could not only reduce the cost of acquiring traffic, but also retain the traffic and continuously generate revenue. It was then that I realized that community operation might be a good entry point. Then, based on this issue, I began to seriously understand community operation and gradually established my own systematic understanding of community operation.

In order to understand community operation, I studied through a large number of cases, courses, and articles on the Internet, but gradually found that the knowledge points I came into contact with in these case analysis, articles, and courses were scattered, and did not systematically tell me how to operate a community. As a result, I was at a loss in actual work scenarios and had no idea where to start.

Combining the logic of problem solving, I began to think about how to operate a community. However, this is an arduous task. There are many difficulties in the operation process that cannot be directly answered, so I need to constantly break it down into several small problems, solve these small problems one by one, and then solve the big problems. Small problems need to be broken down until they can be immediately verified in practice.

As a big question: How to operate a community well, the first question I split out is the starting point for learning knowledge: Since we want to operate a community, the first prerequisite is to have a community, so I have to think about what I need to do before building a community?

According to the laws of cognition, people cannot imagine concepts that do not exist in their minds. Since I have never done community preparation before, I can’t imagine what to prepare and how I should do it?

At that time, I did three things: seek advice from experienced people, study on my own in community forums, and find similar communities to experience the experience from the user's perspective.

Through the above three methods, I summarized and deduced two things that need to be done before establishing a community:

Consider whether the business is suitable for operation using a community model; what preparations should be made during the preparation period.

What kind of business is suitable for community operation?

It is not advisable to blindly follow the crowd. Before doing anything, think about whether your own business is suitable for community operation.

The ultimate goal of building a community is to achieve conversion and monetization. Is your own business suitable for improving conversion and realizing monetization through the community?

The most direct method is to look at competitors to see if there are any successful cases to verify.

If there are no competing products or you cannot obtain information about competing products, I have summarized three characteristics that are suitable for building a community. You only need to meet any one of them:

High profits, such as skin care products, health care products, etc. High frequency purchases, such as snacks, course products, etc. High decision-making costs (when purchasing products or services, due to too many choices, it takes time and energy to select and make decisions), such as: clothing, electronic products, etc.

What preparations does the community need to make?

What needs to be done during the community preparation period? This is also a relatively big problem. By learning from the experience of others and verifying it through the communities I have experienced, I have summarized it into 4 points, namely:

Find the right community positioning, design a good monetization path, plan service content, and formulate community rules.

(1) Good community positioning should be able to quickly capture the user’s mind

User mind means that when a user is in a certain scenario, the first thing that comes to their mind is the community you have established.

Communities connect users around topics. The positioning of the community determines the content of the topic and the way users connect with each other. There are two types:

The "decentralized" connection method is generally sharing and communication. The autonomous sharing of opinions, experiences, etc. among group members is a form of sharing. The pyramid-shaped connection is generally used for guidance and consultation, and usually the highly professional members lead the novice members.

Why is group positioning so important? Because the community is a relatively closed small circle, the core lies in the value of the community. If the positioning is not clear, it will lead to new users or potential users being unclear about the value of the group. They will not know what the group is for and will not be able to give users a reason to join or stay.

So what should we do specifically? Through user research and user portrait formation, we can explore the value of the community and thus make good positioning.

Generally speaking, the information that needs to be collected in user surveys includes: basic user attributes and user's usual consumption behavior. Basic user attributes include gender, age, education level, city level, occupation, salary level, etc.

In terms of acquisition method, if there is a CRM system, user information will be exported from the CRM system. If not available, you can obtain it through the WeChat group or QQ group where the group members are located. Generally, group members will be required to modify the group business card when joining the group. In addition, user information can also be found in recruitment information.

Users' usual consumption behaviors usually include: the users' prices for similar products, the channels through which they learned about the products, understanding the users' purchasing motivations, and the problems they encountered when using the products.

This type of information can be obtained by conducting one-on-one interviews with 20 target users, by observing competing products, or through CRM systems.

When summarizing and collecting the above information to form user portraits, the focus is on focusing on most of the similar information and using similar pain points as a reference for group positioning. Do not think about meeting everyone's individual needs.

For example: those in the skin care industry can judge the consumer group by gender, age, and needs. Users may need more guidance on skin care. At this time, a pyramid-shaped community can be created, with kols in the group who can provide guidance and consultation.

(2) Design a monetization path to avoid missing out on the golden period of community conversion

Community operation is a labor-intensive operation mode, and communities have a certain life cycle. Therefore, before establishing a community, you must think about the monetization path. Otherwise, you will fall into the dilemma of not making enough money or not realizing it when the community is in decline.

There are generally two ways to monetize: one is membership (paying to join the group), and the other is charging by providing products.

Let me give you a few examples to illustrate these two monetization methods:

Knowledge Planet is a paid community. Generally, you pay an annual fee first, and then enter the planet to share knowledge and view the knowledge shared by group members or planet owners. Another type is paid WeChat groups, such as Mint Reading, which is a reading check-in community. You can join the group after paying a certain amount of fees. There will be people in the group to supervise your reading and check in in the group when you need to. It is a service that you pay for. Another monetization model is to charge directly by providing products and services. For example, there is a community in the skin care category, Teacher Xiaoqing and her Goddess Gang. The people in the group have purchased products in their store. They are invited to join the group by directing traffic to their personal accounts. The group will share skin care knowledge and interspersed with product advertisements to encourage repeat purchases.

Baby Play English uses courses to monetize. Initially, it recruited students with English enlightenment courses, guided users to create groups with personal accounts, shared English enlightenment content in the groups, and later promoted paid courses in the groups to monetize.

(3) Consider the community value that can be provided

Not only do we need to consider what the community’s value content is, but also how long it can be provided, which determines the length of the community’s life cycle and operating costs.

So what specific community value should be provided? This requires comprehensive consideration based on group positioning and early user research, and by exploring user pain points, we can provide corresponding solutions, namely community value.

In order to initially verify that the user pain points are real, we need to have user empathy and think from the user's perspective:

Is the user currently having a headache about doing something? Is the user willing to change his or her behavior to solve this problem? Does the user have alternatives besides you? What is the user worried about when making a choice, and can you solve it?

After self-checking the above questions, we can eliminate most of the pseudo pain points, but the remaining user pain points still need to be tested on a small scale. After all, practice is the only criterion for testing the truth.

(4) Formulate group rules, regulate user behavior, and create a good community environment

Community rules are designed to constrain user behavior for two purposes: first, to give new users the first impression of the community; second, to maintain the community’s value environment.

According to the primacy effect in psychology and the experience of predecessors, a new user's understanding of a group is established within 24 hours of joining the group. His overall impression of the community is an important factor in determining whether he will stay and be active.

Secondly, setting entry thresholds can improve the quality of the community and affect the length of its life cycle. A community with no barriers means no escape cost, so it doesn’t matter even if you are kicked out for advertising.

There are generally three types of entry barriers: one is paying to join the group, the second is the group owner's review and invitation, and the third is completing tasks (such as forwarding posters to Moments, etc.). According to the purpose of creating the group, you can choose the corresponding entry threshold.

Then there are group announcements and welcome messages, which generally include four content sections:

Community theme - tell users what the community does. Community service content - tell users what specific services the community provides. Prohibited behaviors - tell users what behaviors are prohibited and what kind of penalties they will receive (usually advertising). Incentive behaviors - tell users what behaviors are encouraged and what kind of rewards they will receive.

Finally, in order to strictly pursue the high quality of the community, an elimination mechanism will be set up, with the gameplay mainly based on points, and there will also be a corresponding resurrection mechanism.

Afterword

At work, we often encounter situations where we do things just for the sake of doing them. The essence of this is that we do not start from the problem to be solved. Therefore, when preparing to do something, you can remind yourself: what problem are you doing this to solve (what is the gap between the goal you want to achieve and the current situation), and is this the only solution to this problem?

Author: Nickname Pill

Source: nickname pill (nameyaowan)