Community operation monetization: private domain traffic & user operation

Grasping private domain traffic construction and user operations are the two core themes for realizing community monetization. Nowadays, users have lost their loyalty. It is not a question of who must be someone else’s user. Only when you truly improve the value of the community will users be willing to pay for you.

The Internet became popular, and then Internet+ came into being; artificial intelligence became popular; AI+ vertical fields blossomed; communities became popular, and then there were community + e-commerce, community + education, community + medical care, community + media, community + automobiles, and so on.

Since 2015, the first year of the social network, social network commerce has been fully launched. Luoji Siwei, Wu Xiaobo and others have become benchmarks in the social network industry by using social network monetization. Both enterprises and individuals have flocked to join the social network market, and more and more enterprises regard social networks as an important means of monetization.

Most people think that social media marketing is awesome, and they make the community sound magical, as if as long as the community is operated well, traffic conversion and product sales can be multiplied. So you will see many companies flocking to set up WeChat groups, and then the groups die...

In fact, everyone knows that a community is definitely not a WeChat group in a simple sense. Why are there so few successful people after investing so much energy and financial resources? Do you often fall into various pitfalls in community operations and can never find effective solutions? Today I’m going to talk to you about the topic of community monetization.

Before discussing monetization, we must be clear about the purpose of building a community:

1. Solve the traffic problem: Community is a very effective way to generate word-of-mouth and attract traffic;
2. Solve the problem of brand communication: Building a community through public welfare can actually go further and longer;
3. To resolve the new opportunities brought about by the sense of crisis, it is not good if you say it is good, but if others say it is good.

1. What is social monetization?

Many people say that community monetization means making money. In fact, my personal understanding of community monetization is not the "cash" in the sense of cash, but "different from the traditional definition of community monetization - non-cash monetization." This "cash" does not necessarily mean cash, it may also be brand, recognition, traffic, etc. The "thing" you want, as long as it can effectively convert traffic, is community monetization.

Nowadays, many "Internet giants" have summarized many monetization strategies, such as: brand image, charging annual fees, selling courses, docking services, retail products, etc., which leads to many community owners only paying attention to how much conversion rate, how much payment rate, how many forwarding shares, etc. It is simply forcing the previous WeChat business model onto the path of social media monetization, with hundreds of mini-program links, paid QR codes or poster images appearing every day.

This marketing model of killing the chicken to get the eggs and the wanton behavioral logic are a harassment to community members, making the entire community ecosystem untrustworthy and making it increasingly difficult to attract new members, activate the community, and monetize in the later stages. This leads to a decline in community activity. Without the participation of members, the group will either become a dead group or an advertising group. Talking about monetization and charging is even further away.

2. Current Operation Status of the Community

When it comes to the topic of community monetization, I believe many people will have the same question, that is: "Why did my group become a "dead group" within a month after it was established?" "After each event, the entire group message is only filled with small advertisements?"

First, let’s discuss the current status of the overall operation of the community:

(1) The threshold for joining the community is too low. The leeks have been harvested almost completely, and the community has entered the second half.

There are too many people who want to create a community. Most of them do not have pure purposes. They all want to find ways to reap profits for their own benefit, so they start to establish a large number of WeChat groups. Anyone can join a WeChat group. Of course, a WeChat group cannot be called a community. However, the lower the threshold is, the more it leads to a mixed crowd, and serious differences in the values ​​of the community.

(2) The number of KOLs in the community is decreasing, the sense of ritual is getting worse, and the unfamiliarity rate is getting higher

When the community was first proposed, a KOL opinion leader was selected first. In addition to making the mechanisms for joining, launching, and outputting the community very well, more users were constantly guided to join the community. After each member entered the WeChat group, a series of rituals such as welcome words, self-introductions, red envelopes, photos, etc. brought them closer to each other.

But then the 101st person appears. He may not know the previous 99 people and only knows the group owner. This goes on and on until there are 200 or 300 people. Are they all strangers? This unfamiliarity rate leads to the gradual transformation of the community into a dead group.

(3) There are a certain number of people in a certain vertical field in a certain region, but the duplication of people in large and small groups is too high

To give a simple example, the group of mothers in Zhengzhou, Henan must be fixed. Regardless of whether it is a Mama Gang or a Mama Bang, 70% of the members in the community are repeated. In this era, loyalty is no longer absolute, but community owners keep popping up to set up communities with different names. The people remain the same but the community nicknames are constantly changing, resulting in too high a duplication of community members. Before, people would actively climb the stairs to check information, but now they don’t even want to read the passively pushed information.

(4) No valuable services are provided, there are few creative forms, and members are tired and unwilling to pay

Community operation focuses on value operation. There are many ways to operate a community. Some ways are to keep the group active by gossiping, chatting, playing games, etc. Some groups will send red envelopes from time to time to ensure that group members do not quit. Obviously, these are not good ways to deal with things. The most important thing in operating a community is to make group members feel the value that the community can bring to them. In other words, high-quality community content is the best way to attract and retain users.

(5) Small groups surround large groups, despising (ignoring) the huge linking power of ordinary people

Everyone wants to be in a big group, but is only active in a small group. This phenomenon is becoming more and more obvious now. Groups of three to five people or no more than 100 people are the most active. In any case, no one wants to be restricted in other people's WeChat groups, so they start to establish their own communities in groups of three or five.

It seems that they are all in the group, but the community owner has no idea that they have cheated. If you want to connect to these groups, you must rely on the value provided by the community. Only valuable content can encourage members to share it in small groups and carry the link forward.

(6) It is difficult to monetize the social business model, and opinion leaders are questioning their original intentions

Community monetization is a headache for operators. Should they first occupy the land and then monetize, or occupy the land and monetize at the same time?

Everyone gives a different answer. Any community owner who has not successfully monetized has completely lost motivation and has begun to question his original intention. If no one pays for him, it means that members do not approve of the concept of the community and have doubts about the community owner's methods and content value. The discouraged community owner can only let the community fend for itself.

3. Two Keywords in Community Monetization

1. Social media monetization: private domain traffic

In the past era of traffic dividends, business was easy to do, and companies focused on grabbing traffic for conversion and did not pay much attention to user operation and management. Today, the cost of acquiring customers is very high and new traffic is scarce. Companies have realized the importance of managing users and maintaining old customers, so everyone has started to build personal IPs and WeChat groups to establish their own "private domain traffic."

The traffic exposure given to you by platforms such as information flow and Weibo hot spots is the public domain, while the traffic such as WeChat public accounts and Moments that you can basically control completely is the private domain. The characteristic of public domain traffic is that you need to pay traffic costs every time you acquire it.

The so-called private domain traffic means that you can use it freely and repeatedly without paying, and you can reach it at any time. It is users who are deposited in public accounts, WeChat groups, personal WeChat accounts, Toutiao accounts, Douyin and other self-media channels. Compared with public traffic platforms such as Taobao, JD.com, and Baidu, it belongs to the merchants' "private assets."

In the long run, private domain traffic has huge value for both enterprises and individuals, and is truly an intangible asset. It is precisely because of this that self-media such as Mimi Meng, New World View, and Four Points Reading have such great value and have received huge valuations.

Nowadays, payment habits have changed a lot. Paying and being paid are no longer simple transactions. It has changed from a buyer-seller relationship to a "friend relationship."

There is a real case around me. My colleague Xiao Zhang is a college graduate who likes Jay Chou very much. No matter where Jay Chou has a concert, he will buy the most expensive ticket. Why should he buy the most expensive ticket when his wallet is already empty?

Her answer was very simple: "That is, only when my "husband" (Jay Chou) is doing well, will I have more face." This is enough to show that as long as he is your true fan, he will be willing to pay for you. Therefore, whether it is e-commerce or offline retail, you must know how to use WeChat, build fans, and establish your own private traffic.

2. User Operation of Community Monetization

Now more and more people complain to me that it is too difficult to monetize the community, or that the products are too profitable. I remember that when Luo Pang gave a speech in 2018, he used the example of eating dates when he was a child to explain what "intensive cultivation" meant. Community operation has reached the stage of refined user operation at a deep level. If you cannot provide valuable services in a targeted manner, how can anyone pay you, let alone monetize the community?

Refined operations are the most powerful weapon to retain users in a homogeneous community environment. We need to understand and tap into the real needs of each user/type of user. "You and I are holding hands, but unfortunately I can't see your face." This is the biggest problem faced by all communities. I have to say that this is a very sad thing.

If you don’t know who your users are and what they need, you won’t know their interests, hobbies, preferred content, or their preferences for products, let alone building long-term relationships with them. How can you monetize them?

Providing them with precise products or services at the right time is considerate, but launching products or services at inappropriate times is “advertising.” We must remember deeply that not a product can be sold to people of all ages, and not everyone needs your product or service at all times. We need to provide them with the services they want based on their preferences, interests, and needs. At the same time, we also need to establish a hierarchical system and build a user growth/level system/user recall system.

A good user growth system can lead users from novices to seed users, establish emotional connections with users, and ultimately improve user stickiness and platform value, realize community monetization, word-of-mouth fission, etc.

Summarize

Grasping private domain traffic construction and user operations are the two core themes for realizing community monetization. Nowadays, users have lost their loyalty. It is not a question of who must be someone else’s user. Only when you truly improve the value of the community will users be willing to pay for you.

Source: Crazy Operation Officer