How do Keep, Zhihu, etc. conduct user operations?

Some time ago, the CEO of a Series B company talked to me about the community product they were planning to incubate. He actually kept me stunned for 2 hours. What surprised me was that this pioneer who had been working on the front line since the beginning of his business had absolutely no understanding of the community. And from his description, it can be seen that no one in the company's core team has a complete knowledge system for community operations.

It’s a pity that despite his millions of vertical users, he was ultimately unable to build a benchmark community.

In the product launch plan that the CEO described to me, he actually planned to directly guide 2,000 users during the cold start phase to see the effect... When I asked him what would happen if the effect was not good, he was speechless for a moment. To him, these 2,000 users are just a market microcosm for testing the effectiveness, but not real people. You know, people are the most valuable asset that supports a strong community.

Here, the author would like to analyze the practical operational methods of different Internet communities through 7 cases. They are: induce, gather, invite, guide, raise, snatch and manage, these are the seven intervention methods.

Case 1: Keep-tempting

As a classic case of community operation, Keep's mine-laying operation has always been a textbook example. The main problem it solves is how to import a large number of accurate users during the product cold start phase.

Let’s first take a look at what their operations have done?

(1) Mine laying stage

Register 3 to 10 accounts on major fitness products/websites and publish high-quality fitness articles every day. Pay attention! This must be of high quality, high quality enough to attract the attention of the platform, high quality enough to attract enough attention, and high quality enough to become a Kol in a short period of time.

(2) Waiting stage

Continue to publish high-quality content at a high frequency for about a month, talk about how you exercise, etc., and interact with fans frequently, basically achieving 100% coverage, so that this group of accounts can form a small-scale influence in this circle. The content can be produced by operations or by hiring writers.

(3) Thunderstorm stage

On the day the product was launched, more than 100 accounts posted content saying at the end that they had experienced Keep's products. In a short period of time, Keep became a weather vane in the fitness circle and instantly became a hot topic.

What is the effect? The internal test on the same day acquired 4,000 precise users, and with the subsequent long-tail traffic, the number is expected to be around 10,000. All of this is based on accurate users' recognition of the Kol's content/influence, actively luring users into the trap.

How amazing is this? For this group of high-value users, the cost of buying traffic is calculated at 10 yuan, which means that an activity worth at least 100,000 yuan was done for free. More importantly, this group of people's interaction with fitness content directly laid the basic tone for Keep's subsequent community.

Case 2: Jiren-Taptap

The development of independent games in China in recent years is inseparable from the existence of Taptap. In the past, the game channel market was basically monopolized by a few large game companies, and small studios basically had little room to survive. Based on the demographic dividend of the game market, many game companies continued to make some skin-changing games and still made a lot of money.

Although there are a large number of players in China who pursue high-quality games, most of them are scattered on some specific niche games, like bright spots scattered in the galaxy, and it is difficult for them to form circles and large communities.

Taptap's purpose is to discover good games, and its internal goal is to gather independent game enthusiasts from all over the country.

Let's see what they do:

• Contact all independent game producers, help them launch their products for free, and help them promote and direct sales;
• Buy Baidu search terms for independent games and associate them with Taptap;
• Build an independent game community, provide authentication functions, and provide a communication platform for independent game players;
• Independent game producers have their own accounts and can communicate directly with users to get feedback;
• Each independent game is provided with a QQ number, providing users with multiple channels for communication;
• The gaming culture in the early community was very clean. For example, Honor of Kings only scored 4.8 points, with a full score of 10.
• ……..

The result is that the largest independent game user community in the country has been formed in the form of an industrial chain.

• Developers are happy. Publishing games here can gain traffic, earn word of mouth, get user help with iterations, and even make a profit.
• Independent game players are rejoicing, as they can download many high-quality games. Here everyone is criticizing Honor of Kings, and their values ​​are correct!
• The platform is happy because of the traffic! flow! flow!

When latecomers like NetEase Games, Xiaomi, and Alibaba Games launched products such as Youpinwei, Knights, and Rantu, and wanted to get a piece of the pie, domestic independent players had already been gathered by Taptap, and its first-mover advantage in "people" was obvious.

Case 3: Hiring someone - Tantan

After Tantan was acquired by Momo, it has become difficult for it to find rivals in the stranger social networking field. But do you know what efforts Tantan made during the cold start phase?

• The foreign version of Tinder uses campus as its entry point and invites hundreds of female celebrities from the school’s social circles to use this as a basis to attract male users and leverage bilateral relationships.
• Because of the different market size, Tantan in China is more direct. When reviewing how they solved the cold start problem in the early days, the founder of Tantan talked about how they hired a group of good-looking models in Beijing and Tianjin to pretend to be users and seduce ordinary users, and the effect was very good.

Nowadays, this method of asking people to "impersonate" users is relatively common and commonly used in social products for strangers of the opposite sex. If we trace back to the source, didn’t Tencent’s Ma Huateng also once pretend to be a netizen and chat with others?

Case 4: Introduction - BabyTree

BabyTree is a community for pregnancy, mother and baby. It is said that once a woman becomes pregnant, she will always see other pregnant women on the street. This is called the pregnant woman effect. It tells us that there is a possibility of strong interaction between specific groups.

Especially when groups in certain vertical fields are subject to information blockade, exclusion and pressure from the external environment. For example, buled’s target users naturally have a need for interaction. People who have bought a car can only have in-depth communication with others who have bought a car, and pregnant women can mostly only have endless emotional conversations with other pregnant women or people who have been pregnant.

For a community, the more vertical the crowd is during the cold start phase, the easier it is to create an atmosphere. Let’s take a look at Babytree and how its operations work during the cold start phase.

• The main sources of customers for WeChat groups are some self-built communication groups on e-commerce platforms and some sales groups selling maternal and infant products. Through some business cooperation, we import existing precise users and relationship networks. Based on the high trust of users in sales, the conversion rate and subsequent stickiness of this import are very high.
• We specialize in emotional Q&A and have captured the natural pain points of pregnant women. If you have never created a Q&A community for pregnant women, you wouldn’t even dare to imagine that hundreds of answers under one question are actually true! ! "Will my husband cheat on me? What should I eat to ensure healthy children?" Vertical groups have a natural obsession with certain issues.

As long as the operation does a good job of display and classification, the results will come naturally.

Case 5: Supporting People - Zhihu

Zhihu is a content community whose core value is high-quality content. What operations need to do is to convey core values. So they created independent apps such as Zhihu Daily, Live, and e-readers, and repackaged and displayed high-quality content in some form. The source of high-quality content is still people!

In the early days, Zhihu adopted an invitation-based model, which took 1 to 2 years to establish the community tone. This is related to the invitation threshold they set. They only invite influential people or people with professional backgrounds from all walks of life, and introduce them into the community through a 1v1 method, forming an ivory tower circle of the entire Internet. They only produce high-quality and in-depth content, and with this as the core, they gradually expand the scope of invitations until it is fully open.

This kind of product that takes such a long time to cultivate people, retain users, and form a community atmosphere is hard to find in today's impetuous Internet era. It can even be said to be an isolated case. However, its core operating philosophy has not changed: community culture requires a time period, and the length of this period depends on the cultivation of people.

Case 6: Stealing People - Wukong Question and Answer

Although ByteDance is a latecomer in the Internet industry, it has declared war on the top players in various fields. Wukong Q&A is a question-and-answer product that challenges Zhihu. As mentioned before, Zhihu took 1-2 years to accumulate high-quality content and attract people. Wukong Q&A wants to overtake Zhihu in a short time. The fastest way is to snatch people!

Since 2017, Wuguoqia has directly signed 300 Zhihu big Vs with high commissions, and all content will not be allowed to be posted on Zhihu in the future. In the same year, at the Creator Conference of Toutiao, Wuguoqia announced that it would invest 1 billion yuan to subsidize and reward content contributors, and announced that it would sign at least 5,000 more people.

This war for talent, which was openly aimed at Zhihu, lasted for 1 to 2 years. Now, if we review the results, Wukong Q&A’s battle for talent ultimately ended in “failure”. As Zhihu's user base continues to expand, it has encountered the dilemma of becoming more entertainment-oriented and more like a microblog.

It turns out that community culture cannot be plundered, but it can be gradually destroyed from within.

Case 7: Managing People - GamerSky

Years of community operation experience have taught us that users cannot be educated, they can only be guided. The troll culture of GamerSky has led to the current situation, which is related to the website's operating strategy. You will often find that under a piece of news on GamerSky, the hot post is an irrelevant abusive comment, which is unimaginable on other platforms. As long as users do not cross the red line in their criticism, the authorities will never intervene.

At first, GamerSky also wanted to suppress the netizens’ criticism and took a series of measures. However, since the website optimized a free-speaking function that did not require registration to reply, this trend became more and more serious, so they completely gave up intervening. Now, if you don’t see any insulting content in the comments on the entire internet, everyone will feel uncomfortable. Some netizens even said that every time they see this kind of verbal abuse, it feels like they have found home.

Many domestic gaming websites started out as piracy games, so conflicts between legitimate and pirated players are natural. There are already many people who are willing to pay for genuine games, and in recent years, game users have become more and more willing to pay for genuine games, which has directly accelerated the escalation of conflicts and verbal wars have become the norm.

• User love spray
• Let it grow

In this case, what the author wants to say is that it is unreliable to manage people in the community. Users can never be educated, they can only be guided.

Source: Operations Professor