Community operation: How to cold start a community from 0 to 1?

Many Internet practitioners or students who are about to enter the Internet industry sometimes ask me why their communities are not very active, why they quickly become dead groups, and why the conversion rate is very low. Needless to say, this is actually related to some misunderstandings about "communities", thinking that creating a WeChat group is a community.

Below I have sorted out my experience in running a community for two years and shared it with everyone. I hope that everyone can have a comprehensive and clear understanding before running a community.

1. What exactly is “community”?

A community is a collection of people with the same attributes or tags (like-minded people), such as a basketball club, an adult oral learning group, or a parent-child education course group.

In my opinion, community is a concept derived from the Internet environment. Its predecessor is actually the gathering of certain offline groups of people, such as car clubs, travel groups, swimming teams, etc.

From the literal meaning of the example, we can see who the users of a community are? (Basketball enthusiasts, adults who want to improve their spoken English, and parents who want to learn parent-child education courses)

These people are closely gathered together because they have common needs.

Many people simply think that adding all their WeChat friends into a WeChat group is a community. This is not a community, it is just a bunch of people, and these people are not of much value to you.

After understanding who our users are and what characteristics they have, we need to think about the following: We hope that users will pay to buy our products, but how can we get users to pay faster and get more people to pay to buy?

2. What does “ community operation ” do?

Community Operation vs User Operation

Community operation is a branch operation scenario under the general concept of user operation. Community operation is just a concrete manifestation of dealing with users in the community scenario, while user operation involves more general scenarios. The essence of this is to deal with users, acquire more users, maintain user relationships and keep them highly active, cultivate loyalty and trust, and then generate payment.

In my personal opinion, compared with this complete path (attracting new users - retention - active - conversion - dissemination), the work of user operation is more about the subsequent conversion (retention - active - conversion - dissemination), while the work of attracting new users is more about marketing and business being responsible for promotion and channel expansion.

Now, let’s give a simple definition: community operation is to allow users to complete what we want them to do in the community scenario by following the path we designed.

Please pay attention to this definition: community (scenario), users, what we design (operation measures), what we hope users will do (operation purpose)

3. How to cold start a community from 0 to 1?

We all hope to acquire users at the lowest cost. The method shared below is suitable for low-cost customer acquisition with a limited budget.

Let’s sort out the underlying logic of building a community: by allowing users to complete what we want them to do by following the path we design in the community scenario.

Now that we know that building a community is just about this kind of thing, let’s go back and break down one by one what we need to think about in order to do this.

1. What kind of people are users? Where do users come from?

Figuring out what kind of people our target users are is of great significance to the subsequent promotion and post-operation effects. It can help us know which users we need to acquire during promotion, avoid going astray when formulating operation strategies, and prevent ourselves from making activities and products that our users are not interested in even though we think they are awesome.

Every company has its own products. Who are the people using the products? If the company's development is on the right track and has a certain market share, this user portrait should be easy to figure out. If the company is in its start-up phase, the user profile may not be clear yet and may require continuous market research to analyze and understand.

User profile:

Including: age, gender, city, hobbies, strong demands, consumption level, education level and other basic information and activities (recent consumption, reading, sports, etc.). The more complete the information of target users is, the more helpful it will be for you to figure out what the real users of your product are like.

Where do users come from?

Customer acquisition is an important life source for the development of every company. A mature company has the following sources for customer acquisition: marketing, channel cooperation, and communication from old users (new media operations, product apps, and communities).

Marketing is a special position with marketing specialists and marketing managers. It is a paid position, so we will ignore it for now. Channel cooperation requires the expansion of broad personal connections. Information exchange is very convenient now. In fact, you can find many partners you want to contact and potential partners you don’t know on the Internet. This requires you to hang out in circles and communities on a daily basis, and make more personal recommendations and links, which will be very helpful for future cooperation. This is a process of accumulation. In addition, you should sort out your own needs and the lowest acceptable form of cooperation. I believe that the paying students have worked longer than me and must have more experience in channel cooperation than me, so I will not discuss this in depth.

Marketing is an expensive job, and channel cooperation is a slow process. However, leveraging old users to spread the word and bring in new users is a method that is more effective and popular.

The underlying logic of "old users bring in new users" is to encourage existing loyal users to distribute and spread the word to attract new users to join. In terms of forms of expression, for example: spontaneously sharing high-quality articles, spontaneously posting on Moments, etc., the currently popular group buying, red envelope grabbing, lottery, distribution, support, crowdfunding, card collection, free orders, etc. have increased the user's motivation to share and added rewards.

If users are willing to share, several factors should be taken into consideration: user psychology, operability, and expected results.

Then, with the perpetual motion machine of old customers bringing in new ones, we can bring in some new users, but it is still far from reaching our customer acquisition goals. We also need to acquire some new users through other channels. Here are some ways to acquire customers for free in the WeChat field:

① Changing groups: The effect will be better if the circles are more vertical and precise, such as the exchange group for people in the education industry.

② Join a group: Add more target user groups to intercept traffic or increase fans (competing public accounts, mixed industry circles)

③Take traffic lessons: find some IPs for sharing and output, the IPs will automatically generate traffic, set fission thresholds, and then select more channels to distribute and spread, attract more users to join, pay attention to detecting the number of users from each channel, and analyze the distribution conversion rate and fission effect.

④ Buy groups to increase fans: Now a group costs about 5 yuan on the market. You can buy a batch of WeChat groups and use bulk friend-adding software to increase fans and acquire new users.

⑤ Mixed groups: Join some high-quality user groups, build good relationships with group owners, help others more, share more benefits, and build trust. The success rate of adding friends will be higher. If you have stable output, you can attract users in the group to add you actively.

Each of the above methods has a set of mature methods. It is recommended that you try them out first and summarize the most efficient way to acquire customers.

In addition to WeChat, your target users may also gather on other platforms, so attracting traffic through other platforms is also a customer acquisition channel:

Douban (generally there are people born in the 80s and 00s. Douban groups are very active. You can run your own group or join other people’s groups)

Zhihu (publish several high-quality articles, preferably occupy more keywords based on your business, to increase the weight of your articles that may be searched)

·Jianshu (same as above)

1. What do we want users to do?

Think clearly about what we want users to do. In fact, the ultimate goal we want users to do is to pay for purchases or renewals, but it is difficult for users to pay directly. The proportion is extremely low or even zero. So after determining the ultimate goal, you need to think back and think about how to make users more willing to pay and how to increase the number of paying users.

1. How to design a complete path to achieve operational goals in the community scenario? How to adjust and optimize the designed path?

Path : Build communities around products and services to attract users, extend the life cycle of the community with products or services that are repeated and increase purchasing power, and cultivate users' stable consumption habits.

Therefore, you need to combine products and services: how to retain new users and prevent them from leaving. Keeping them for just one or two days is not enough. You also need to keep users highly active and prevent them from becoming stagnant, because inactive users are worthless. Only active users are likely to trust the product and brand, and ultimately generate payment and referrals.

For each operation node, we need to have corresponding operation strategies, such as new user benefits to increase retention rate, continuous output of practical content to ensure high community activity, thoughtful service to maintain good relationships with users, and medium and high-priced products for users to buy.

Cycle: A community must have a life cycle. If conversion can occur in one day, it should be completed in one day, because the activity of community users is the highest in the first few days.

Different communities have different operating time periods. Some are product-oriented. For example, for a 4-day course, the entire community operation time is about 4 days. At this time, the community is more focused on user services. Some are operation-oriented, such as operating their own membership group, which requires setting a specified time for members to enjoy the benefits.

Indicators: Set indicators at each operational action node for the path you designed. The quality of community operations, the problem of inactive users, and the reason why there are too few paying users, in addition to intuitively reflecting some problems in the operation process, more accurate data is needed as a reference.

A good community must contain these five elements: like-minded people , structure , output , operation , and replicability .

4. How to formulate community operation KPI

Generally, the company's overall business goals will be assessed on an annual, quarterly, or monthly basis, and then broken down and assigned to a KPI for each department's management based on the completion path, and preferably to individuals.

Therefore, when formulating the community operation kip, it should be broken down from top to bottom first, based on monthly assessments, and how many people are needed for this position to complete a certain amount of work each month.

Further breaking it down into each executive position, a community operations student will break down the goals assigned by their direct supervisor into several small goals, and each small goal will be specific to each detectable operational action.

The KPI of community operation generally includes two indicators: user scale and number of paying users (or number of renewal users) .

Depending on the strategy of each company, the focus may be different. Some community operations students are mainly responsible for attracting new users and maintaining users, while others may only care about the number of paying users or the number of renewal users.

Source: Li Junlong (Alger)