Use product thinking to operate the community, all the methods are here!

Communities can be divided into three categories: fission and new user acquisition, course services, and own user groups. Each of the three types of communities has its own characteristics.

Now many companies hope to have their own active user groups, but the reality is that after a while, the community will soon become dead silent, and no one will talk. I believe that everyone has joined many such groups, or has created a group yourself, and watched helplessly as the activity level decreased, and finally no one was interested, leaving only an advertisement thrown in from time to time...

Why is this happening?

I ran the company's community for 2 months, during which I encountered the difficulty of gradually declining activity. Finally, I found a good model and iterated the product. I am considering embedding it into the App at the end of the month. The following is my review summary:

Overall framework: Think about the core positioning - learn and think about the routines of community operations in the market - MVP verification - review and think about failure + return to the original intention, focus on PMF and start outputting content promotion - guide new users into the group to form a positive cycle.

1. Think about the core positioning of the community

Because my half-year North Star metric is “retention”, the community positioning outside the app is very direct:

One is to find user needs and scenarios;

The second is to strive to achieve the linkage between the community and the App;

Therefore, the activeness of the community is very important. Only when we connect with users emotionally can we try various things, test ideas and explore opportunities.

2. Understanding of social network operation articles on the market

So I looked for a lot of articles on community operations and found that communities can be roughly divided into three categories: fission and new user acquisition, course services, and own user groups.

Fission and new customer acquisition :

Most of the articles talk about how to do this, and it's basically the same routine: seed users are lured into the group with bait -> tasks are issued after joining the group, requiring the dissemination of posters -> screenshots are taken for manual review after completion -> prizes are issued. The key to fission is how to maximize the number of users posting posters to introduce new people.

Honestly, I'm sick of it. These are all very utilitarian tactics. The subsequent variants are nothing more than taking screenshots and requiring the messages to be kept in the circle of friends for 2 hours or forwarded to the social group for more than 3 minutes (cannot be withdrawn after 2 minutes). The bait is changed from electronic materials to physical objects or live classes.

They always build a community first and then try to attract users. The purpose of users joining the group is also very clear, which is to get bait. When the time is up, they will naturally leave, and the activity level will inevitably be very low. This kind of fission and new customer acquisition only reduces the cost of new customer acquisition

Course services:

The most typical example is to join a group after purchasing a course, where teaching assistants will follow up at any time to provide answers to questions, share with students, urge homework, comment on homework, etc. The main purpose is to improve the user's experience after purchasing the course, which is also a key factor in ensuring the repurchase rate.

In general, WeChat groups for course services tend to be event groups, and once the event is over, the group can easily disband. For example, in the group I’m in now, the editor sends out a daily report, at the end of which is the sale of new courses, which is equivalent to a mechanism of sending content to a group to harvest traffic.

Own user base:

I have never seen this kind of introduction, and it is one of the reasons why I do a detailed review based on my own operations.

3. MVP Idea

How to do it? I was also confused at first. The only theory I knew was the "Small Group Effect", which said that users with similar ages, hobbies, regions, and opposite genders (three similarities and one opposite) would quickly establish connections when put into a group. In the early stages, my volume will inevitably be small, and there will not be enough users to group, so I will just focus on one "hobby". Let's decide, the group theme: history!

I placed two entrances for traffic: the secondary menu at the bottom of the Kanjian official account and the banner on the App homepage. I also used the Kanjian VIP membership card as a reward for joining the group to attract users.

Not bad, about ten netizens can join the group every day. After dozens of netizens joined, I tried to stop the reward, but the number of netizens still joined the group. So I laughed, hahaha, I don’t have to keep sending VIP redemption codes to netizens

In addition, since it is a theme group, there must be fixed content to talk about. I thought I would find a topic every night and let everyone speak freely. This trick effectively established a sense of ritual. Every night at 8 o'clock, everyone would wait for me, the group leader, to release the topic of the day.

After operating for more than a week, the group data on January 30 was as follows:

This data basically verifies that this model works. The Spring Festival holiday is approaching, and we are planning to hold an event to express our gratitude to old customers. I wanted to take this opportunity to attract a wave of users, but I encountered a "Waterloo".

4. Failure of large-scale drainage

The old customer appreciation event is like this. We hope to send a text message to our historical old user group, giving them some VIP benefits, hoping that they will continue to come back and use the App. But at that time, because the App title contained the two commonly used words "youliao", Apple removed the app from the shelves after someone complained, which resulted in the App Store being unable to find our app. I temporarily wanted to divert users to the WeChat service account for sedimentation, and then lead them to the WeChat group.

A total of more than 60,000 text messages need to be sent.

In addition, the service account QR code will be embedded in the public account articles with a total of 200,000 to 300,000 views, which will also direct traffic to the service account and then to the WeChat group.

I calculated the conversion rate and optimistically estimated that I could attract at least a few hundred people to join the group, so I bought robots for 8 groups and waited excitedly...

The result is something everyone has guessed. The effect was very poor. In total, we gained more than 200 followers of the service account and brought in more than 20 WeChat group users. It was like a bucket of cold water was poured on us.

If we review the situation, it is actually closely related to the low SMS opening rate, low conversion rate from SMS to WeChat, and poor effect of advertising at the bottom of the official account that is irrelevant to the content.

5. From expanding ambition to returning to the original intention

Even so, there was still a natural increase in users joining the group during the Spring Festival, and everyone chatted extremely enthusiastically during the Spring Festival. The figure below shows that during the seven days of the Spring Festival, the three groups of 100 people had an average of more than 300 chat messages per day, and the participation rate reached 40%, which means that half of the group members participated in the interaction.

After the beginning of spring, I suddenly felt a little inflated. The community was so active, and I was thinking: Can I consider doing fission to harvest a wave of users? When I was interviewing a girl who was doing community work at Xin Shi Xiang, she asked me a question very firmly: Do you want to be active, or do fission + monetization? I happened to be listening to Sun Tzu's Art of War that day, and there was a lecture saying: Stick to the strategic center and don't deviate. I suddenly woke up and thought about what my original intention was. Don't think too much, just be active

6. How to recover the decline in activity after the holidays

After the Spring Festival, the activity level suddenly dropped... Some active users told me that they had to go to school and were not allowed to use mobile phones... Some also started working and had no time to chat...

What to do! ! !

After a few difficult days, I discovered a phenomenon: new users in the group are always more active. This is very important, so I wondered if I could add some fresh blood to the silent community?

So, after the WeChat group reached 5 groups of 100 people, I started trying to direct users to group 1. In addition, use the following trick to quickly guide new users in:

7. Publish the content to WeChat official account after sorting it out, and then import new members into WeChat group, positive cycle

I tried an MVP, organizing the highlights of the evening into Youdao Cloud Notes, and then shared the link back to the WeChat group at noon the next day, similar to the following picture:

As a result, I found that the link has received 160 visits and the total number of people in the group is close to 500, which means that the link opening rate is conservatively above 20%. Huh? This shows that people are quite interested in this content. You can consider organizing the essential content and publishing the article on Kanjian’s official account. After the students in charge of content operation arrived, they quickly pushed forward this matter. We added a group QR code to the content. After a while, the effect was as follows:

The yellow ones are the best articles produced by our community. You can see that the reading and viewing ratios are better than those of the headlines. In addition, each article can add dozens of new WeChat group users. These users have solved the problem of our gradually declining activity. The new catfish led the old ones, and a new outbreak occurred. And my personal initial feeling is that small groups with less than 100 people have high activity levels, which is based on the principle of three close and one opposite. If the relationship chain is not strong, large groups still have value.

8. Enhance community operation mechanism

The following is our group announcement, which covers our community operation mechanism. The core is to establish rules, points to stimulate user activity, and a variety of activities to stimulate participation:

All group members are welcome to express their own views and learn from each other!

Today's topic:

Why did Qin unify the six kingdoms? Was it a historical coincidence or a historical inevitability? Why?

You can post your own opinions in the topic link, and the top three people who receive likes will receive points as rewards!

【1】Group rules:

【2】Sign-in, points and corresponding reward details:

【3】Activity rules:

Link to discussion topic:

9. Product Verification User Scenarios

Being active is just a means; the goal is still to find product demand. We all know that the biggest problem when a WeChat group is active is that the content is quickly deleted and the essence cannot be retained. With this in mind, we quickly developed a simple H5 that allows users to leave messages and interact:

After several days of verification, the data is as follows:

Without any operational mechanism stimulation, the data is still okay (the data in the past two days has been bad because the new community operation colleagues did not continue to use my mass messaging strategy and instead used a manual publishing mechanism, resulting in a decrease in H5 exposure), and the possibility of UGC has been basically verified.

Next, in addition to continuing to iterate and optimize H5, we will also add operational mechanisms to continue to cultivate user habits:

Moreover, we cannot just release topics at 8 o'clock in the evening. We have added a new gameplay: PK topic gameplay, choose a side and then put forward your own opinions. The data performance is very good:

Page UV: 152, PV: 965, total votes: 151, number of comments: 90, total number of likes: 188. This is based on the assumption that the total number of people in the group is around 1,000.

I will consider porting this UGC mechanism into the App next, and we are also continuously optimizing the H5 experience.

The following is the latest H5 screenshot last night after several iterations:

Tips for robot operation :

We use robots in WeChat groups, which can achieve the following functions. You can refer to them:

1. Sign in :

We use robots to complete the sign-in action, customize the sign-in script as the brand name, and then regularly send some rewards to users who insist on signing in to encourage users to continue to open the WeChat group and develop a habit.

2. Welcome message to the group :

Inform users of the value of WeChat groups, some rules that need to be followed, and do a simple greeting to break the ice

3. Intelligent chat :

The robot has its own functions, and netizens sometimes tease the robot for fun when they are bored.

4. Data Analysis :

Discover potential KOLs through data analysis and add them as friends to strengthen connections

Find the differences between different groups, such as groups with weaker operational activity, which is especially important in the early stages of topic release to bring the pace up.

5. Mass mail :

Yesterday's topic arrangement, daily pictures, and topic release can all be used for group sending, which greatly reduces work costs.

6. Keyword reply :

For example, I set "topic" as the keyword and automatically trigger a reply to the topic link of the day. Sometimes users will ask what today's topic is, and the robot will automatically reply with a link.

I am currently using Zidou Assistant, but to be honest, the data has been unstable recently and it has been giving me a headache. I keep urging them every day and they all say yes and will connect me right away. But I just can’t change it! I know that Zidou’s CEO is also following my account. Can you give me an explanation?

Final summary: MVP-PMF-AARRR+ multiple trials and iterations, this set of product thinking can also be used to build community operations. I hope everyone can build their own active community~

Source: Super Huang's Thoughts