When it comes to community operations, 80% of people have positioned themselves incorrectly!

80% of the people who create communities do so for their own purposes, thus mistaking their own ideas for those of users. Such a group positioning is destined to have a short life cycle.

Through exchanges with experts, my own experience in operating communities, and hanging out in other people’s communities, I found that 80% of communities are tangible but not real, that is, they are covered with the shell of a community but lack the core of a community, because the starting point is wrong:

• Wrong example: I want to sell my products and services, and seeing that other people’s communities are doing very well, I want to build a community too.
• Correct demonstration: My users are always asking me what resources they can exchange, so I set up a community to make it easier for everyone to exchange resources.

The core difference between the two is that the former is to solve the demands of the group owner, while the latter is to solve the demands of the group owner and users.

So, how do you build a real community?

The first thing to solve is the positioning of your community, so that the subsequent users in the group will be more accurate and give them reasons to stay in the group.

This article will talk about my thoughts on community positioning.

What exactly is a community?

Before talking about community positioning, we must first understand the concept of community. According to the definition of Baidu Encyclopedia, community refers to a social relationship, including community spirit and community emotion. Based on the closeness and complexity of social relationships, I divide them into four quadrants to see which social relationships will influence users' purchasing behavior: herd mentality, authority or celebrity effect, interests and hobbies, and recommendations from relatives and friends.

As a gathering place for these four types of social relationships, communities are where users have common purchasing experiences and will generate common topics, which in turn will promote repeat purchases and form a virtuous consumption cycle. This is also one of the reasons why a successful community has a high conversion rate.

Now that we have a conceptual understanding of the community, how do we position the community well? You just need to understand two questions: what value can the community bring to users, and what value can the community bring to yourself.

Understand user demands and lay the foundation for group positioning

From my personal observation, most people now have joined many WeChat groups and follow many public accounts. From time to time, someone will recommend WeChat groups and public accounts to you, and you may even take the initiative to search for them yourself.

In this era of information explosion, various types of WeChat groups and public accounts are emerging in an endless stream. In order to stand out from them, you need to quickly occupy the minds of users so that when users encounter problems, they will think of you first (preferably a blank market).

How do you know in what scenarios users will think of you? This requires a deep understanding of users and the formation of user portraits.

I use the four-factor analysis method to create user portraits, understand what different users need and are interested in, and clarify their purpose of joining the group.

The establishment of user portraits can be achieved through CRM systems, user feedback evaluations, user reviews of competing products, Baidu Tieba and other channels to obtain basic user characteristics, such as age, gender, regional distribution, occupation, etc., as well as user behavioral characteristics, such as consumption habits, consumption scenarios, consumption pain points, interests and hobbies, etc. The most important point is to explore the user's social needs.

What exactly are social needs? I will explain this with an example.

A young white-collar girl who has just entered the workplace sees that everyone around her is wearing exquisite makeup. She feels that her social identity has changed and she needs to buy some cosmetics to reflect her workplace characteristics and the sense of ritual for her identity change.

She may be struggling with what lipstick to buy and what color is suitable for her at the beginning, and she is eager to find like-minded people to communicate with and seek recommendations from professionals. At this time, social needs arise. These groups join because of product and social needs. As long as the community can continue to provide them with solutions, users will become more and more dependent on the group. There is no need for any discounts. Users in the group will purchase on demand, exchange their experiences, recommend products to others, and encourage new users to buy.

Is the business suitable for social networking?

After understanding user needs and positioning, the next question is to consider whether the business is suitable for community. As mentioned at the beginning of the article, the community is to meet the demands of group owners and users. Operating a community is a costly endeavor. If the value of the community is only enjoyed by users and the group owner does not gain anything, the management of the group will become lax, causing the group to go silent more quickly.

Therefore, after finding user needs, we need to clarify what value the community can bring to the brand and to us based on our own business needs: is it to strengthen the brand image or to engage in fan economy? But in general, products or services with high profit margins, high frequency of purchases, and large information asymmetry, and businesses that meet any one of these points are more suitable for operation and management using the community.

After clarifying the business needs, we need to match our identity in the community, whether it is a brand promoter, a product recommender, a customer service representative, etc.

In order to solve the problem of user trust, it is necessary to create a strong and influential personality image in the minds of users. Here are two points that can help you:

• First, they must have professional knowledge and be able to provide professional guidance to solve user pain points, meet the needs of users to join the group, and continuously output community value to create a professional personality;
• Secondly, it can provide targeted solutions so that users can not only understand them, but also put them into practice immediately to solve the current problems they encounter.

What do you want your group to look like?

After the first two steps, the needs of establishing a community have been basically clarified, and the tone of the community has been determined. The last step is your group planning, that is, what your group should look like. There are three main points:

1. Be clear about how long the products or services provided by the community will last;
2. The community must be able to realize monetization before the end of its life cycle;
3. The rules of a community should be able to convey and maintain the values ​​of the community.

First, I have seen that most communities attract users through free courses, but after the group owner shares the course for 7 days, the community basically becomes silent. On the 15th day, the group owner disbands the community. Because when the value within the group disappears, users will post advertisements to reduce losses due to the cost of silence (feeling that they have spent time and energy) and the cost of escape is basically zero. However, the advertising party that constantly harasses the group will damage the image of the group owner. Therefore, after deciding to establish a community, you should have a rough idea of ​​how long the value you provide to the community can last.

Secondly, the community has its own life cycle. In this relatively closed small circle, when users no longer feel the freshness, the community will slowly become silent. Therefore, before establishing a community, you must think about the monetization model and make good conversions before the community becomes silent. Common monetization models include: membership-based paid groups (monetized from the beginning) and product payment (monetized during operations).

Third, the community is a small circle, and it is unrealistic to rely on human management. In order to better convey the value of the community to new users and maintain the value of the community, corresponding rules need to be formulated.

From the moment you join the group, establish a good entry threshold, screen accurate users, and use group welcome messages and group announcements to convey the community's norms and values ​​to new users. These messages generally include a community introduction, group function services, instructions for prohibited behaviors, instructions for encouraged behaviors, etc. According to the primacy effect, a new user's initial impression of a community will affect his or her overall perception and behavioral actions towards the community.

I have joined two communities with almost similar user groups, but one of the communities is called a communication group and the other is a learning group. Users basically chat in the communication group, but if they have work problems, they will ask questions in the learning group.

Finally, to sum up, how to start building a community requires changing the user perspective to position the group:

1. Understand user demands and use empathy to pave the way for community positioning
2. Consider whether the business is suitable for operation in the form of community
3. What does the community look like?

Source: Yidou University