Community Operation | Master these 3 steps to make your community "live"

Most people who run communities have experienced a kind of pain:

After positioning the community well, the community traffic that was painstakingly attracted through an event or KOL promotion gradually fell into the embarrassing situation of being ignored. Sometimes, after throwing out one or two red envelopes, users would run away after grabbing them, and the community could not become active at all.

So, how can we activate the community?

The inactivation of a community is generally because it cannot provide sustainable core value, so we need to re-endow the community with new value.

Through exchanges and learning with some experts and my own experience in operating communities, I have summarized the following three points on how to re-endow communities with value and effectively activate them:

1. Identify the value points that need to be re-assigned
2. Tiered operations for users
3. Create efficient activities to let new values ​​occupy the minds of users

Do three things well to seize the value of the community

"Silent communities" are often because users can no longer feel the core value of the community, or the community cannot bring sustainable value. At this time, we need to reconnect the value with users through three actions:

• The first thing is to rethink the purpose of community members joining the group and turn the community into a gathering place for similar people, so that users can form a unified goal, cultivate a sense of belonging, and lay the foundation for strengthening user connections in the future.
• The second thing is to provide professional help to the community, shape the image of the group, and enable users to find professional solutions within the group, thereby increasing the frequency of users being active in the community.
• The third thing is to give users an experience that exceeds their psychological expectations (a sense of surprise), so that users will have a deeper impression of the community and the community will have a better reputation.

Through a case, we can deepen our understanding:

Among the users we have operated before, there was a user who sold light luxury women's clothing. When she was operating the community, she first set an entry threshold. Only users who had made more than two purchases would be actively added to the WeChat account by the stylists. Then, they would conduct user surveys in the form of follow-up visits to discover the user's characteristic attributes, interests and hobbies, behavioral preferences and other information.

From the collected user information, we know which users have which needs. The operators will then pull similar users with the same needs into the community, and then continuously guide users to chat in the group, providing professional guidance based on user topics, such as what to wear when attending a certain occasion, etc.

In addition, in group topic discussions, operators will discover users' pain points (not necessarily product pain points) and provide solutions through one-on-one communication and guidance with users, which will surprise users and deepen their trust and increase contact points.

Different users, different operation methods

The result of average is only mediocrity. Many operators always want to treat every user equally with the same operating method, but this often leads to high operating costs and poor results. Therefore, after clarifying the value points of the community, we need to stratify users into: peripheral users, adaptive users and core users.

How to distinguish these three types of users?

Peripheral users basically lurk and watch in the community. When doing user research, they also have a cold attitude, but they are still willing to be in the community.

For these users, we should disturb them as little as possible. By checking the purchasing behavior and preferences of such users in the CRM system, we can recommend highly relevant information to them, or guide them to the official account and give them the initiative in communication, or add personal accounts and conduct marketing in the circle of friends.

Adaptive users are those who occasionally show up in the group or are newcomers who have just joined the group. They may not be familiar with the tone of the community and have not yet been able to integrate well into the atmosphere of the community.

For this type of users, we can let old users of the community guide them when they join the group, unload their psychological burden, and slowly integrate them into the community. In addition, you can also have one-on-one private chats with such users to understand their concerns, and then eliminate their concerns in the community to strengthen connections between users.

Why do this? Here we use a very famous foreign social software - Facebook as an actual example to illustrate.

When Facebook first started, the user churn rate was very serious. Later, when the operations staff studied user data, they found that the core factor affecting retention and activity was the number of friends. In subsequent operations, they encouraged new users to add 7 friends within 10 days, which greatly improved the retention rate.

The essence of a community is social interaction among acquaintances, and we should try our best to encourage adaptive users to find connection points with other users.

The characteristics of core users are very obvious. They are usually active members in the community, can constantly provide their ideas to the group, and have a strong desire to express themselves.

We need to bring this type of users into the core management group, and encourage them to remain active in the community through internal incentives (such as a sense of honor and responsibility) and external incentives (such as rewards and authority), and even let them organize offline salon activities and train them into KOL roles within the group.

Highly effective activities have these two characteristics

After clarifying the value points and conducting user stratification, can the “silent community” be reactivated? The answer is no. Because the low value of the community has occupied the minds of users, in order to change users' cognition, there must be a "powerful medicine". Just like ourselves, every change in our three views is after experiencing major events.

However, in reality, most people only do linear activities. The most classic one is to throw a promotional page or a lottery, give out prizes, and then it ends. This kind of activity is only a temporary solution and may have a greater effect in the short term, but it cannot be continuously effective. Instead, it will raise users' future psychological expectations.

Two characteristic points of efficient activities: circulating body mechanism and four types of baits.

When planning an event, we need to design an interlocking activity process, starting with the user's attention to the event, gradually guiding the user into the next activity link, maintaining continuous activity, and finally being able to arouse the user's desire to participate in the next event.

The following will explain in detail through an example:

Baby Learns English is a preschool education app that has grown from scratch to the top of the preschool education app rankings in just two years. First, he promoted the seven-day free baby trial course on various channels to attract new users, directed traffic to his personal account, and then pulled them into the community. He also informed them that if they invited three friends to add his personal account, they could get an additional 99 yuan special course for free.

The content of the seven-day free trial courses is different, and after reading each course chapter, a poster will pop up to remind you: Congratulations on completing today's learning. Forward the poster to your friends and attach your learning experience to receive a small gift. Fission is completed through this link.

In addition, in order to increase participation, the community will also have a clearance mechanism. If you do not check in for two consecutive days, you will receive a warning. If you do not check in for three consecutive days, you will be kicked out of the group. For users who have been cleared from the group, the operations staff will conduct one-on-one follow-up visits to understand the situation and provide a corresponding resurrection mechanism - re-learning and re-checking in.

After the user completes the 7-day course, the operation staff will guide them to take a trial course of the paid course. If the user thinks the course is good, they will be guided to make the payment. The entire activity process is very compact, with one link after another, similar to the clearance mode in a game. This is the loop structure of an efficient activity.

After talking about the loop structure, let’s talk about the design of the bait, that is, the user incentive point: what should be used to attract users?

Most e-commerce operators are familiar with using combination packages or product trial packages to attract users. However, this is costly and not the most suitable bait. A good bait must meet two conditions: the first is that the bait itself must have a high value point, and the second is that the marginal cost must be low.

The free trial course for Baby English mentioned above is a good bait. The course itself is a value demand for users. After the course is developed, the average cost per user will gradually decrease, which is a low marginal cost.

Based on experience, an efficient campaign generally requires four types of bait: attracting benefits, guiding benefits, old user benefits and hidden benefits.

The seven-day free course in Baby English Learning is an attractive benefit, while the 99-yuan special course that guides users to invite friends and the small gifts that guide users to share their friends' circles are guiding benefits. What are the benefits for old users? That is to say, old users who have been kicked out of the group can be attracted to continue learning with other new course content or gifts.

Hidden benefits act as a lubricant. The trial courses in Baby English Learning are hidden benefits. In addition, sometimes when doing lottery activities, some users are not satisfied with the lottery results, then hidden benefits can be activated to improve the user experience. If the user is highly involved in the entire activity and is an active user, we can use hidden benefits to create a sense of surprise for such users.

Note: Hidden benefits are post-actions. There is no need to inform users in advance of the existence of these benefits. Instead, they are distributed after the behavior occurs.

At the end of the article, let’s summarize how to reactivate the “silent community”. You need to do three steps to re-endow the community with value:

• The first step is to clearly grasp the user's social value points;
• The second step is to differentiate operations according to peripheral users, adaptive users and core users;
• Step 3: Plan an efficient campaign with a loop structure and four types of good baits.

Source: Yidou University