Community operation: How to operate a community from scratch?

1. Purpose

Addressing current community needs:

• On the B side, customer retention, platform stickiness improvement, user fission, and monetization.
• On the C-end, marketing activities are split and valuable content is monetized.

Overview of B-side demand solutions: The purpose is to maintain fixed B-side customers, improve platform stickiness, user experience, etc.

Classify, organize and rename the groups currently owned by the sales end to enhance group members' awareness of the group.

Based on the above analysis, the Facebook information of group members is clearly identified and the group activity is improved, or the original group is abandoned, and active users are guided to migrate and re-establish a new group, and the group name card (QQ group)/nickname (WeChat group) is standardized.

If planning a new group, it is necessary to divide it according to the corresponding B-side business groups, strictly follow the group operation logic, and assign similar groups of people (members with similar attributes are very important), such as meeting one or more conditions: city/region, business scope, nature of the enterprise, etc.

Group management is assisted by both humans and robots. All groups have robots stationed there to automatically add people to the group, provide welcome messages, group rules, keyword replies, group activity push, administrator settings, and anti-spam management.

Group activity strategies are promoted according to the required stages to achieve corresponding goals, such as: customer retention, platform stickiness improvement, user fission, and monetization. (The form mainly considers the functions and business requirements that can be supported within the platform.)

Group active strategies: daily activities, fixed/rotational content sharing, entry of experts, robot interaction, and specific target needs.

Overview of C-end demand solutions: The goal is user fission + monetization + platform stickiness improvement.

• Group creation is carried out based on the target group user channel process.
• The highly-advanced group robot management mode + manual activation operation mode manages massive groups. Compared with B-end groups, C-end groups have less manual intervention, which is mainly carried out in the early stage of group creation and during the cold period. Group affairs are completed by administrators + robots, such as advertising, spam management, and removal of illegal group members.
• Finely guide regional/industry experts to join the corresponding groups and interact with group members to promote corresponding needs.
• Based on group classification, robots are used to achieve commercial monetization push for large numbers of groups.

Here are some insights into community operations :

The life cycle of a community is strongly related to the needs of group members for the community. The life cycle is different based on the different attributes of the group. When the value of the group is lower than the maintenance cost, highly active users should be decisively migrated to the new group environment.

For example, for product categories, keeping new products that group members are interested in can extend the life cycle. For social categories, since new members speak more than old members, to keep new members coming in, silent members should be properly cleared out.

• Users' motivations for joining groups can be classified into six categories: relationship maintenance, work needs, social circles, learning and improvement, promotion and publicity, and life and emotions.
• Group value: high return, general, garbage group, death group. High-yield groups need to have highly consistent user Facebook attributes and the purpose of joining the group, have common needs, and be suitable for promoting commercial monetization content. The attributes of general group members are diverse, and it is difficult to form unified demands. They are suitable for social media and hot topic hype and fission. The information in the spam group is messy, the advertisements are everywhere, and the forwarded information is messy. Strengthening management can transform it into a general group. The activity level of death groups is low, and most group members have their groups blocked, so they cannot be effectively activated and conversion is ineffective.
• Correctly evaluate the value of the group and do not over-invest in the operation of certain groups that have achieved marketing goals. When the group reaches the end of its life cycle, transfer active users to a new environment.

Group operation taboos:

• The purpose of group creation should be clear, and the attributes of members should be kept as consistent as possible to avoid loss of focus, which will lead to inaccurate promotion and marketing, and eventually turn the group into a general or dead group.
• Lack of management and frequent harassment are mainly due to low management timeliness, situations that are easy to occur when managing multiple groups manually, or the lack of corresponding group rules. Clarifying group rules and managing robots can solve the problem.
• Emotional and improper management and strict group rules limit members' active space and suppress their motivation to be active.
• Evaporative cooling effect group, the group size increases, the once high-value group members lose focus and give up being active. The improvement method is to appropriately set the user attribute threshold for entering the group and introduce leadership members.
• For an old group that has no freshness, we need to increase the number of new members to join continuously, adjust the ratio of male to female members, and add consumer-level concept content.

About the size of the group (the number of people is subjective and for reference only):

The number of people in the B-end group should be controlled to no more than 100. Too few people will lead to a lack of scale, while too many people will lead to too many silent users, failure to convey promotional information, or too many frequent speeches, and some members will choose to block.

C-end groups can be large or small according to business needs. Fixed groups should not be too large. WeChat groups should be kept at 200 members, with 20% of them being active speakers. The QQ group should be kept at 1,000 people, with 5%-10% being active speakers.

Regarding the value that active users can generate:

Users with needs are more likely to be attracted by serialized content (which intuitively reflects the value of content); 20% of users will actively comment and participate in content creation if they have a good experience.

Users without rigid needs are more likely to be attracted by fragmented (fresh, interesting, trendy) content; 80% of users will actively forward and distribute content if they have a good experience.

Monetization case demonstration:

Source: T-Cell