Case analysis: How to build a community content system and active users?

This sharing session will mainly focus on strategies and implementation cases for content growth and user activity .

01. Background

The user group of our product is mainly female housekeeping business owners aged 30-45, mainly 3 types of people: nannies, confinement nannies, and cleaners. We provide them with housekeeping order-taking services within the App.

What is special about this user group is that, except for cleaners who need to log in to the App every day to receive orders, for business users such as nannies and confinement nannies, the shortest period from receiving an order to the end of the service is generally one month. During this month, the number of times these two groups of people launch the App will be affected by the service status, and their activity level will be relatively low.

Because the product itself has weak user stickiness and strong tool attributes, the "community" within the App is tasked with increasing the activity of the App. This challenge is not small but the effect is great.

I have always felt that in the process of building a community content system and continuously improving product functions, users are also growing along with our community. Both the activity level and the quality of content are constantly improving, and a group of users who can produce high-quality content under the cultivation of operations have emerged. During this period, our vest accounts also began to slowly disappear and no longer played the role of guiding users to post every day.

02. Operational Strategy

Before talking about the strategy, let’s first understand each module we are going to talk about today from a mind map.

1. Content exposure strategy

If the community is compared to a hot pot, then the content is the base of the hot pot. Only a good base can make users enjoy the hot pot.

However, even good content can only realize its greatest value if it receives more exposure.

How to effectively expose good content and achieve more conversions? What we are going to talk about next is the strategy for content distribution.

After our special content is launched in the community, we need to use the limited resources at hand to expose the content and reach our users. The ultimate goal of promoting special content is to stimulate the growth of UGC.

When promoting special content, we will add some small strategies, such as adding a button at the end of the special article to stimulate users to post and encourage them to participate in posting interactions. This is similar to the conversion at the end of WeChat public account articles.

The content distribution strategy mainly includes three specific methods: precise message push, home page resource exposure, and WeChat public account dissemination.

(1) Precision message push

App message system push can improve App activity to a certain extent, but it will also affect user experience. Imagine a user receives push notifications from an app every day. If the content of the notifications is not of interest to the user, the final result is that the user will turn off the notifications.

So in order to avoid such situations, we implemented a set of precise message push strategies: pushing different content to users of different identities at different times and scenarios. This not only avoids the waste of content resources, but also increases the opening rate of message push.

(2) Home page exposure

Exposure of APP homepage resources will recommend community content to the App homepage. So, what kind of content is suitable for recommendation to the homepage for exposure?

When recommending user content to the homepage, we will select interactive content that is likely to attract other users to comment. Because the content posted by users can better arouse interaction between users, giving it more exposure can create more opportunities for interaction between users.

Secondly, the benefit of recommending more user-posted content is that every time a user's content is recommended, the recommended user will receive a message reminder, which can enhance the user's sense of honor for creating content.

(3) WeChat public account dissemination

WeChat public accounts mainly disseminate thematic content and user-side content , and place topic-interactive content in WeChat tweets. Users of the public accounts can directly click on the post hyperlink in the tweet to interact with the community.

Because WeChat is the most commonly used app by our users, a reminder to share to WeChat will pop up at the last step of posting in the user community. Especially when users are participating in a discussion on a certain topic, they can invite friends outside the site to help like the post, which invisibly gives users a reason to share and satisfies their vanity.

2. Online PK system

In the community, every user is a connected group, but how can we make them interact with each other?

We mainly take advantage of the psychology of comparison and pursuit of honor among people , and prepare different online interaction methods for them in different time periods, and finally form a complete online PK system: daily topic discussion PK, weekly cooking PK, and cooking PK during festivals.

Daily topic discussion PK mainly focuses on common problems in users' lives to improve online activity. There are several ways to do this:

1) When choosing a topic, be sure to focus on the user’s pain points

Although many phenomena in life can be used as topics for discussion, they may not necessarily be the content for discussion among community users. Secondly, the topics we choose are relatively neutral and do not have fixed answers , so that users can have different opinions when discussing.

If the answers to a topic are only yes or no, then there is too little room for users to discuss, and it fails to stimulate users' desire to discuss.

2) Story guidance enhances the sense of immersion

When guiding a topic discussion, you can set a related story in the topic content to make users feel involved, as if it is happening to them at this moment. Only when users can empathize will they have something to say.

In the early stage, you can also use some pseudonyms and key numbers to create a lively discussion atmosphere and attract users who like to join in the fun, such as how many people are participating in the discussion of this topic; of course, having a clear and meaningful goal is only the first step, which only arouses the interest of users.

3) Continuously amplify the topic effect

In the topic discussions in which users participate, we capture interesting content. The advantage of doing so is that sometimes a topic can be continuously extended, giving users more room for participation.

Because our community users mainly produce content related to cooking, we take advantage of this and give users more opportunities to showcase their skills. We screen excellent cooking skills every week, open weekly special topics for cooking skills on the list, give them more exposure on the homepage, and give users a sense of honor for posting, so as to encourage them to continuously produce more content.

At the same time, community users also have their own active cycles, which require us to adopt corresponding strategies for intervention and management.

For example, during the holidays, the overall activity of App users is low. We will use some online activities to increase user activity. For example, we will hold an online cooking voting competition in the community to mobilize users' enthusiasm for content production.

3. Strategy for cultivating high-quality users

A community must not only be active, but also have high-quality users producing good content, which is what we call KOLs.

So where do we find these high-quality users? How do we manage them after we find them, and continue to encourage them to produce more content?

Our approach is to establish interest communities . Based on the previous online PK system, we have accumulated a group of active users, but their ability to produce high-quality content has not yet met our requirements. Therefore, we will centrally cultivate and manage users who frequently participate in community activities and topic discussions by establishing different interest communities.

Through the community, we can not only understand the latest developments of this group of users, but also strengthen our relationship with active users, thereby encouraging them to return to the community to produce content.

For our community, active users do not necessarily have the ability to produce high-quality content. So how can we drive these users to produce better content?

The improvement of the quality of user content is directly related to the quality of the users themselves. However, when the users of the community are unable to meet the conditions for producing high-quality content, operations intervention is needed to cultivate them.

We mainly adopt the method of operating collaborative users to produce content. We will provide one-on-one training for active users, select the content they are interested in, organize the materials they provide, and publish them in the form of special issues.

This approach will make users feel recognized and will increase their motivation to produce content in the community.

4. Check-in points system

The several UGC incentive strategies mentioned above require full intervention from operations to guide users and increase online activity.

That would be a huge workload for operations, so is there any way to create a long-term driving force?

In this context, we need to give users some rewards so that they feel it is profitable to join the community. This mainly involves establishing a sign-in points system and cultivating their online behavioral habits to further enhance user stickiness to the community.

Sign-in points are actually familiar to everyone. The general logic is that users will get corresponding points for participating in community posting every day. When the points accumulate to a certain amount, they can be exchanged for corresponding physical rewards online.

At the same time, in different scenarios, there will be different community posting and check-in message reminders. For example, during lunch, our users will receive a check-in reminder to show off their cooking skills, thereby activating users in this way.

Of course, points can also be associated with the user's growth level. We have not put it into practice here, so we will not explain it specifically.

03. Summary

I have shared four methods to increase community activity. I have some feelings when writing this. At each stage, we can adjust the operation strategy in a timely manner through the content produced by users in the community and understanding their needs through daily communication.

Finally, I want to say that no matter what method is used to improve various indicators, the formulation and implementation of operational strategies must start from meeting the actual needs of users, and self-satisfaction is strictly prohibited.

The core demands of users for using products are unique, but the focus at each stage of the life cycle is different. We must adhere to the core from beginning to end and always meet new demands.

In fact, during the entire community operation process, we need to constantly try operation strategies that are suitable for our own users. I hope the above sharing will inspire your operations and help you find an operation methodology that is suitable for your own users.

Best wishes~

Source: Crab-