5 thoughts on community operations!

Before the rapid development of mobile Internet, there were already many social products on the PC side, such as mailing lists, circles, groups... but they have always been relatively niche compared to communities. Why are social applications becoming more and more widespread in recent years? The popularization of mobile Internet has given communities the best mass base: low threshold for establishment, high popularity, high reach, fast response speed, relatively accurate users, and conducive to social communication... It is simply a must-have medicine for silencing people at home or traveling, no, it is a must-have medicine for cultivating market commercial monetization.

Why do we work hard to build many communities but they are not active? Not to mention helping business development and monetization. There is nothing wrong with the tool itself, it depends on how you use it.

Here I would like to share some of my thoughts on community operations . They do not involve tools and practical operations. There are endless means and methods of group operation tools, group fission, and group activities. When it comes to solving problems in a certain link, you can always find the one that suits you best by trying more and communicating more. Act after careful planning. Community operation is not as simple as creating a group and attracting people to send messages. The routines of community operation and community marketing are different. The former pays more attention to the long-term sustainable development of products, users, and brands. For products with high usage barriers, low user awareness, low consumption frequency, and non-standardization, long-term and in-depth operations are required to achieve marketing conversion; the latter pays more attention to transactions and is price sensitive. The sustainable development of products and brands is not the focus.

1. Clarify the purpose

The purpose determines how to carry out subsequent operations and what resources to invest.

The ultimate goal of operation is to realize cash, and to achieve cash realization requires:

• Explore potential users and conduct precise operations
• Cultivate potential users' awareness and recognition of products and brands
• Maintain relationships with core users and business partners
• Follow up old users’ consumption process and observe and evaluate the effect satisfaction to promote repeat purchases

These can all be achieved through the use of communities, but communities are not the only available means. By forming an operating matrix with different products, we can form a synergy to better achieve our goals, which will be explained in detail later.

2. User Value

The above purposes are aimed at different user groups, such as potential users and core users. The issues and demands they care about are also different. Therefore, after clarifying the purpose, it is necessary to guide the corresponding users into different communities for operation, and not to unify them.

There are already different communities, what value can they provide to users? Making users feel that the community is useful to them is the key to whether the community can be active or even exist, and it also determines what strategies the community operators need to adopt. Start with user analysis:

• New potential users: interested but unclear about their needs, lack knowledge and understanding of products and brands, and are waiting to see

Community value: helps understand products, eliminate concerns, and clarify needs. Operational strategy: focuses on organizing product experiences, answering questions, popularizing relevant knowledge, and promoting purchases. Communities are usually large in scale and require relatively standardized processes and specifications that can be reused multiple times and in multiple groups to reduce operating costs and improve efficiency. Operational methods: guide free product trials/online live Q&A/popularization of relevant background knowledge/answering general questions/regular event promotions/offline event exchanges, etc.

• Old users: have purchased the product and may encounter problems during use, or need assistance during use, typically such as online course learning

Community value: help users achieve their set goals (such as completing courses as planned), eliminate obstacles and questions during use, and provide and guide incentives. Operational strategy: focus on promoting plan implementation, answering questions, and providing incentives. The number of community members should not be too large, usually within a hundred people. There also needs to be relatively standardized processes and specifications that can be reused multiple times and in multiple groups to reduce operating costs and improve efficiency. Operational methods: Regularly synchronize results to provide incentives/organize activities/answer general questions/popularize relevant knowledge, etc.

• Core users: Core users may be users with great influence in the industry, opinion leaders in the user group, product providers such as authors or lecturers, or certain business partners. The users of this type of community are not quantity but quality. Maintaining this group well can help expand brand influence, establish and spread word of mouth, promote monetization, and when necessary, even require one-on-one dedicated personnel to respond to their needs in a timely manner. Their demands are usually directly related to interests, such as resource connection, influence realization, career advancement, etc.

Community value: helping to exchange information, share benefits, and foster growth. Operational strategy: mainly encouraging users to share/output value/provide services or tools/regular incentives. This user group will usually spontaneously generate some topics and discussions. Operations must pay attention to guiding and inspiring, and timely organizing and processing them so that they can be output into very valuable content for dissemination through various channels. In addition, core users will make many suggestions for the product. Listen to them with an open mind, learn from them as appropriate, and thank them in a timely manner. Offline meet-ups will enhance mutual understanding and emotional connection. Operational methods: organizing sharing/content compilation and output/offline activities, etc.

3. The Pareto Principle

Having said so much above, it feels like there are so many things to do that you can’t handle it all, right?

From what I understand, there are not many people in charge of community operations in many businesses. Many of them are part-time or directly let interns do it. If you want to do a good job in the community and make it play its full role, in addition to understanding the characteristics of the community itself, you must have the participation of people who fully understand the product and business and provide certain resource support, such as cooperation in content, activities, and promotion. As mentioned above, establishing relatively standardized operational process specifications that can be reused multiple times will also improve the efficiency of operational work.

In addition, not all communities require the same amount of effort to maintain. The 80/20 rule also applies here.

Most of the core user groups recognize the value of the product and brand. Ordinary users who do not recognize the product at all should be abandoned, and the focus should be on user groups with recognition and demand. Communities also have different life stages. In the early stages of community establishment, users have a sense of freshness and enthusiasm. It is important to strike while the iron is hot and establish rules. In fact, we do not need community members to be online and active all the time. Users also have their own work and life and it is impossible for them to always be in the group. In the early stages of establishment and for a period of time when new users have just joined, it is important to establish the active routine of the community as soon as possible so that new users can develop a fixed sense of ritual and attention habits. For example, many communities push morning newspapers every morning, sign in, answer questions regularly, share regularly every week, etc. (Whether these methods are effective is another matter, here are just examples). In actual operation, it is not necessary to use all methods. Try more to see which method is most suitable for the user's rhythm and can achieve our purpose.

4. Operational Matrix

As mentioned earlier, community is just one of the tools to achieve business goals. There are many other products that can help achieve these goals. The product form of the community determines that it has weaknesses in content accumulation and query, content form carrying, continuous dissemination, and radiation range. In addition, the community itself also needs continuous promotion; the community itself can generate a lot of valuable content for marketing and brand communication, such as user experience, experience sharing, excellent user cases, etc. It would be a pity if these were limited to within the community.

It can be operated through various channels such as official websites and communities on PC and mobile terminals, WeChat public accounts, official accounts of mainstream communities, etc. The channels help the communities to promote and attract new members, and the content generated by the communities is fed back to the channels for promotion, thus helping each other to develop in a healthy way. Students who are engaged in community operations should not just focus on the group, but also look at what other channels can be used outside.

5. Continuous Optimization

Each of the above parts requires timely statistical data collection and analysis of the results for optimization. In each operation link, you must pay attention to data management and accumulation, observe and summarize regularly, find problems and correct them, including the established standardized operation process specifications, and the practice of new operation tools and techniques. As community operations continue to deepen, there will definitely be new discoveries, which also require continuous improvement and accumulation. Then you can output your own community operation methodology.

The above is just my personal opinion, welcome to discuss and correct me.

Source: Zhang Momo