How to operate a community? Information density is key!

The vast majority of communities are content products disguised as social products ; for example, Weibo is not a social product, and the vast majority of its users are content consumers. This type of product should have a clear positioning. Improving content density and quality and cultivating the platform's own influencers is the key, rather than increasing social interaction.

Newspapers/magazines, portals, forums, news clients, and algorithm-recommended products such as Toutiao and Douyin all represent the evolution of content products at various stages.

In fact: comprehensive communities like Weibo and vertical communities like Snowball and Zhihu are essentially content-based products , not social products.

With the continuous updating of technology, the form of content products is constantly iterating, but they always follow the same rules - continuously increasing the information density .

Information density (information concentration): refers to the amount of valuable information that users believe they have obtained after reading the same amount of content in a unit of time, from the user's perspective.

Information overload is everywhere and there is no end to it. The total amount of information becomes unimportant, while the precise matching of information becomes important. Users will continue to open content products with high information efficiency.

Products such as newspapers/magazines, portals, and news clients are all the same; each page contains a large amount of content that others are interested in but users are not interested in. These products eventually declined.

There are now two solutions - algorithms and follow-up relationships, establishing unique content push for each user and trying to match them as accurately as possible to increase information density.

1. The difference between content products and social products

WeChat and QQ are typical social products.

In addition, most communities are content products disguised as social products; for example, Weibo is not a social product, and most of its users are content consumers.

Tencent's own stock selection and Futu Securities , which is invested by Tencent, are two stock-related Internet products. Because of Tencent’s background, both products wanted to be social stock products, but both failed.

The two products did not make clear the difference between content products and social products. Interaction and discussion between each other is social interaction, and watching people chatting and speculating on stocks is a stock UGC content product. In the world of stocks, there are no social products, only UGC content products.

There is only one way to make a content product successful, and that is to make sure that when the user opens their phone screen, the screen is filled with content that interests them. Even if it is less, we should try to increase the information density.

Smart Stocks and Futu Securities products were born in the era of mobile Internet . They invested a lot of energy in the development of the mobile terminal and neglected the development of the PC segment. This is a major mistake. The stock community is a content product that requires high-quality content to irrigate it. A considerable portion of the high-quality content is long text/pictures with more than a few hundred words. PC input and editing still has an absolute advantage.

The two products were ignored on the PC side, and users had no habit of using the two products on the PC side, resulting in a lack of excellent long-form content.

High-quality content input from the PC is extremely important for the user's content consumption experience. Otherwise, it will not be possible to occupy the user's time and cultivate the user's reading habits. The platform itself will not be able to produce UGC content to serve other users and spread it outward, and the snowball effect of social networks cannot be achieved.

Xueqiu, Zhihu, and Douban are essentially UGC information products. They all originated from the PC and have retained the good user experience of the PC. Without good PC experience and user time, there is no successful UGC information product.

It is important to distinguish between content platforms and social platforms. FB and WeChat are typical social platforms that encourage users to use their real names and establish social relationships. Products such as Weibo, Xueqiu, and Zhihu are typical content platforms. Users come to read content, not to make friends, so try not to use real names.

Tencent is also trying to import WeChat friend relationships into watchlists. This choice is natural and effective quickly, but it is irreversible. Many products encourage users to upload their address books and encourage friends to follow each other. This is wrong.

A new content product based on follow-up relationships. When each new user uses it, they essentially follow and rebuild the content on their own mobile phone screen. What the platform needs to do is to try to fill his screen with content that interests him.

According to this logic, it is more reliable to recommend well-known figures and proven influencers. However, most of the friends in ordinary people’s address books do not have the ability to produce content, and these followers will only dilute the information density of the screen.

The greater harm is that the attention among acquaintances will greatly suppress the creative desire of ordinary users, which is explained in more detail below.

2. Cultivating influencers is the key to UGC platforms

In the early days of the community, most of the operations were done by attracting big names from off-site platforms, which was a very common practice. However, the success of a community platform does not rely mainly on external big Vs. The key is to cultivate one's own big V users and build a trusting relationship.

Early big Vs can bring traffic and credibility to the platform in the early stages, and top big Vs can bring in a long tail of ordinary users. Ordinary users use some platforms for a long time, and some of them become big V users, which is the key to the qualitative change of the community.

In the early days of the platform, there was little high-quality content. The platform could push all the high-quality content on the platform to the user's timeline by operating some large accounts under its control or using editing methods. Ensure that there is always high-quality content on the user's screen and extend the user's online time.

It is human nature to talk nonsense. As long as they are online, ordinary users will definitely produce content. For high-quality content, it should be fully edited, beautified, packaged and disseminated so that the content can be evaluated by more people and the producers can be paid more attention to, thus forming incentives.

For users who produce content, try not to use their real names unless they actively express their demands. For the vast majority of ordinary users, they have no demands on the platform in the early stages. The platform is just an anonymous notebook, or a tree hole, an anonymous square.

Almost all social platforms encourage you to upload your address book so that your friends and family can follow you. As a content platform, this approach is wrong. This behavior hinders ordinary users from taking the first step in producing content.

Most ordinary users are emotional and non-utilitarian when producing content. To show off, to complain, to shout in the square to hear other people's opinions; but most importantly, they don't want to take responsibility. In the early stages when ordinary users have yet to grow into big Vs, they lack confidence, and anonymity can protect their desire to express themselves.

The speech content of users at the top of the pyramid can attract users at the bottom of the pyramid; vice versa. All UGC content platforms are operated from top to bottom. For ordinary users, just make sure their timeline is filled with enough content with sufficient information density.

Many products within the community like to come up with features to verify the user's credit. For example, stock communities like to verify users’ investment performance, which is wrong.

In this world, the speed of sound propagation and the molecular structure of Viagra are information that are already known and can be verified, and have been PGCed . Most of the UGC content focuses on whether Apple’s stock will rise, what’s so good about Stephen Chow’s acting skills, and how to view the new round of interest rate hikes. Most of them are unverifiable.

The platform does not have the ability to help users find standard answers. What the platform can do is to help users find answers that they think are correct by providing sufficient rich content and perspectives. And content is distributed through follow-up relationships and recommendation relationships.

As long as the facts are clear and the logic is clear, it is good content. It is acceptable for different users to come to opposite conclusions about the same content. The platform has neither the ability nor the responsibility to verify and provide standard answers.

On the contrary , the act of verifying users will kill the credit of all big Vs and destroy the platform.

"Friendliness" is what the platform should advocate most, and normal and logical debates deserve encouragement. We must strictly control unfriendly speech and try our best to ensure that content producers receive more positive feedback.

Less is more: Improving information density is the key to the success of content products

Content distribution is the core of the platform.

The most common way for a platform to sort the posts of people the user follows in chronological order is to sort the posts by people the user follows. However, there is still much room for improvement in this method.

This method only takes into account the "freshness" of the published content, but different content has different weights, and the same content has different weights for different people. A user may follow 100 big Vs, but the user will only have deeper trust in a few of them. For the same big V, some speak important words while others just chat about trivial matters. The same content can be discussed by many people or not discussed at all.

These weights should be different.

In other words: two different users who follow the same influencer should have different timeline pages. Most users do not have the energy to browse all the content they are interested in, so users should be given priority to see high-authority content. There should be algorithms to increase the information density of users when browsing.

Less is more, and precision is more important than quantity. WeChat Moments is already the largest and most successful content platform in China, and its operating ideas are very worth learning from.

WeChat is a platform that strictly implements the principle of less is more.

Official accounts can only post once a day, forcing content producers to carefully edit and publish the best content, reduce the release of spam, and increase information density. The latest revision of WeChat public accounts , in which only the first two items are exposed, also reflects this idea.

The amount of content in public accounts is already rich enough, and has long exceeded the amount that users can consume. WeChat is continuing to compress it, forcing producers to produce top content. In its latest revision, WeChat has greatly improved the convenience for users to unsubscribe, and is also reducing “traffic accounts” to support brand accounts that focus on content.

Not only that, the management rules of WeChat Moments also reflect the idea of ​​"less is more" everywhere.

In the management of Moments, WeChat is constantly trying to reduce the spread of non-effective content and reduce the total amount of information appearing in users' timelines. WeChat has drastically compressed micro-businesses, compressed popular items in "personal tests", compressed likes in Moments, including the same article being forwarded in extremely large numbers, and compressed induced sharing.

These contents will seriously dilute normal content and reduce the efficiency of normal users in obtaining effective and valuable information in Moments.

There are some personal tests and activities that increase user engagement in the short term, but these are not the purpose of users browsing Moments. These behaviors reduce the efficiency of information delivery in the circle of friends and are harmful in the long run. Anything that reduces the efficiency of users obtaining information will, in the long run, drive users away from this product.

Why does Weibo allow Wang Sicong’s retweet to participate in the lottery?

This is wrong behavior.

This resulted in millions of people spending an extra 5 seconds on useless information; perhaps Weibo believes that their users' time is worthless.

Source: 1805