How to build an Internet finance product community?

Forums, as one of the first gathering places for Internet users, have gradually disappeared into segmented communities. Today, communities have become a feature of various products. Internet finance , which has emerged in recent years, has gradually taken on the shadow of the community. How to build a good community for Internet financial products ? Starting with content is one perspective.

1. Understanding the community: the necessity of building a community for mutual financial products

1. What is a community?

A community is a place that connects people and information. It is a process in which information is produced by platforms or users and consumed by users. At the same time, it may also extend to connect people and people, people and things.

For Internet financial products, in the community, what is important is to connect people and things after people and information, that is, users’ financial management , lending or trading behaviors. That is, converting users through the community.

2. For vertical communities, the community is an accessory

For individuals in the field of Internet financial products, if you are building a community and want to make a product rather than a vertical community product, then the community must be an accessory that is developed around the core functions or commercial realization of the product.

For example, Lufax's Lu Community has set up a community section around the core profit-making functions of the product, such as fixed-term, current, online loans, and funds. It initiates topics, invites KOLs , and uses a user points system to promote user participation in community building.

(Lufax: Lu Community)

3. Community improves ROI

Building a community is not the purpose of Internet financial products; the real intention is to use the community to enhance the investment value of individual users. The cost of acquiring a single user for financial products is already very high. If the value of a single user can be increased, the ROI (return on investment) can be increased accordingly.

The community has the characteristics of amplifying users' presence and consuming their time, so it was natural to add a function like community. The user's sense of presence is amplified because a good community allows users to find themselves in the community and find similar opinions or emotions as themselves, or it may be a completely opposite cognitive impact. In this situation, users will continue to waste their time in the community, perhaps just to argue a certain point of view. This point of view may not be useful yet, but users just like to argue and express themselves.

The era of attention economy has not yet passed, and attracting users' attention is the closest to commercial monetization.

2. Community content: content that users of mutual financial products like

The initial connection of a community is between people and information, so to build a community we must return to its original intention. Starting from the content and building a community for Internet financial products is a feasible approach. Especially build content that users like.

1. High-quality content is fundamental

High-quality content can really help users, which has already covered the needs of most users. It is necessary to build a high-quality "production line". For most Internet finance, compared with traditional financial companies, providing professional investment research reports is a very costly task. Most of them adopt the strategy of introducing media, UGC or KOL articles. For users, these may not be enough. Self-produced content may be the ultimate "moat" of high-quality content.

(1) Methods for producing high-quality content: platforms take the lead

The premise of the "herd effect" is that someone has set an example, which is likely to attract attention, and the same is true for high-quality content. The community has a good control over the quality of the content it introduces, and every article is of high quality and timely, so users are more likely to continue to open and read. Users will develop a sense of dependence on good articles. In addition, community-generated content must also be of high quality and timely. However, this also increases operating costs, and many financial product companies may not be willing to do so.

Users at this stage are all consumer users. It is neither recommended to allow comments nor necessary to allow users to publish articles. From the perspective of effectiveness, comments often need to be launched online in combination with other functions, such as a points system. For users of Internet financial products, publishing long articles is extremely unlikely. The threshold for writing a long article itself is very high, especially for financial articles that require a high level of professionalism.

Good things should be shared. For high-quality articles, there must be a sharing function. Users have the desire to share, the threshold for sharing is very low, and it is a product designed for self-propagation . In addition to polishing high-quality content in the early stages, we must also consider product dissemination, because good products have their own dissemination characteristics.

(Grondhui: Professional provider of overseas securities information)

(2) Method for producing high-quality content: Let users imitate

For users, there will always be the urge to express their opinions in the community, so it is necessary to open up comment, like and collection functions. Under the premise of having certain high-quality content, a small number of users will express their opinions after reading long articles, but they are still a small number.

Launching a points system, opening up topics and short content, stimulating users' enthusiasm for participating in discussions and lowering the threshold for user participation are all suitable things to do at this stage. There is also a function that links points to users' comments, sharing, and reading behaviors; topics are provided, which have the function of aggregating and expressing opinions; and the function of posting short content online is as simple as posting on WeChat Moments .

Once the community has a certain atmosphere, the users' imitative nature will easily manifest itself; users will not only be content consumers, but also content producers, forming a benign interactive community atmosphere.

2. Topicality of high-quality content

To ensure that a community remains active, topics of high-quality content are important. Long articles, special topics, and short content all need to guide users to form an atmosphere for discussion. The topics of the community are the questions of users on one end and the answers to users on the other end. The community should serve as a bridge between "questions" and "answers". The question-and-answer community Zhihu has done a very good job. It not only has a function for users to invite each other to answer, but also has a reminder system for likes, comments, and new answers.

(Zhihu: XX invites you to answer questions, XX updates reminder)

3. Recommended content is an accelerator

High-quality content introduced, produced by community staff, and produced by users should be continuously recommended to more users. The higher the quality of the content, the more obvious the head effect will be. These contents dominate the tone and activity of the entire community.

(1) Algorithm recommendation

Users are only interested in what they like. When there is a certain amount of content and user data, recommending information and content that users are interested in and pushing them using a simple recommendation mechanism (which may not even be considered an algorithmic recommendation) will inevitably bring a sense of surprise to users.

Since people are more interested in reading similar and favorite things, algorithm recommendation has become a trend in community building. Regarding judging whether users are interested, in the absence of user data, we continuously push content to users with the tag “You may be interested” to test the direction of user interest. In the case of some user tags, we recommend and optimize.

( Alipay : Intelligent recommendations for commonly used functions)

(2) Fancy integration

A long article on one topic will become monotonous in form after a while. High-quality content can be continuously re-integrated and processed and appear in new forms, such as pictures, texts, short videos or posters, etc. It can even form a content relationship network and be recommended to users again.

(3) Sharing content is growth

Products should be self-propagating, and product communities should be even more so. High-quality long articles, topics, short content, and small videos should all have sharing functions. In product design, the design of recommended sharing functions should be given priority consideration. Sharing means user recognition of the community and also means product growth.

3. Community system: lowering the threshold for user participation

It is almost a consensus in product design that the threshold for users to participate in the community must be low, provided that the community has already formed certain attributes. In community operations, building a good product framework can often achieve twice the result with half the effort.

1. Community operations are product-oriented

(1) Community Framework

Build community frameworks at different stages. In the initial stage, we will continue to optimize the display and sharing functions of high-quality content.

The presentation format, like the article title , determines the user opening rate.

After users open an article, high-quality content ensures that users will finish reading it. Then users will have an urge to share it. Product design should satisfy this urge of users and provide sufficiently convenient sharing functions.

For communities that are initially entering the market with content, the user opening rate and user sharing rate should be given special consideration in product design.

(2) Interaction mechanism

When a certain number of users (based on the proportion of product users) participate in the community, it is necessary to provide a more convenient interactive product mechanism design. Design and iteratively optimize the user opinion expression function and user sharing function.

When users express their opinions through functions such as posting content and making comments, the product design should consider whether the publishing entrance is conspicuous, whether the editing box is suitable for people's operations on mobile phones, whether it is easy to link topics, etc. The same goes for posting comments.

The user sharing function needs to be further optimized to support not only article sharing but also comment sharing. Everything in the community should be shareable. Products should have such planning concepts.

(3) Gadgets

For some Internet financial products, users can also be provided with small tools to help them save time or lower the threshold for users to participate in the community. For example, in stock trading, it provides one-click trading profit sharing and information sharing to the community. Financial products can provide accounting notes, which automatically link investments, financial management, etc.

The gadget itself is a lightweight product. When it is closely integrated with the community, it will help users lower the threshold for participating in the community.

(4) Establish a user incentive system

Users need incentives. Without incentives, even the highest-quality content may only be spread among a small number of people. In product design, we must consider both the incentives for interaction between users and the incentives between the community and users.

Users' likes, comments, and opinions can all prompt other users, forming a feedback mechanism. For example, if an article published by user A is liked by user B, user A should receive a notification of user B's like. This is an incentive for interaction between users.

The incentives between the community and users should include not only an interactive system between users, but also a reward system. After users have liked, commented on, or published a high-quality article, they can obtain corresponding points, which can be exchanged for things related to spirit or interests. In some Internet financial products, there are often levels, rankings , medals and other design methods similar to gamification products.

(5) Version iteration and scenario construction

Building a community is a slow process. When planning a product community, there should be an overall and longer-term plan. A key indicator should be determined for each cycle, and the indicator should be achieved in coordination with community operations. In addition, by extending the time users stay in the community, it brings about many new scenarios. New scenarios mean new possibilities for commercial monetization. This is exactly the role that the Internet financial community should play.

A good product should have its own communication attribute. The community function has more communication attributes than other Internet financial functions. On the premise of ensuring the community's tone, the threshold for user participation should be continuously lowered. In this regard, product planning is the most important.

4. Community significance: helping users grow

The community connects people and information. Good information and high-quality content will benefit users. Harvest can help users grow, and vice versa, it can also retain users.

1. Growth is the driving force

For a user who is willing to hang out in a community, it must be because there is something attractive in the community. For users of Internet financial products, they have relatively good financial ability and knowledge, and have a certain degree of judgment. Users can sense whether the community has the ability to benefit them. Helping this group of users grow is the community’s mission.

2. Extend the user life cycle

The growth of users will definitely lead to an extension of the user life cycle (LTV), and the profit that a single user brings to the product will continue to grow. This is the ultimate purpose of the existence of the Internet financial product community.