UGC community operation: From cold start to mature operation, only these 3 steps are needed!

I first came into contact with community operations because my boss suddenly asked me to revitalize a community that had been abandoned for many years within three months. After receiving this task, I carefully studied this community which had stopped maintenance before I joined the company, and thought about the basic methodology of community cold start and tried to do specific operations.

From the perspective of general operational methodology , what can attract users and motivate them to be active are nothing more than content value, social value, a sense of belonging, and a sense of honor.

Therefore, I carried out the following work based on the above points:

1. Create high-quality PGC content

A long-abandoned community, or a poor community, lacks users and content, but users need content to be retained, so what is urgently needed is content. But we cannot rush to fill in content blindly. The content we choose determines the path we take.

What the community fears most are spam posts and self-congratulations. It is very important to carefully find content that can stimulate user participation based on user characteristics and user needs.

I set several criteria for my content selection:

• In line with user and brand tone
• High quality (valuable to users)
• Topical and extensible

During this most difficult and boring time with no future in sight, I did the following two things:

• Original or high-quality content
• Change to different trumpets to create atmosphere

Although the final result seems to be only two things, in fact, a lot of preparation is needed to do these two things well:

• Plan in advance which channels to use to introduce users, what are the characteristics of these users, which topics they care about more, and which discussions and activities they are willing to participate in.
• Read a lot of content, extract the most valuable and appropriate content and topics, and recreate them
• Carefully consider the small replies that create atmosphere, so that they are somewhat guiding

2. Plan activities based on the door-in-the-door effect

Once the content has accumulated and is roughly ready, we will start promoting it . The community’s promotion method is often activities. As a community in the cold start-up phase, activities also need to be carefully planned.

First, we need to clarify our goals and plan activities based on them. As a cold start community, we have three goals:

• Recruiting a large number of community members
• Inspire community participation
• Stimulate the output of community members

The above three goals are gradually progressive, and the former are the basis and premise for the latter. At the same time, due to human nature, users will not invest too much energy in a product when they don’t understand it and their stickiness is not strong. Therefore, the activities we plan also need to follow this rule when providing value, starting with the easy and then moving on to the difficult, following the threshold effect, first winning the user’s response and then gradually cultivating user habits. But at the same time, we must not forget that our activities must provide value, either content value or social value.

The activities I planned in the early stage are as follows:

• Daily reading check-in (the reading content is the PGC content laid out previously)
• Hot topic discussion
• Encourage UGC

Among them, the threshold for reading aloud is the lowest. As long as users read aloud, they can check in and get some spiritual and material rewards. Therefore, this activity helps to quickly accumulate users and quickly establish an active community.

In actual operation, it is not enough to just lead users to read aloud. You also need to consciously lay the groundwork for retention and the next step of active activities, such as regularly commending users with full attendance, urging absent users, and even establishing a mutual supervision and competition mechanism among users, and guiding users to say a few words about their reading experience.

After a period of time, users begin to show their own different characteristics and naturally enter the stage of user stratification. During operations, we must also pay attention to user cultivation. When the most active users who are willing to share and speak reach a certain number, for example, 100, we can enter the next stage and start organizing discussions on hot topics.

The threshold for users in the initial topic discussion should not be too high. You can refer to the operation methods of PUGC, or even the operation methods of picture and text comments on WeChat public accounts .

Operations staff provide most of the information, set topics and questions, arouse user interest, and promote messages and discussions. Immediate replies to user discussions will stimulate a new round of discussions. As long as the operators are willing to discover and guide users, they will always stimulate the users' urge to express themselves and arouse their desire to communicate with each other, and then the first batch of UGC will come.

Finally, a word about rewards.

Most community activities will set up rewards for cooperation, which include spiritual rewards and material rewards.

Spiritual rewards include titles, and material rewards can be prizes related to the community tone or product brand, such as books and stationery for reading clubs, small daily necessities for e-commerce companies , etc. If your company has a good brand image, brand peripherals, product trials, and internal company supplies will be more popular prizes. For KOLs who actively share UGC, it is best to offer them some rewards to show recognition and appreciation.

3. Establish a user self-management and UGC system

At this point, the community has become very mature, UGC has become a natural outcome, and even the operators have established very close and positive relationships with KOLs. However, if you want the community to enter a virtuous cycle, operate automatically and healthily, and complete its own development, then it is particularly important to establish a system. This system consists of two aspects:

• Rotating administrator system
• KOL sharing and review system

There are two purposes for building this system:

• Give active users a special identity
• Let users participate more deeply in operations

The benefits are:

• Stimulate users' sense of superiority and honor, and make them more willing to show and share themselves
• Stimulate users' sense of belonging and consciously maintain community health and order

Specific operations:

• Build a KOL circle, treat KOLs as friends and colleagues, communicate with them, provide valuable information, give KOLs topic inspiration, and cultivate the habit of sharing ideas with each other
• Recruit administrators, clarify the responsibilities, rights and rewards of rotating administrators, and set up an administrator duty roster
• I adopted the mentor-apprentice system to form a mechanism for recruiting and training administrators. First, I wanted to inspire the old administrators' sense of honor. Second, I wanted to make the new administrators feel more at ease in the circle, making the group atmosphere relaxed and intimate. Third, I wanted to make myself feel more relaxed.

In a word, when operating a community, you should stand on the user's side and gradually meet the user's needs, including the demand for content value, the need for social interaction, the need for emotion, and the need for honor. If you do these well, your users will evolve from lurking to bubbling, and then to being chatterboxes and dependents.

Source: Meow Meow Cave