How to build a community of 700,000+ from scratch?

The author of this article tries to combine the product operation experience of former Tencent bosses and his own experience in operating the community to write an experience post specifically for community newcomers, hoping to help newcomers~

My first job was to independently run a gaming community. As a newbie who had not yet graduated from school and had no dedicated leader to guide me, I was under tremendous pressure. There was no other way, so I had to go to various community forums such as Zhihu to look for experience posts related to community operations and ask some big guys for advice (although few of them were willing to pay attention to me).

However, the problem arose. I searched a large number of posts and found that they were all like this↓

For newcomers or those who have just started to build a community, it is actually quite hopeless. Although these opinions are the summary of the experience of the big guys, they are relatively abstract and very unfriendly to newcomers. Basically, they are still confused when they start working on it themselves.

Now, when I think of that experience, I still feel a little sad

Therefore, in order to help new operators who are as confused as I was, I will try to combine the product operation experience of former Tencent bosses and my own experience in operating the community to write an experience post specifically for community newcomers, hoping to make your journey on this road a little smoother~

1. About the community and community operations

First of all, we know that communities include parallel community platforms and vertical communities. For example, Tianya , Tieba , and Zhihu are community platforms composed of many theme communities, while Naruto Bar is a very vertical community because there is only one theme, Naruto. What we are going to discuss today is vertical or semi-vertical communities, and does not involve the scope of community platforms.

(ps: parallel and perpendicular are not two absolutely opposite words, they just indicate different degrees)

Baidu Encyclopedia explains the community as follows:

An online community refers to an online communication space that includes BBS/forums, bulletin boards, notice boards, personal knowledge releases, group discussions, personal spaces, wireless value-added services, etc. An online community with the same theme brings together visitors with common interests.

I personally feel that an online community should be an online platform for users with common attributes to share and obtain topic-related value. In the community, we can see users with common characteristics (hobbies, social relationships, etc.), valuable content related to various topics generated by the community, and users who are interested in the topic can get the content they want.

The community is actually a product, and community operation is just a carrier for community product operation. Many of the methods we use in product operation are also applicable to community operation.

In addition, the community operation we are talking about may serve an independent community (such as a community app) or it may be an operation tool attached to a product (such as the official community of a game). There will be relatively large differences between the two in the operation process, which will be discussed later.

2. The steps of community operation I summarized

1. Understand the target users and products

When I feel confused about my work, I usually take time out to do three things: ① Research competing products ② Communicate with or observe users ③ Read experience posts.

I think the first step in operating a community or product is to spend enough time to understand the users, mingle with them, see what kind of people they are, and identify the most representative types of users. Even though we already have many methodologies, operations often require adopting specific strategies based on user attributes.

Generally, we will take the initiative to familiarize ourselves with our products and strive to become real users of our own products. I will not go into details here.

In addition, there is a pitfall that must be noted here: preliminary understanding of users is only to familiarize yourself with user needs and provide ideas for yourself, but even if you understand the users, you are definitely not the same as the users. In the subsequent operation process, you must not be arrogant and think that your views represent the users . Many things have to be tried before you know the results.

2. Positioning

Positioning is an extremely important step, because all subsequent community operations must revolve around positioning and must not be dealt with casually.

According to Trout's positioning theory, the positioning process is divided into four steps:

• Analyze the external environment, identify and analyze our competitors
• Avoid the advantages that competitors have established in the minds of users, or determine the positioning of your own products by targeting the weaknesses hidden in their advantages (e.g. Xiaomi’s high cost-performance ratio also represents low-end).
• Seek reliable evidence for product positioning
• Use all available factors such as content and proof to package and position, so as to establish your own advantages in the minds of users

I think this is more suitable for the positioning of an independent community, and it can also be combined with user interviews, observations, and user journey design methods to help identify the mental advantages of competing products and one's own products. (I have seen a sports information product whose slogan and vision are all about complete, fast and accurate information. However, when these functions cannot compete with Hupu, what else can it use to break through? The fact is that almost no one is willing to use it)

However, for communities that rely on products, it is actually difficult to use such positioning methods. Communities will make adjustments more based on product needs.

At this time, we can position ourselves based on the needs of the company and users and the advantages and disadvantages of our own products.

For example, when I first started working on the game community, the games were not yet perfect and often had bugs. Users wanted a place to promptly report bugs and get solutions, and the company also wanted to be aware of problems and collect feedback in a timely manner.

So I positioned the community as a problem-solving and feedback collection platform, and formed a 7-person external inspection team to answer questions and reassure players in real time. Although there are not many other operational actions, the community has remained quite active because it solves the fundamental problems of players.

3. Determination of community content and framework

Regarding the community framework, considering that not many newcomers can participate, you can also carry out it based on community positioning and competitive product research. I will not go into details here.

As for community content, it is mainly about determining the self-produced professional content (pgc) and user-generated content (ugc), as well as the community tone, which also needs to be confirmed based on the positioning and target user groups (for example, Zhihu was a high-quality question-and-answer community in the Internet industry in its early days, and its tone was also high-end and high-quality.

The tone of a community determines its overall style and content direction, and requires a series of measures such as cold start and community management to implement. Therefore, you must not be careless when determining it in the early stages, and you must know what your community and community users should look like.

4. Build a user system

Whether it is a product or a community, users have a life cycle. We can divide them into target users, new users, mature users, declining users and lost users based on the time from when they are attracted into the community to when they finally leave the community.

After building the user system, you can perform community operations based on the needs of different users.

(1) Target users

Based on the positioning and tonality, we can determine our target users.

So what should we know about our target users?

There are four main points:

• Who is the target user? Where are they?
• Which channels should be chosen to attract them?
• What values ​​of the community will the target users be interested in?
• What operational strategies should be adopted to improve user conversion rates ?

Later we need to choose appropriate channels to attract target users.

(2) New users

When users first enter a community, they are relatively unfamiliar with it and generally have no sense of identity or loyalty, making them particularly prone to churn.

At this time, our operational goal should be to increase users’ sense of identity with the community:

First of all, we need to understand the source channels and attributes of users (it is best to have a rough user portrait ) and analyze the value points that users are looking for (a very important point, don’t guess blindly, communicate and research with users more).

Then, operations should be strengthened based on value points. For example, if users have a great demand for strategies, high-quality and complete game strategies should be provided.

In addition, it is also necessary to improve the community content based on user attributes, especially the homepage content, UI and framework, so that users can realize that "this community is suitable for me" as soon as they come in.

The more common tag recommendation is to let users choose their favorite direction and then provide them with accurate content. To give another example, the UI of Bilibili caters to 2D users very much. Even a pseudo 2D fan like me can intuitively realize that this community is very suitable for me as soon as I enter.

Finally, it is the work of operational evaluation and optimization. Every time we make an operational change or diversion , we must keep a close eye on the data and evaluate whether changes are necessary and whether the changes are appropriate based on the data.

(3) Mature users

After users have passed the novice period, they will slowly become familiar with the community. At this stage, our operational focus should be on cultivating their loyalty, improving their health and activity, and fully tapping their value (such as payment, dissemination, etc.).

When operating users at this stage, we need to stratify users according to the characteristics of the community, such as dividing them into KOL /core users, active users, and ordinary users, and then perform different operations for users at different levels (remember to stratify according to your own operating objectives and community characteristics. There is no fixed model, so don't copy it blindly).

In addition, in order to increase activity, some commonly used operational methods are also needed, such as level rewards, continuous login rewards, relationship chain interactions, rankings , title labels plus V, various gift packs and activities, etc.

(4) Declining users

In the process of using products or communities, some users’ activity or payment will continue to decrease. How should we manage such users?

① Establish an early warning mechanism

Supervision is mainly carried out through operation data tables and the effects and conversions of each operation activity. In addition, if conditions permit, a mechanism can be provided on the product to judge user decline based on data trends.

② Discover the tendency of loss in advance

We can determine the churn tendency through communication and analysis of the portraits, behavioral characteristics, and unmet core needs of churned users, so as to optimize the product or our own operations.

It is worth noting that in the process of communicating with declining or lost users, on the one hand, you cannot trust the users' words too much (it is possible that they themselves are not sure why they do not want to play), and you should pay more attention to their real behavior (such as Moments , group chats, etc.). On the other hand, even if you communicate, you must ask in-depth questions and do not just stop at some superficial reasons and think you have got the answer.

For example (purely fictional, for illustration only):

Q: Why don’t you use Zhihu anymore?

A: I don’t have time.

Q: Why don’t you have time?

A: I want to learn something now.

Q: You can also learn on Zhihu

A: The knowledge on Zhihu is too fragmented, and there is a lot of fake knowledge and witty comments.

Q: There are private lessons and bookstores for systematic learning on Zhihu, as well as Zhihu Live. You can search for live broadcasts related to knowledge points.

A: I don’t know about these.

③Extend user life cycle

After analyzing the behavioral characteristics, attributes, and unmet needs of declining and lost users, you need to reverse engineer your product and adjust your operating strategy. And evaluate the improvements based on the data.

Once a user churns, the cost of recalling them is generally much higher than awakening a declining user, so try to understand the real reasons for user decline and churn to avoid churn as much as possible.

(5) Lost users

For users at this stage, it is particularly important to note that when using recall measures, the return incentives must meet or even exceed user expectations.

Common recall methods include:

• New features or new ways of playing, especially new features that improve the main needs of lost users, must be well packaged and communicated to users
• Pull the relationship chain, recall in the name of friends in the community, or use operational methods to let users pull users back themselves
• Humanistic care such as festivals, using emotions or practical benefits to recall users

Similarly, after completing each operational action, you should pay close attention to the data and use the data to evaluate the results and determine the optimization direction.

5. Phased operation

We need to implement the above points through 4 stages. These 4 stages are as follows

(1) Warm-up period

This stage mainly involves preparatory work, such as filling the community content according to the previously determined community content direction and tone. It may also be necessary to use some product mechanisms (such as robot comments and likes) to prevent the community from being too deserted.

Another part of the work is to discover seed users . After answering the questions of who the seed users are and where they are, you can start to find seed users through the cold start channel (mentioned in the previous link).

(2) Gray period

During this stage, we need to continue to store seed users , carefully observe user behavior and operations, and pay attention to their every feedback and suggestion, so as to promote the update and iteration of the community. In addition, you should also pay attention to and record the natural growth at this time for comparison in later operations.

(3) Full-volume period

The full-scale period is faced with all users. On the one hand, it means that we need to introduce users from various channels (at this time we need to pay attention to and optimize channel conversion). On the other hand, it means the end of trials and seed reserves, and operational work can be carried out without restrictions.

Of course, the most important thing at this stage is user growth (growth = incoming traffic - lost traffic), so we should improve channel conversion (in addition to using aggregate channels, we should also consider pushing high-quality community content to various channels to attract user attention) and user retention (managed according to the user system).

(4) Solidification operation period

From this stage onwards, we will carry out more regular operational actions - summarizing and optimizing the rhythm. As the operation progresses, we should institutionalize our operational experience as much as possible, and use mechanisms to replace manual work in the front and back ends of the product (such as using data to determine the user level and then making specific pushes ).

In addition, you should also consider promoting exposure and word-of-mouth through online and offline brand publicity, marketing , and other means (more suitable for independent communities, and word-of-mouth is mainly determined by positioning and packaging).

Conclusion

When talking about community operations, we often mention very focused yet general words such as users, mechanisms, or relationship chains (I don’t know if you can understand this sentence).

I think that for novice operators, these more mysterious things are not the most important things to understand. For the big guys, they already have a very systematic operation system, and they just need to strengthen and optimize these key points. As for us, we should learn to establish our own operation system and grasp the operation rhythm, do more research and summary, so that we can slowly find our own feeling for the operation.

Source: Meng Mo Ming Yu