How to build a good community using content, users, and activities? (Attached with case)

The article combines the author's actual experience and more than two years of thinking, and analyzes content, users, and activities to find out how community operations should be done. How should problems encountered in actual operations be solved?

Over the past two years, I have been engaged in community operations. I started out in the social industry and am currently in the Internet finance industry, which has been 27 months in total.

In the past year or so, I have been responsible for community content recommendation, user operation , and activation activities. During this period, I have also completed various competitive product analyses , community product function combing, etc., so I had the opportunity to connect them together and have a deeper thinking and understanding of community operations.

From my personal experience, an excellent community is often inseparable from the development of a community atmosphere (for example, Zhihu has always advocated serious, friendly, and equal communication). The development of a community atmosphere, in addition to an effective content screening mechanism (for example, preventing spamming), is often inseparable from the three pillars of the community: content, users, and activities.

Next, I will combine my personal thoughts over the past two years and the problems faced in actual operations to provide a detailed interpretation and explanation.

1. Community Content

In today's era where content is king, high-quality original content is almost a standard for a good community.

Not to mention the previous Toutiao's Wukong Q&A snatching Zhihu's big V , from the author's observation, various communities are often willing to "spend a lot of money" to encourage users to produce good content.

This is a call for papers from the women's financial management community She Finance, which claims that the maximum payment for each article is 170 yuan.

In a certain competing community that I have observed, the maximum reward for a submission campaign some time ago was increased to 1,000 yuan.

Zhihu, which recently received financing , has accumulated high-quality content over the past eight years, which has become its very deep moat. The massive amount of excellent answers and articles accumulated in the community is also the most fundamental reason for its high financing and valuation.

Okay, that’s all I have to say about the importance of community content. Regarding the entire process of community content, I personally think it mainly consists of the following four steps: production & creation > display & recommendation > consumption & interaction > dissemination & distribution.

1. Production & Fabrication

For example: Is the main source of content in the community original or reprinted? If it is original, is it UGC , PGC , or OGC? In addition, is it necessary for the official to participate in the production and production process of the content?

Taking the community I belong to as an example, there are reply activities that generate many user replies (UGC). The administrator then screens and integrates some high-quality replies and creates a new post: "Selected Replies from the Activity".

Although the source of the content is UGC, the official (administrator) participates in the secondary creation of the content by integrating, editing, and repackaging the content.

2. Display & Recommendation

Specifically, which content should be selected? Where in the community will it be displayed (text OR banner)? Approximate display & recommendation frequency? Is personalized recommendation (machine algorithm) required?

If it is a manual recommendation, it is best to have a set of basic operating procedures and specifications, such as: update at 10 o'clock every day. If you have very good content, you can also give it more display time to get full exposure.

Of course, each community operates differently and has different content recommendations and update standards, so I won’t go into detail here.

3. Consumption & Interaction

There is no need to say much about content consumption. In terms of form, it probably includes: pictures, texts, videos, etc. For example, Zhihu did not support GIF animations at the beginning, but it was opened later. Recently, the official has been promoting video as a content format.

Interaction mainly refers to the interaction between content creators and consumers. Specific forms of interaction may include: likes, favorites, comments, rewards, ratings, etc.

4. Communication & Distribution

There are mainly two aspects here: on-site dissemination and off-site distribution.

(1) In-site communication

In-site dissemination refers to the approximate proportion of content shared by users within the community after consuming it . The proportion between them has a lot to do with the content recommendation mechanism, content quantity and quality mentioned above. There is another factor that cannot be ignored: the content sharing mechanism.

Specifically, the following details may be involved: How many sharing buttons are there? How many steps are there in the sharing process? What are the sharing channels ? Is there any feedback after successful sharing (such as points +1)?

For example: In the Suishuiji community, in addition to the regular upper right corner, there will be sharing buttons in the last row of each post and on the right side of the comment box, making them visible everywhere, thereby lowering the sharing threshold for users.

Or it can be said that when doing content operations , you need to pay attention to this data : content sharing rate. Because the higher the content sharing rate, the more opportunities there are to promote and attract new users , which will result in higher UV and PV, and these two are key data for the community.

In addition to the notes mentioned above, let’s take two more examples to illustrate: How to improve the content sharing rate by optimizing the content sharing mechanism?

Example 1: NetEase Cloud Music

One of the important factors for the popularity of NetEase Cloud Music is the popularity of its music review community. Every song is content, so how to increase the sharing rate of songs (content)?

The scenario is as follows: When you hear a new song and click the [Like] button for the first time, there is a high probability that an animated prompt box will pop up in the upper right corner of the system, suggesting that you share it.

as follows:

From the user scenario perspective: users will click the [Like] button and collect songs only if they think the songs sound good, and they will be more willing to share them. In addition, the prompt box often has several sets of different copywriting , which can impress users and maximize the sharing effect.

Example 2: A competitor

A competitor that I have observed uses [recommended tasks] to increase sharing rate.

The specific process is as follows: users can find the corresponding sharing tasks in the [Discover] section, share them to Moments , etc. as required, and be rewarded with points of varying values ​​after successful sharing. The points you earn can be exchanged for corresponding gifts in the points mall.

By optimizing products and streamlining the user sharing mechanism, users and the platform can achieve mutual benefits, and the users' willingness to share will also be enhanced.

(2) Off-site distribution

Of course, relying solely on in-site dissemination is not enough. There are many channels and platforms that can be used to distribute content , thereby maximizing the value of the content.

Taking her financial management as an example, let’s see how channel content distribution can be done?

1. Weibo/ WeChat : These are basically the standard channels for every Internet company. However, judging from the frequency of updates, WeChat should be her main channel for financial management.
2. Jianshu /Zhihu: She started updating her articles on Jianshu in 2015, with an average frequency of one article every three days. She has published a total of 428 articles. Judging from the personal center description in the upper right corner, her main purpose should be to direct traffic to the official account and promote the community. I also have an institutional account on Zhihu, but it was probably opened not long ago, so only 4 answers have been published.
3. Major content distribution platforms: such as Toutiao/Sohu We Media /Penguin We Media, etc. Take Sohu's self-media as an example. She Finance was established in July 2014 and has published a total of 9,753 articles with more than 43 million readers. There is a QR code at the end of each article to guide people to follow the official account.
4. E-book reading platforms: such as Baidu Reading/Duokan Reading/ WeChat Reading , etc. Taking Baidu Reading as an example, She Finance has updated a total of 110 e-books. After each article, an original link and an App download link are added to guide users to follow the community and download the App.

To summarize: She Finance maximizes the value of content by spreading good community content within the site and distributing it outside the site, guiding them to pay attention to the community, public accounts, and download the App.

This is the overall content process. Finally, let me talk about a problem that I actually discovered and thought about when I was operating community content:

If the community has accumulated a lot of good content in the past, how can it be kept hidden and have more display and exposure in the community so that it can be consumed again by users?

You can think about it first, and then look at the following answers.

I personally found that there are probably the following solutions.

Collection function: This is a standard function of many content-based (including) community products. Although the actual situation is that the proportion of users who can view the collection again is extremely low, at least there is an entrance.

Personalized recommendations: Taking Zhihu as an example, in the [Recommendation] module, machine algorithms will be used to recommend some answers that users may be interested in. These answers may not necessarily be generated on the same day, but may also be popular answers this month or in recent months.

Personal center: For example, Qiantang and Her Finance, click on the avatar to enter the personal center, and you can see all the original works she (he) has published before.

Follow function: It is somewhat similar to the personal center and can view all the user’s previous original works. But what’s even better is that after following the user, his or her posts or updates may appear in the information flow .

Recommended reading: For example, in Suishuji, the [Recommended Reading] module at the bottom of each post page updates 3 popular original articles. For Zhihu, this number is 20.

Topic collection: organize the popular articles of the past 7 days/30 days into a topic page and provide the corresponding entrance. This is what Jianshu does.

How to present better content to users is a problem that every community content operator has to face. After all, users care more about the quality of content than its timeliness.

2. Community Users

Many articles have mentioned about user operation of the community. For example, user pyramid /user tiered operations, I hope to differentiate and try to talk about some points that may not have been mentioned before or not explored in depth.

First of all, we need to make one thing clear: whether you are recommending content in the community or organizing events, it all comes down to two words - users.

Content is provided to users for consumption, interaction and even sharing. The original purpose of holding an event is to attract new users and promote activity. In addition, the formulation of community rules, community content recommendation mechanisms, etc. are all centered around users.

In a nutshell:

“User-centered community operation.”

We mentioned earlier that content is very important to the community, and the focus of content is often on UGC. Next, I will explain several levels of user operations by talking about how to motivate original users in the community.

1. Novice

A common example is replying to a pseudonym. The specific scenario is often as follows: seeing a newcomer in the community post an original post and few people commenting on it, you quickly reply to the pseudonym to interact, praise the other person for good writing, and encourage him (her) to continue posting original works and keep writing.

The reason why it is called the novice level is that this type of work itself does not have much technical content. It can be considered when the community is not active enough in the early stage. However , if this method is used for a long time and in large quantities to maintain the activity of the community, it is likely that the operation work is not so successful.

2. Entry level

Point-to-point interaction with vests is obviously time-consuming and has little return. Entry-level user operations will consider using more efficient methods to improve results.

For example: create a group for all original users, and let them actively interact and communicate with each other from time to time. Because you are dealing with a group of users rather than just one, so theoretically speaking, the input-output ratio should be higher.

3. Advanced

The advanced level begins to consider more refined user operation methods, such as the user tiered operation and user pyramid model mentioned earlier.

For example, among all original users, there are some who write a lot and with good quality (commonly known as big Vs). Should such users be given more material or spiritual incentives?

For example, setting up a smaller communication group and giving more care and attention (such as material and spiritual incentives)?

For example, just send them invitations to write articles, or interview them, let them share their experiences in the community, and give them a chance to be personally exposed and displayed?

4. Expert

The master level may have the following two aspects:

• One is the operational level: the novice-level account-replying, entry-level original group, and advanced-level user-level operations mentioned earlier are, in the final analysis, just a small branch of user operations. Experts in user operations will consider integrating all of the above-mentioned operation methods and eventually form a process-based operation module, such as a complete original user incentive system . Of course, this system is not static. Instead, it will be gradually adjusted and optimized based on user feedback and operational results after it is implemented in operational work.
• One is the product level: we need to consider improving the overall operational results by optimizing products, productizing operations, etc.

For example, through product adjustments, a good user level growth system can be established, which will affect all users in the community.

For example: Some users on Zhihu who give many high-quality answers will have an official yellow V logo, indicating that they are excellent answerers in a certain field. This is actually to encourage excellent original users by adding product functions (special logos).

The founder of Operation Research Society , @陈维贤, also talked about an example from his early days in the content e-commerce community Xiaohongshu . At that time, he wanted to enhance the enthusiasm of content sharers by increasing the number of users' likes. Although activities (such as collecting likes) were effective, the number of likes dropped sharply once they were stopped.

Later I found that the solution was very simple, which was to optimize the product and make the like button bigger or give it a better position .

“By displaying the like button in a prominent position in the new version, the overall likes of the product have increased significantly, and the likes data has quickly doubled with the increase in new users.”

The above is just an analysis and explanation of several levels of user operations from the perspective of original user incentives. This does not include all means of user operations, such as: data analysis , refined operations through user tags, the recently popular " growth hacker ", etc.; there may also be higher-level levels, such as: the overall strategy of user operations, the basic rhythm of user operations (considered by the operations manager or director).

Through the above examples, I am not saying that "novice-level" and "entry-level" work is unnecessary. After all, this is the basis. I just want to suggest that every operator (including myself) should not blindly indulge in "returning to a vest" and other physical work, but start to consider familiarizing yourself with the product, deepening operations, etc., pay attention to the input-output ratio of operational work, and use more efficient methods.

For example: operational productization, operational processization, etc., to improve the overall operational efficiency and effectiveness, which may also help us operators get rid of the labels of "miscellaneous" and "inefficient" to a large extent.

Finally, I would like to share an important experience I had in user operations in the past: user incentives.

User incentives: Don’t be too enthusiastic at the beginning, take it step by step

This is something I talked about with a friend who works in content operations. In order to encourage originality, he developed a complete set of original user incentive programs. After reading it, I said that your incentive plan is indeed quite complete, but that may be the problem: it is too complete.

Because I found that he might have made the same mistake as I did before, which was to strive for perfection from the beginning and make the plan perfect. For example: that plan is only the first version, but it has 6 or 7 specific points of material + emotional incentives for users.

There may be two disadvantages of doing this:

• First, too much work was done in the early stage, resulting in insufficient optimization points in the later plan;
• Second, if you give users too high expectations at the beginning, it will be difficult to exceed their expectations later.

(PS: This involves user expectation management, so I won’t go into details for now)

A better approach might be to try 2-3 incentive measures first, and then consider adding some incentive measures or increasing the intensity of incentives when you find that the incentive effect is getting worse or insufficient.

From the user's psychological perspective, expectations are not that high at the beginning. Through user incentives, his (her) expectations and requirements can be gradually met, and he (she) can be encouraged to have better behaviors (such as writing more and better original works), so that he (she) can obtain material and spiritual rewards step by step. This way , the incentive effect will be better and the incentive will last longer.

To give a rough analogy, this is the same as flirting with a girl. If you are too enthusiastic at the beginning, including throwing away the big card of confession, you may have no cards to play later. A more pleasing way is to try to get to know her first, flirt appropriately to increase your affection, and then slowly interact and deepen your investment in each other...

3. Community Activities

First, let’s think about a question: Why do we need to hold events?

Okay, I won’t keep you in suspense any longer. Here are the answers given by my friends:

Most products on the market do not have self-operated attributes. Without the support of operational actions, the growth of relevant product data will be very slow. Activities are an effective way of operation that can quickly improve operational indicators in a short period of time, help us increase user activity, promote transactions, and make users feel fresh and excited. In addition, the activity can also be used as an experiment for product functions to test whether it meets user needs before the product goes online.

The community is no exception. When hosting an event, many aspects must often be considered, including the purpose of the event, the target audience, the theme of the event, and the form of the event (including gameplay and rewards).

So after launching a community activity, which details can be optimized and improved to maximize the effect of the activity?

I suggest starting from these four points.

1. Early stage of the activity

In the early stage of the event, I will mainly consider the event atmosphere and event guidance. There are three optimization points here:

(1) Atmosphere rendering

Sometimes this is achieved through a pseudonym. For example, have at least five fake accounts reply to the post in the front row to create an atmosphere of participation in the event and exaggerate it. After all, people are prone to the herd effect.

(2) Activity guidance

In addition to pseudonymous replies, shortly after the event, I will use the community [pin] function to pin 5 relatively good user replies to the top; through user and pseudonymous replies to guide, lower the threshold for participation: "See how others reply, and I will participate in the same way."

(3) Interactive Encouragement

If there are good user replies, the administrator account will select some of them to reply to, usually in the front row, to try to let users see them. If the administrators who initiated the event actively responded to the posts, would users be more willing to participate?

Therefore, at the beginning of the event, various means should be used to attract users to participate, because if the enthusiasm is not generated in the early stage, it will be difficult to increase it later.

2. Mid-term

In the middle of the event, in addition to event monitoring, I will focus on: how to use existing promotional resources to maximize the effect of the event.

(1) Strive for more channels

For example: App push , community banner or buoy display positions. The atmosphere of the early activities has been created, and new traffic entrances should be added to give more users the opportunity to participate.

(2) Update of promotional display

For example, the text display position can update the copy every day to attract and impress users to participate through different copy, such as: [Last 1 day]: XXX investors have participated!

Banner display position is also something you can consider, for example: make 2 sets of different banners and put them before and after the event.

3. Late stage of the activity

The later stage of the event is also neglected by many people, who think that since the event is over, it is enough to distribute the rewards. In fact, we can consider: How to encourage users who participate this time through various means, so that they are willing to continue to participate in the future?

After all, activities are cyclical and continuous, not a one-time deal.

(1) List of winners

After the event is over, create a table with all the users who won awards in this event and display it for 2-3 days. When users see this, will they feel satisfied and be more motivated to participate in the event next time?

(2) Secondary packaging of content

As mentioned before, there will be many excellent replies in community activities in the form of replies. The official selects these contents, integrates and edits them, and repackages them, and then publishes a new post to promote them: "Selected Replies to the Activity". Provide positive feedback incentives to users who reply seriously.

Of course, this can also be displayed together with the first list of winners.

(3) Emotional care

This was when I was doing another graduation season themed event about classmates and friendship, and I suddenly realized that I could optimize the custom text for award distribution to provide emotional care to the award-winning users.

4. Activity summary

After each activity, if there is time, be sure to conduct a review and summary through data analysis to obtain feedback.

For example, if the event does not achieve the expected goals, we need to infer: Is it because there are not enough resources in the promotional channels for the event ? The activity topic is not interesting to users? Or are the event rewards not attractive enough?

Only after summarizing these experiences of success and failure will we have the opportunity to carry out better activities next time.

Through the above examples, I want to illustrate: If you regard the activity as a project, you will find that there is an opportunity to optimize every node.

When operating an event, once the theme and gameplay are finalized and launched, what is often tested is execution, that is, the control over the event details and process.

Finally, let me talk about two examples of failure around me, which may give you more understanding.

Failure Case 1: Not clarifying the purpose of the activity

This is something I heard from a friend a while ago.

They held an event on New Year's Day a few years ago, and the main purpose was actually to raise funds and attract users to invest . But suddenly they wanted to play the "emotional card", so they did a lot of New Year's Day atmosphere on the previous special page, which resulted in users' attention being distracted. Finally, during the event, the user investment effect was not very good and the expected goal was not achieved.

Later reflection: This was a mistake made at the beginning because the purpose of the activity was not clear and I was greedy for too much and too complete.

Failure Case 2: The theme does not consider the activity audience and attributes

When I first took over the event, I was unfamiliar with it, so I looked for previous community and similar competitor event cases for reference. It was found that there was an activity before, but the participation rate was relatively low.

This activity was held in June. The theme was based on the hot topic of graduation season. Users were asked to post a photo of any student-related imprint: such as graduation photos, admission tickets, campus scenery, etc.

In terms of the event format and rules, there seems to be nothing to complain about, but why is the participation rate so much lower than other events of the same period?

I later looked through some users' replies and comments and seemed to have found the answer. These can be roughly divided into two types.

• The first type is that users say they are old, or have replaced several mobile phones, and it is difficult to find photos from their school days on their mobile phones.
• The second type is that although it is not on the mobile phone, there seems to be graduation photos or something at home, but I still have to look for them carefully, so I can’t participate in the event for the time being.

It was then that I realized that the overall age of community users is relatively old, with most of them over 30 or 40 years old, and even quite a few born in the 60s and 70s. Although they had their youth on campus, many of them did not have mobile phones to record it at that time. Even if you have paper photos at home, you still have to take new photos with your mobile phone and then reply to the post to show your participation in the event.

They were interested in the theme of the event, but when they were ready to participate, they found that the threshold for the event was relatively high, so many people lost their desire to participate.

To put it bluntly, at the beginning of the activity, the attributes of the activity users (such as age) were not fully considered, resulting in a high threshold for participation in the activity, and ultimately a decrease in activity participation.

4. Final Thoughts

Let me stop here for now about the three axes of community. I am engaged in community operation and have seen many products during this period. Some of them entered the community from content, some entered the community from tools and social networking, and there were even platforms that wanted to build communities. So in the end, I would like everyone to think about an essential question together: Why do we need to build a community?

My answer is as follows:

From the perspective of the product (company), the most fundamental goal is " retention " and "activation". After all, for Internet products, in addition to the total number of users, the number and activity of active users are also very critical indicators. The community has high-frequency scenarios that just meet this need.

Through the community, users browse and consume content from time to time, which increases usage time and stickiness to the product. Sometimes they also comment, reply, participate in activities, and interact with other users, paying various sunk costs such as time and energy, and even develop trust and loyalty to the product. Once someone wants to leave or give up, "loss aversion" will make him or her have higher decision-making costs.

The community product form can effectively extend the user life cycle and better improve retention and even payment.

For example: the earliest Zhihu Live, despite the uneven quality of content, still achieved a turnover of more than 34 million in three months after its launch. This is inseparable from the extremely high user activity and trust in the Zhihu community.

However, we also see that many traditional BBS communities are declining. Some people even ask: Is the community as a product form outdated?

My answer: Yes and no.

• On the one hand, many traditional BBS communities, such as Tianya and Maopu, are indeed declining;
• On the other hand, we can also see that the new question-and-answer social community Zhihu, the content e-commerce community Xiaohongshu, and the third-party shopping guide community What’s Worth Buying are still thriving and in full swing.

Or we can say that the community has not declined, it has just been presented in a newer product form and has a stronger vitality. From this perspective, the community will never be out of date.

Regardless of the type of community, including the content, users, activities mentioned above, or the so-called community tone, community rule-making, community atmosphere cultivation, etc., they all need to be connected by connecting points into lines and lines into surfaces.

To sum it up in the words of an operations expert:

The so-called operation is nothing more than a process of combining and linking many trivial and scattered links and events to eventually form a benign ecosystem.

When the ecological cycle has not yet taken shape, you need to make every effort to break down the key points in the ecology one by one and try to connect them. And once the ecosystem is built, you only need to maintain the balance of this ecosystem and enjoy it.

Finally, I hope that you, including myself, who are reading this, can build such an ecosystem and finally enjoy it!