How to make a dying community forum popular again within 4 months?

Regarding how to operate a community, the author of this article summarizes a "seven-step operation" method. The seven steps are: familiarizing yourself with the product - competitive product analysis - community atmosphere and seed users - attracting new users and promoting activation - retention and conversion - recalling old users - standing the last shift.

Turn the tide and make a dying community forum popular again within 4 months!

First, let me share a case with you. Around the beginning of 2014, I took over the home forum of a local portal website. This is a local portal website of a county-level city. The local permanent population is about one million, and the urban population is about 300,000. The portal website is very successful in the local area and is a strong local portal. It has more than 460,000 daily page views and about 15,000 independent IP addresses per day. The home furnishing section of this website has never taken off, the data has been lukewarm, and it was basically on the verge of death after the previous operator left.

When I took over at the end of February, the previous operator had left for nearly a month, and the forum had basically been unattended, with less than 200 UVs and less than 500 PVs. There are basically no users speaking in the forum, let alone any quality content. The screen is filled with all sorts of messy advertisements and external links from SEOs . The entire forum is basically paralyzed. It took me four months to restore the basic functions of the forum, and the number of visits increased to UV1,500 and PV exceeded ten thousand.

First, I spent about a week or two getting familiar with the forum and all aspects of the entire portal, and then I made a preliminary assessment of the problems that existed in this community forum: due to operational gaps, the popularity of the home forum was very low, but there were still users paying attention to it; the basic system of the forum was still sound, but it lacked management. Therefore, I gradually saved this forum through the following operational methods and means.

Step 1: Clean up advertising posts and spam posts

There is no doubt that the spam posts such as advertising posts and external link posts in the community are harmful to the overall environment of the forum. A page filled with advertisements and external links is difficult to attract users. It’s like if there is garbage everywhere in a community, would anyone be willing to live there? So, the first thing I did was to clean up the community so that it would attract tourists from all over the world.

Generally, forums have firewalls to automatically handle the deletion of posts, but some posts will still slip through the net and need to be deleted manually. I have been doing this job since I took over the forum until before I left. Not only do I delete the new spam posts that appear every day, but because of my obsessive-compulsive disorder I also screen out and delete old posts in my spare time. This is probably the most basic job of a community forum operation manager. For example, the operations director of Baidu Tieba once said that Baidu Tieba deletes nearly 2 million spam posts every day. The operation never stops and the posts are deleted all the time.

Step 2: Post using a pseudonym

After cleaning up the community forum environment, I started to work on content operations. I first used the most common method in community operations: posting under a pseudonym as a user. This method is most commonly used in the early stages of a new community operation. The operation staff not only have to be the original poster and create controversial topics, but also need to use pseudonyms to cheer for themselves and divide themselves into several users with different positions to initiate discussions. It should be noted that the purpose of using pseudonyms here is only to produce some content and liven up the atmosphere of the forum, and does not involve malicious fraud.

Most people like to watch the fun. Just like in life, if someone is arguing, soon a large group of people who don’t know the truth will come to watch. When it comes to the Internet, we all love to read "quarrel" posts. The more intense the quarrel, the better. Well, "the front row is selling melon seeds and benches, and the crowd is watching." Therefore, when operating a community, controversial topics are always needed. It would be even better if some celebrities and opinion leaders could participate, as it would be easier to ignite the atmosphere and attract a large number of users.

Step 3: Launch a large-scale campaign

Around the beginning of March, the manager and the director in charge of investment promotion planned a large offline group buying event, and I started to warm up the online event.

At that time, we took some relatively routine actions, such as posting event warm-up posts, event theme registration posts, topic hype posts, etc. At the same time, we also applied for some policies to pin posts to the top of the main site homepage and forum main board by utilizing the company's internal resources.

I had reservations about this approach at the time. In my opinion, it was a bit hasty to launch large-scale offline activities when the community forum had just completed the first and second steps. I felt that it should be done after launching online and small offline activities. On the one hand, by then the forum would have a certain atmosphere and popularity, and on the other hand, with the previous resources and experience accumulated, it would be more familiar with hosting large-scale events. However, the actual effect of this offline event was still very good, and it also became a turning point in the growth of the home forum. After that, I kept thinking that it might be possible that I was too conservative. When the community is not popular enough, attracting popularity through large-scale events is also a strategy worth pursuing.

Step 4: Regular offline activities

Shortly after the pre-launch solicitation post for a large offline event went online, under the guidance of our manager, we began to plan regular offline activities as a supplement, on the one hand to continue to attract new members, and on the other hand to build momentum for the large event.

In my opinion, regular online and offline activities in community operations can help greatly increase the stickiness of users to the community. At the same time, it can form a certain brand effect, help users remember the highlights of the community, and facilitate dissemination.

Step 5: Select original content output

Around March 15, our large-scale offline event was launched and achieved good results. The number of participating users and the conversion rate made the boss and participating merchants very satisfied. Since this article is about community operations, I will not go into details here.

After the event, I suggested following up on the users who participated in the event. The ideal situation would be that users would spontaneously produce content after participating in the event. However, due to insufficient basic operations of the home forum, users are still not very proactive in posting spontaneously. On the other hand, the user group participating in the event is not the expected young people born in the 1980s and 1990s, but an older group over 40 years old who are not very familiar with posting on the forum. Therefore, in order to attract users, I had to do the editing work myself, and then describe the decoration process from a third-person perspective.

For users in the community, it is easy for them to develop the mentality of living in a real community. Therefore, they will often behave like in real life, caring about the trivial matters of their neighbors and paying attention to other people's stories. Therefore, content such as decoration diaries in decoration forums, mothers' diaries in parent-child communities, travel notes in travel communities, etc., although often very simple in content and not professional enough in text and pictures, can attract many users to click and interact. So when users are not able to produce content yet, I produce content on their behalf.

Step 6: Production of integrated content

Around April, after learning and exchanging ideas with a local sister site, the company leaders increased the requirements for the forum's integrated content output. As a result, we invested a considerable amount of energy in operations to create various large-scale decoration guides and integrate various decoration knowledge posts.

Compared with fragmented content, integrated content (large strategy posts, collection posts) has a higher degree of integrity and higher requirements for copywriting editors, so generally no users will do this. However, these dry content is the content skeleton that supports the community, just like staple food, which is light in taste but indispensable.

Step 7: Recruit and cultivate opinion leaders

Since this forum had been operating for some time, although a lot of users were lost before I took over, I was able to find some opinion leaders who left the forum due to its desertedness from previous posts, and communicated with them one by one, and recalled some of them. At the same time, find some activists in the forum and train them to become a new batch of opinion leaders and posting experts. This group of people subsequently contributed a lot of high-quality content, boosted the forum atmosphere through daily postings, and provided us with a lot of help in offline activities.

When building a community, there is a group of people that cannot be avoided, and that is opinion leaders. The importance of opinion leaders to the community is well known, so community operators need to maintain good relationships with them and become friends with them.

Step 8: Merchant Standardization Requirements

After all, it is a local home furnishing forum that is closely connected with local businesses. The need for our own profits makes it inevitable for us to promote for the businesses. At the same time, merchants themselves also have the need and willingness to speak in the forum, so how to prevent merchants from blindly posting advertisements in the community has become a problem we face.

Our approach is to guide the merchants rather than block them. Instead of falling into the vicious circle of "merchants post advertisements - we delete the posts - merchants complain to us", it is better to guide the merchants. We train or deceive merchants, telling them that in an era of rampant advertising, simple advertising posts in forums will not only fail to play a promotional role, but will only destroy the forum environment and lose users. Therefore, speaking in accordance with the norms will help businesses get better returns in community forums.

Step 9: Establishment of community rules

When we were regulating the speech of merchants, we found that the previous rules were no longer suitable for the current environment. In fact, we should have formulated community rules before making standardized requirements for businesses. We should even say that we should have released new community rules after the first step of cleaning up spam posts.

When operating a community, the formulation of community rules is necessary, and the sooner it is completed the better. At the same time, new adjustments and additions need to be made continuously according to changes in the environment.

Step 10: Guide users to spontaneously produce high-quality content

In mid-April, a group of users finally posted some high-quality content in the forum - decoration diaries. After high-quality content is produced, we not only add highlights to the posts and give points and flowers to encourage them, but we also use fake accounts to interact with them to meet the psychological needs of users and motivate them to continue posting. In order to make them more motivated to post, we conducted a decoration diary competition and temporarily allocated a batch of gifts to give to them.

Colleagues who work in the community will probably find that if they rely solely on operations editing to produce content, the quantity is limited after all, and the content diversity is far from enough. There are many hidden talents in the community. If the users in the community can be fully mobilized, the community can be made more vibrant and more diverse.

When the popularity of the forum increases and the atmosphere gradually improves, users will post some high-quality content for various needs. This is a sign that the forum is beginning to become vibrant. This first batch of seeds needs operators to care for them as carefully as they would care for seedlings, and encourage them to continue speaking like kindergarten teachers encourage children to speak.

Step 11: Online Activities

After the decoration diary competition, we held several online activities, mainly focusing on "topic discussion". It should be noted here that, generally speaking, our online activities were seriously lagging behind. However, because the previous leadership attached great importance to integrated strategies, they gave up on online activities such as "grabbing buildings" and "voting" that are common in community operations. Therefore, we did not start online activities until the strategy loosened in May. However, online activities such as "grabbing buildings", "voting", "topic discussion", "selection", "competition", etc. are still very effective in boosting the atmosphere and popularity of community forums.

Step 12: Launch of merchant database and interviews

As more and more merchants joined us, we learned from the experience of our sister sites and launched a merchant database, opened up an independent page to meet the merchants' publicity needs, and trained merchants on how to make integrated large posts and how to communicate correctly with users in the community. At the same time, in order to meet various needs, we conducted exclusive interviews with some businesses.

Step 13: Community Beginner's Guide Online

As the number of community users increased, the atmosphere became better, and more and more businesses cooperated, we began to prepare for a large-scale online event - the Decoration Diary Competition.

However, during the preparation stage, it suddenly occurred to me that as the community became increasingly popular, more and more new members would be joining in, and more and more new members might face operational questions, so I started to make a community beginner's guide and FAQ.

Well, this thing should have been introduced together with the community rules.

Step 14: Renovation Diary Contest is online

Holding large-scale online events such as the Decoration Diary Competition is for commercial interests on the one hand, and on the other hand, it is to attract users to produce more high-quality content while keeping the output of content normalized. At that time, we had already accumulated a number of high-quality users and original content, and the atmosphere of the forum was also very active, so the promotion of the Decoration Diary Competition was a natural outcome. After the Decoration Diary Competition was launched in early July, the data of the Home Forum has reached UV1,500 and PV over ten thousand.

The above is some of the operational work I have done in the four months since taking over the home forum.

I should point out here that this is my first time doing community operations work, so the order of many of the fourteen steps is quite debatable. For example, the formulation of community rules, the launch of a community beginner's guide and FAQ, the recall and training of opinion leaders, the development of online activities, etc., should all be done in the early stages of operations. Due to lack of experience at that time, we basically crossed the river by feeling the stones. Some of these operational tasks were done under the guidance and suggestions of the manager, some were learned from other sites, and some were just because I felt that this was how the community should be done when I was hanging out in Baidu Tieba, Douban , Tianya , and Mop. Therefore, when doing it, I was confused about some things. I knew the results but not the reasons, and there was a lack of overall planning and unified thinking. However, from a documentary perspective, I will still record it step by step from the beginning.

Later, I kept reflecting on the community operation work in those four months, communicating with other community operators, and studying the operation history and ideas of some well-known communities. I have summarized some ideas for discussion with you:

Until I left my job, I still didn't know what operations and products were, so some of these operations were done under the guidance and suggestions of my manager, some were learned from other forums, and some were just because, as a senior netizen, I felt that this was how the community should be. Therefore, it now seems that the operational thinking lacks overall planning and clear ideas.

Later, after I had a preliminary understanding of the operation knowledge of Internet products, I also studied the operation history and ideas of some well-known communities. After communicating with other community operation students, I came up with some new ideas:

(1) Comparison between the two types of communities: idealistic and pragmatic

When operating a community, one type is like Baidu Tieba, Douban, and Zhihu, which tend to be idealistic and tend to discuss some high-brow topics; the other type is local forums like the 19th Floor and Wanjia Hotline, which tend to be pragmatic and tend to discuss some people-friendly and down-to-earth topics.

Personally, I think that among community products, a significant advantage of the later-growing Baidu Tieba, Douban Group, and Zhihu is that they focus users' interests on one point, rather than on a surface like local forums or Tianya and Mop. User needs are becoming more and more diversified. Baidu Tieba, Douban groups, and Zhihu Q&A are constantly refining user needs. According to different needs, there is corresponding product space. In a focused forum, there is a problem that the diverse needs of users cannot be well met in a general section.

However, the advantage of local forums is that they are down-to-earth. The more down-to-earth a forum is, the more likely it is to be popular with local netizens. It has a concrete quality, which tends to transform virtual netizens in the forum into friends in the same city in real life, and has more advantages in the conversion from online to offline.

(2) Comparison between community and information

Probably the biggest difference between community and information is that UGC has much larger content space than PGC . On the other hand, information requires authority, reliability, and newsworthiness, while the community needs to be down-to-earth, talk about trivial matters, and tell the stories of people around them. Information has a centralized perspective, with the spotlight focused on elites and celebrities, while in the community everyone has their own story.

(3) My thoughts on product communities

There are many companies that are making APP products now, and most of them have supporting product communities. I think a product community is not just a product experience community, nor is it just a place for users to submit various experience reports after using the product, but it is a place for users to communicate. Let users communicate about the reason why they use the product.

If it is an Internet home improvement product community, then what it wants is decoration diaries, decoration stories, decoration problems, etc. If it is a private chef product community, then what it wants is food stories, food experiences, recipes, etc.; if it is a travel product community, such as Ctrip 's community - travel guide community, it is to provide users with fresh and real travel guides and travel notes.

If we regard the community as a large courtyard, what we probably need to do is to gather the neighbors, hold a campfire party, and listen to their stories one by one. Storytellers want to get applause or comfort, while story listeners want to satisfy human curiosity. People need to communicate, and we need them to communicate in our communities.

If I were to take over the operation of another community product, what would I do?

Now, after more than two years of continuous learning, communication and summarization, and after more experience in operational work and systematic study of the product field, I have summarized a "seven-step operation" method for how to operate a community. The seven steps are: familiarity with the product - competitive product analysis - community atmosphere and seed users - attracting new users and promoting activation - retention and conversion - recalling old users - standing the last shift. The following is a systematic introduction to these seven links:

Step 1: Get familiar with the product

As an operations staff, I come into contact with products relatively later than the product team and technical team. It may be that the company starts to get involved only after the community product enters the R&D stage, or it may be that after the product version 1.0 is launched, the company starts to build a product community due to various needs. It may even be that the former community operator resigns and the company temporarily joins or is transferred to fill the vacancy. In either case, when we take over the operation of this community product, the first thing we need to do is to familiarize ourselves with the product.

Just like a sharpshooter checks his gun and ammunition before going into battle and a racing driver checks his car before a race, community operators need to have a deep understanding of the product they are operating before starting operations.

In general, there are the following points:

• Communicate with all parties: communicate with leaders or bosses, communicate with other operations staff, and communicate with product teams;
• Clarify key factors such as product concept, target users , and demand scenarios;
• Clarify key factors such as user portraits , user stories, product principles, and product original intentions;
• Use the product in different user ways, check whether the product has defects, and be familiar with the operation process;
• If it is a product that has been launched, you also need to pay attention to various operational data, such as the number of active users, number of posts, number of views, number of replies, online time, etc.; collect and analyze the early operational strategies, what work has been done, what results have been produced, and what are the reasons for success or failure.

Step 2: Competitive Analysis

In today's Internet industry, it is difficult to find a market segment without competitors. If you really take over a community product with no competitors, then congratulations, challenges and opportunities coexist.

As Sun Tzu's Art of War says: "Know yourself and know your enemy, and you will win every battle." After you have a thorough understanding of all aspects of the product you want to operate, it is necessary to do a competitive product analysis. The operational analysis of competing products can be conducted from the following dimensions:

• Competitors’ operational data
• Competitive product operation strategy
• Competitive product operational highlights
• Competitors’ operational mistakes

If you have enough time, you can also use the product in depth as a competitor's user, join the competitor's seed user group, and interact with the competitor's seed users and operators.

Competitive product operation analysis is only a means. Through competitive product operation analysis, we can

• Familiar with the market and users;
• Develop differentiated operational strategies;
• Learning advantages;
• Avoid detours;

Step 3: Community atmosphere and seed users

For community products, a good community atmosphere is crucial, and the creation of a good community atmosphere is also closely related to the quality of the first batch of seed users.

For example, in the earliest days of Zhihu, a strict invitation system was implemented to ensure that all seed users were bigwigs in the Internet industry, investment circle, and media circle. After being invited, these seed users not only gained a sense of honor, but also felt highly responsible for their status as seed users. They produced a batch of high-quality content for Zhihu, and almost laid the foundation for Zhihu's community atmosphere.

When cultivating the community atmosphere in the early stage, a common model is vest operation. The operation staff produces high-quality content in the identity of a vest, interacts, forms a prototype of the community atmosphere we need, and attracts seed users.

In addition, it is necessary to improve the "community infrastructure" internally, such as community rules, beginner's guides, FAQs, etc.; and to improve the "brand infrastructure" externally, such as encyclopedias , Q&A, libraries, and experiences. Of course, if you are the one who takes over, you will also need to do a thorough cleaning of the community forum, just like I did before, and remove illegal posts and spam posts.

In the early stages of operation, you also need to collect more user feedback and opinions, work with the product team to explore the perfect fit between the product and the market, and verify PMF.

The best seed users are opinion leaders in the target user group. Generally, there are several ways to obtain seed users:

• Select suitable seed users from your own network of contacts;
• Communities with concentrated target user groups, such as forum owners and moderators in Baidu Tieba, Douban, Zhihu, local forums, etc.
• Group owners or administrators of QQ groups, WeChat groups and other communities where target users are concentrated;
• Find out from your competitors.

After obtaining seed users, you need to communicate and exchange with them more often, establish a seed user group, and make the seed users feel more involved in the community.

Step 4: Attract new customers and promote activation

After a good community atmosphere is established, seed users continue to attract new users to join, and PMF is verified, then you can start attracting new users on a large scale. Before formulating a plan to attract new customers, it is necessary to clarify the densely populated areas of the target user group, how to reach users, how to attract users, and other issues.

Commonly used new customer acquisition techniques:

(1) Content Attraction

As mentioned before, in the early days, community operators produced a large amount of high-quality content, which was disseminated to the target user groups to attract new users. The content produced by the seed user groups was screened for quality, edited and organized, and then disseminated. Examples of reference include "Zhihu Daily" and "Tieba Selections".

(2) Event Operation

Holding events is also a common way to attract new customers. Carry out activities based on your own product features, activity goals, activity budget, and operational capabilities. No matter it is a large-scale activity, a regular activity, a small-scale activity, an online activity, or an offline activity, remember to make more plans and keep records of the process. At the end of the activity, you must do a good job of cleanup and review.

(3) Viral Marketing

It could be an excellent copy, a heartfelt video, an interesting interactive H5, or a sophisticated campaign that makes your product spread widely on social media .

(4) Leverage marketing

You can take advantage of hot topics in the content or add hot elements to the activities. The key is to match your own product characteristics and user attributes. If you are not sure about some hot topics with negative attributes, it is better not to pursue them.

(5) Create an Internet celebrity

It would be best if we could have a group of high-quality seed users with their own fan halo like Zhihu. If not, we can select two or three high-quality users from the existing seed users and make them Internet celebrities. Through their halo effect, we can increase the brand exposure of the product itself and attract new users.

(6) Other new customer acquisition techniques

For example, SEO/ SEM ; field promotion ; PR reports; offline advertising, etc.; and protecting the originality of content in the community. When reprinting, the source of the content and the original author must be indicated, as is done by Zhihu; allowing content in the community to be shared with one click, giving products more opportunities to be delivered to social networks ; optimizing unfriendly registration pages, etc.

When attracting new customers, you need to pay attention to the platform's carrying capacity and the product's service scope. More importantly, you must immediately activate new customers after attracting them. Attracting new customers is just a means. Users who are not activated are equivalent to a waste of initial investment.

① Newbie Care

A new user coming into a new community is like a newborn baby, and the operator should care for her like a parent taking care of a baby. Set up tips and guides for novices, teach her how to have fun in the community, and let her see the subtleties of the community; send her a welcome email within 24 hours after her registration; give new users novice gift packs, some limited-time high-level props, etc., which are all good care for novices. Of course, the best thing is that there is a good atmosphere in the community, and old users are very friendly to new users and are willing to help newcomers.

② Timely response

After new users register, they can get timely interaction or attention from old users. This can be achieved through robot vests or by increasing the recommendation weight of new users. After new users reply or post, they can get timely responses from old users or community operators, making them feel cared for.

③ Magic Number

Through data analysis , we can find the criteria that stabilize users when using the product. For example, for Zhihu, the "magic number" is said to be 3, which means that if a new user answers three questions in a short period of time, he will become an active user of Zhihu. Find a way to get newly registered users to reach the magic number as quickly as possible, such as recommending topic groups or community celebrities of interest when they register.

④ Incentive system

Work together with product colleagues to establish a good incentive system so that every step of new users can be affirmed and old users are willing to spread the product and help new users. You can refer to gamification thinking and set experience points, levels, medals, props, rewards for old customers bringing in new customers, etc.

Step 5: Retention and conversion

Generally speaking, the more time and energy users spend on a product, the higher the cost of leaving; the more relationship chains that are accumulated, the higher the cost of leaving; and the more personal traces left on the content produced, the higher the cost of leaving.

Therefore, operators can make users feel more involved through activities, communities, establishing private connections, etc., provide users with more opportunities to build relationship chains, and allow users to produce more content in the product. Satisfy users, surprise users, and increase user loyalty so that they are willing to stay. Another commonly used method to promote retention is "check-in", check-in to upgrade, check-in to get points, check-in to draw, etc. This method is especially effective for people with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

At present, the conversion methods of community products are generally: advertising model, e-commerce model, and service model. Typical examples include local forums, Xiachufang , O2O product communities, etc.

When operators are converting users, they should weigh the commercial value and smile value more, try to choose conversion methods that cause less harm to user experience , and think of more sophisticated conversion methods based on their own product characteristics. A typical negative example is a certain bar.

Step 6: Recall

Old users may have left the community for various reasons. However, the cost of recalling an old user is much lower than attracting a new user. The value of old users is far higher than that of new users: old users are familiar with the products, old users have richer relationship chains, and old users, especially in community products, will leave a lot of content output and personal imprints.

Commonly used recall modes include email/SMS recall, event recall, reward recall, etc., which allow old users to obtain benefits such as free use of paid props for a certain period of time, or give additional props, medals, etc.; let active users recall old users through relationship chains and give two-way rewards. These are all good recall methods.

Step 7: Stand guard for the last time

Every product has a product cycle, from product launch to attracting new customers and promoting activation, to retention and conversion, to harvesting, and finally to offline. However, few products will reach this step. For the sake of the completeness of the entire operation process, I will write it down here.

When the product is about to be taken offline, on the one hand, cost recovery is needed. At this time, the product and technical teams may have already withdrawn, and the operation team will gradually be incorporated. On the other hand, since community products will have a large number of user outputs, it is necessary to consider how to properly deal with them. It may be to migrate the data to another product of the company, or it may be to migrate the data to a friendly competitor. No matter what the situation is, operators need to stand guard until the end.

In these seven operation links, there are four capabilities that operators need to have throughout:

1. The ability to learn quickly is a skill that every position in the Internet industry needs to master;
2. Data analysis ability: pay attention to data, do not blindly believe in data, discover value from data, and reflect on operational strategies;
3. Communication skills: When communicating with users, you should neither flatter them nor be condescending. You should be friends with them. Good communication skills within the team can reduce a lot of unnecessary internal losses.
4. Execution ability. Operational work requires good execution ability. Otherwise, no matter how good the plan is, it will be useless if it is not implemented properly.

Summarize

Operation is a technical job, a meticulous job, and a physical job. However, all the efforts we have made will turn into little bits of joy when we see the data increase, receive user praise, and the product gradually grow, supporting us to move forward!