Community operations: user acquisition and retention!

Everyone knows that a community is an organization composed of a group of people with common hobbies, interests and needs. Whether it is the traditional offline community or the current online community with WeChat and QQ as the main base, they are actually using a certain purpose to bring a group of people together, and then realize certain value through operational means. Therefore, the essence of community operation is actually to accomplish three things: attracting new users, retention and conversion.

Some of you may find that this is the main task of user operation.

You can understand it this way, but although community operation and user operation are both about attracting new users, retaining users, and converting users, they are essentially different.

The work of attracting new users, retaining users, and converting users under user operations is mainly based on the user life cycle, and the operational measures taken are centered on user growth and commercial monetization.

And community operation cannot be viewed in isolation from the community as an organizational form!

The essence of creating a community is to establish valuable connections. Now more and more companies and individuals are focusing on building IP, because the creation of IP can maximize the value of the subject. In addition to IP creation, social relationships can be formed by continuously reaching more people and forming valuable connections with them. The more social links there are, the higher the individual value. Furthermore, after the IP is created, it is inevitable to connect with others for dissemination.

Therefore, how to effectively and maximize the connection with more people and establish social relationships becomes the top priority.

The community as an organizational relationship is a form that is relatively conducive to the subject establishing social relationships. So this is also the core reason why everyone has begun to pay attention to community operations.

Looking back now, attracting new users, retaining users and converting users under community operations is actually a process of continuously building connections from weak ones to strong ones. Among them, expanding weak relationships is to attract new customers, and forming strong relationships is to retain customers. After completing these two steps, conversion will become a natural result. To sum up, attracting new members, retaining members, and converting members into new members is a process of building a relationship chain from expanding connections to strengthening them.

Attracting new members to a community is about expanding weak relationships

There are many ways to attract new members to a community, the most common of which is fission marketing. But this is at most a technique, a way of playing. That is the question of how to do it specifically. This has been talked about a lot, so I don’t intend to repeat it again. Let’s talk about the essence.

Since a community is a form of connected relationship, its purpose is to form social relationships. Therefore, attracting new members to the community means constantly expanding relationships. Of course, during this stage, the relationships between each other can only be relatively weak.

I have said in previous articles that the biggest difference between online communities and offline communities is mainly the difference in carriers. Offline communities use space as a carrier, while online communities mainly use time as a capacity. That’s why there is the concept of exchanging time for space, and it is also the goal that many Internet products want to achieve: killing time.

Furthermore, in the objective environment where the traffic dividend has passed, there is no longer a way of playing (including the highly praised fission marketing) that can achieve very rapid traffic growth. Those historical cases that swept the screen overnight and fissioned a lot in a few days are, firstly, difficult to happen in the stock era; secondly, for you, there is actually not much reference significance (after all, the resources are incomparable in all aspects)

Picture So whether it is an enterprise or an individual, when operating a community, they have to accept the new normal of exchanging time for space.

In other words, we need to seize more user time through operations, and operators also need to devote enough patience and time to this.

In this case, when we are attracting new members to the community, we need to accumulate new users in a trickle, and at the same time pay more attention to the attraction of values ​​and fun in communication.

Let me give you an example of why we say content is important. Firstly, content is the easiest way to kill time. Secondly, content is very sticky and is irreplaceable when it comes to user aggregation, especially cognitive content.

Pi Ye is actually quite opposed to the kind of gameplay that looks complicated. Many operators always like to design the specific gameplay of attracting new members in the community to be very complicated and dazzling. In fact, this kind of planning under the guise of adding fun often makes it difficult for people to want to experience it.

When we design a community to attract new members, we only need to follow one principle: what you share is what you gain! As for the gameplay, the simpler the better. In this way, as long as you can persist for a long time, you will be able to achieve user connections and expand weak relationships.

Community retention is about strengthening relationships

After we connect with more users and establish weak relationships, we need to strengthen this relationship, that is, do a good job of community retention. What kind of content or behavior can effectively strengthen this relationship? Pi Ye believes that the best way is to let users make contributions themselves!

In today's era of pursuing refined operations, many operators dare not make any demands on users and would like to do everything for users. Things like mind mapping, essence extraction, etc., everything that can save users’ time is included. But if you think about it carefully, if you have a hardware physical product, there is actually nothing wrong with this service concept. However, in the service field, even if you have prepared everything, users may not buy it! Because there is actually a lack of spiritual experience for users.

If you want to strengthen user relationships, spiritual compatibility is indispensable. Back to reality, many community operators now design various paths, baits, gameplay, etc., all with the aim of encouraging users to experience products and services. But in my opinion, user contribution is not completely equivalent to user experience. Only when users take action themselves can they truly gain a sense of participation and experience. It definitely requires action and contribution!

So to sum up, the basic principle of user retention is: let users pay for it themselves! In this way, he will feel different and the relationship between each other will have the possibility of being further strengthened.

Summary: Usually, people often leave me messages or add my personal account to consult about community operation issues. In the process of communication, I always feel that too many people are eager to get a universal methodology, strategy, or skill; furthermore, most of the people who consult are actually workers themselves. It is often the boss who decides to do private domain at the drop of a hat, and then they encounter some problems in the specific process and want to get answers from me. So when most people learn about community operations, they are actually just pursuing something on the technical level, wanting a clear answer, a universal formula...

To put it simply, community operation is just a part of a company's marketing process. To put it more broadly, it is a part of the company's strategy. So, do you think community management skills are important? Of course it is important. After all, a good way of playing and skills can often directly determine the result. However, compared with this, it is more important to understand the essential things first, because it is related to your beginning! If you make a mistake from the beginning, no matter how good your skills are or how innovative your gameplay is, it will be of no use!