How to implement community operation strategy?

As we all know, the traffic dividend of the current Internet has passed, and various so-called hot spots have also passed. Even in the field of knowledge payment, it has already entered the second half.

For ordinary people, or small and medium-sized enterprises, it is basically impossible to obtain traffic support on large platforms, and they do not have the financial strength to attract traffic by placing advertisements on their own. Therefore, more and more people are investing their time and energy into the private domain, hoping to get a piece of the pie through the operation of private domain traffic.

Although private domain is not equal to community, it is undeniable that at the current stage, community is still the most important and critical section in the private domain. Therefore, concepts, strategies and various ways of playing regarding community operations are emerging in an endless stream!

Companies also seem to have grasped at straws and are studying these things, hoping to increase user stickiness and tap into user value through community operations.

However, I am not very talented and I think that most companies, when operating communities, do it just for the sake of doing it, without further understanding the real meaning of building communities, let alone what private domains are!

Previously, a company found me and asked me to help take a look at their community operations and give some suggestions! This company is not large in scale, but the entire company has more than 2,000 communities of all sizes, with a total number of more than 600,000 users!

To be honest, this data is already very dazzling for the vast majority of small and medium-sized enterprises. However, its transaction conversion and value creation are really terrible!

After further investigation, I found that among these so-called 2,000-plus communities, 70% of them can almost be judged as dead groups. This is a very typical example, done for the sake of building a community!

We should realize that the change from traffic operation to stock operation is not only a shift in corporate resources, but more importantly a change in thinking.

In the past, in the era of traffic operation, the so-called fish pond theory: only by aggregating users can value be built, but in the era of stock operation, this does not work! After all, if you want to raise fish in a fish pond, you must first make sure there is running water! Only running water can keep fish alive and keep them healthy!

Therefore, in the era of stock operation, community operation should first ensure the vitality of the community. Otherwise, no matter how many users you gather or how many communities you build, it will be in vain.

Today, with the rapid development of the Internet, we all say that if we want to get a share of the market, we need to seize the fragmented time of users. Faced with massive amounts of information, whoever can grab the user's attention first will have the possibility to further explore the value!

The so-called seizing of fragmented time is actually essentially seizing the user's attention! What will attract users and what kind of content will they spend their time and energy on? This is the core that we should focus on when doing operations. This is the so-called attention economy .

So back to community operation, the so-called community vitality is essentially equivalent to user attention. Whether your community can attract users' attention and make them willing to spend more time immersed in it determines the quality of the living water in your fish pond.

I believe many people have encountered this situation. Suddenly one day, they were inexplicably pulled into a community! Actually, this is still okay. The most unacceptable thing is that as soon as you enter this community, the group owner starts to send messages in a screen-filling manner. Some of the lower-level ones are just crazy about sending advertisements, while others will send some content that seems to be relatively valuable. But no matter which one it is, my choice is basically to quit quickly!

Even if sometimes, I don’t log out immediately because of the face of my friends who invited me in, I will choose not to be disturbed by messages!

So the result is that, although I still exist in this community, I am no different from a dead fish. I am of no value to the company because I don't grab any of my attention.

Some people may question this and think that what is shared in their community every day is very valuable. Not to mention whether your so-called value is also attractive to users. Even if it is a really good thing, when you just enter the community and the relationship between each other is still weak, no one is willing to pay a long time of attention to you when they are not familiar with you.

We must know that in traditional offline communities, space is a container. Because of space, the community has room to operate. Online, time is actually the container. The amount of time users are willing to devote to you is equivalent to giving you their attention!

Therefore, when faced with communities like this whose life cycle has ended and which cannot capture users’ attention, it is better to simply disband them. Companies shouldn't spend too much energy on this.

Of course, some people will feel that the community they have worked so hard to build is disbanding in an instant. At best, they will feel it is a pity and regret, and at worst, they will feel that it is a waste of customer resources that have been accumulated with great difficulty. In fact, as far as the disbanding action is concerned, it is not that pessimistic!

Community operation is essentially about connecting users and building a small ecosystem. The starting point of operation should be to deepen user relationships!

How much value you can extract from community operations depends on how deeply you can cultivate user relationships! If you want to tap into deeper user relationships, you must first make sure your fish can swim. This can be achieved by injecting vitality into the community, that is, finding ways to grab the user's attention!

When it comes to community operations, there are actually two fundamental reasons why users pay attention to it: one is that there is a certain target event in the group that requires "me" to participate, so users will unconsciously pay attention to this group.

The second is that there is someone in the group whom you like (or admire, or respect, or desire to communicate with), that is, there is an emotional flow between people, making people feel warm, comfortable, or fun in the group. Let’s look back and see if the communities you often hang out in all have these two core elements? !

Target events and emotional flows are the two main glues of a community.

For most communities, the most important part at the beginning of operation is to design common goal events to strengthen the relationship between operators and users, between users, and between users and goals. By jointly completing a specific goal, this can not only grab users' attention, but also strengthen the relationship between each other.

When the community operates to a certain stage, the attraction of common goal events will weaken. At this time, something with stronger stickiness is needed to attract users. Look at all the communities, which one has the longest life cycle?

Without a doubt, it must be the work group and the family group! So what goes one step further than the target event is actually emotion! Only by using emotion as a bond can we develop stronger social relationships and further deepen user relationships.

But no matter which one, it follows the user life cycle, and user value will always come to an end one day. If a target event has a beginning, it is bound to have an end. But how many people can maintain community sentiment for a long time without expecting anything in return? So it is natural that community vitality cannot last forever.

Therefore, as far as enterprises are concerned, there is no need to go against the trend and forcibly extend the life cycle of WeChat groups. Instead, they should complete the screening and diversion of users when the community still has a little vitality, so that users who want to be retained can move to new groups.

Having said that, you can also look back and see whether your community has the two core elements of common goal events and emotional flow? Combined with online communities, the concept of time being the container emerges. It is not difficult for you to find out why more and more communities are under the banner of learning.

Because in a learning community, first of all, there are target events with longer cycles. After all, learning is a delivery process, not a transaction process.

At the same time, the learning process itself will produce a collision of ideas, which will further lead to emotional integration. This is a natural process, neither deliberate nor inconsistent. Why were business schools like MBA so popular in the past?

You must have heard this saying: You go to business school not to learn, but to make connections. This actually proves that learning itself is a form of social interaction, and the social network formed by learning is still a relatively high-quality social relationship network.

Therefore, if you can understand the concept that time is a container, then when we are building a community with multi-level retention of users, we must consider that if we want to create differences in the life cycle scale, the longer the learning group, the longer the common target events that can be loaded must be!

The longer the life cycle of a learning community, the more fully the social relationships that can be developed will be intertwined, and the stronger the trust between members will be!

Summary: Regardless of the industry or type, during the limited life span of the community, companies should not treat the community as a distribution center for information dissemination.

Instead, we should think of it as a spiritual space for building relationships and communicating with each other! Only by using common goal events as a carrier and emotional flow as a bond can we develop sufficiently strong social relationships. Therefore, sometimes you should learn to be willing to let go and disband useless communities, which will not cause you to lose the user resources you have already accumulated.

In the process of community operation, how to build a multi-level time container for user retention is an issue that cannot be avoided and a road that has no shortcuts. It requires us to accumulate slowly, step by step!

Author: Pi Ye Operation

Source: Pai Ye Operation (pyyunying)