Community operation methodology: how to gather target users

In early 2015, communities began to become popular as a means of maintaining user relationships and increasing user stickiness. At that time, most communities brought together target users through WeChat groups , QQ groups, etc., and used operators to mobilize the atmosphere to achieve certain operational goals.

In the early stages of community establishment, the benefits of this model were very obvious: operators were closer to users, could understand user demands more efficiently, and the stickiness between users and products seemed to be getting stronger and stronger.

However, as the community grew, various problems began to emerge: operating multiple groups greatly increased the workload of operators; users in the group always needed operators to answer questions from time to time (including non-working hours); as the number of users increased, the community became a mixed bag, and turned into an advertising group, a WeChat business group, and a complaining group, which was completely beyond the control of the operators.

However, even though there are various problems with the community at present, in the current Internet environment, it is still one of the most effective ways to strengthen the user-product relationship chain. So, how do we operate an efficient and high-quality community that we can use? Today, let’s talk about the methodology of community operation .

1. What is a community?

A community is a group of users that brings together based on common needs or common goals.

2. Why do we need to do community operation?

Since the community brings together users, the ultimate goal of community operation is of course to allow users to better "serve" our products. This kind of "service" can be: let us understand the user's demands at the first time; enhance the interaction between users and products, increase their churn cost, and better instill the core value of the product to users; some Internet companies even have their basic business model built on "community", for example, some e-commerce companies do not make apps or websites, but gather all users in the community.

Since communities have so many uses, do all Internet companies have to make communities a standard part of their daily operations? Of course not.

Because we need to understand: the relationship between products and users is mutual. The community brings users closer to us, and vice versa, it also brings us closer to our users. Not all user demands are valuable, and not all user demands are just demands.

They will complain about our products in the group (making the negative impact of a certain problem increase exponentially), and ask us to provide various reasonable or unreasonable help (including the unreasonableness of the demands themselves and the unreasonableness of the time of submission); and the community puts us and these users in a small space, and we cannot escape at all. In this case, community operation will become a high-cost means. After all, what could be more complicated than the relationship between people?

Therefore, when we choose to do community operations, we must think twice before acting. Think clearly about whether it is necessary for us to do community operations. At present, there are more education and training products that are engaged in community operations, and most of them divide students into classes and provide lectures through the form of communities. For example, Qidian Students, Mantou Business School , Operations Research Society, etc.

3. How to operate a good community

Before answering this question, we still need to start with the definition of the community itself. At the beginning, the author answered what a community is. Now let’s take a look at what a community is not? This allows us to avoid detours during operations.

3.1 What is not a community?

(1) A community is not just a WeChat group

Don’t think that adding users to a WeChat group, sending a link and asking them to forward it when there is something to say, and chatting and complaining with each other when there is nothing to do is community operation. Remember that all operations are purpose-oriented. This kind of "water group" formation cannot be called an operation at all, because it does not help us achieve the corresponding purpose.

(2) Communities are not necessarily online

Just as we should not deify the Internet, we should not think that online social networking is omnipotent. Human beings' natural instinct of self-preservation will inevitably make them more reserved about "online friends they have never met", which is one of the reasons why more and more communities are starting to hold offline activities . "Offline dating" can often lead to further breakthroughs in relationships between people, of course, this is under the premise that the relationship will not "die in the light of day."

(3) It does not necessarily revolve around a core figure

Since operators are the founders of the community, many communities will become operator-centered, forming a one-to-many feedback mechanism. This mechanism will put a lot of pressure on operators and is not conducive to the effective communication of information. The correct approach should be to build a pyramid-shaped management structure based on user circles.

3.2 Four-step method for community operation

Now that we know these three pitfalls of community operations, let’s talk specifically about community development plans.

(1) Establishing the core values ​​of the community

In "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind", Yuval proposed that the biggest difference between Homo sapiens and other animals is that they know how to tell stories. It is with this advantage that they have formed a common goal and even belief among Homo sapiens, and cooperated with each other for it, and with the power of the crowd, they have achieved successful counterattacks time and time again with the strength of the crowd.

The prerequisite for human cooperation is to have a unified goal, and the same is true for community operation. A community brings together users with the same needs or attributes. If you want these users to remain active in the community for a long time and unleash their value, you must establish the community’s core values, screen out those users who recognize the community’s values, and influence later users by leading from one point to the other, thus forming a good community atmosphere. Remember, it’s not the quantity of social media users that matters, but the quality. The best ones are the ones that suit you.

(2) Cultivate KOLs and form standardized systems and management

As mentioned before, community operations are not centered around a core person (usually an operations staff member), but should be managed using a pyramid-like organizational structure. This requires us to manage user circles, screen out those core key users who are most in line with the core values ​​of the community and have a service spirit, and consciously cultivate them to become KOLs of the community.

As for the criteria for selecting potential KOLs, the author still recommends screening them through three dimensions: insider (in-depth understanding of the product), contact person (rich personal connections), and salesman (strong persuasiveness).

These KOLs can replace the operators and introduce the group rules to new members when they join the group, help the operators with daily community management, and reduce the burden on the operators. More importantly, they come from the user group: first, they can make other users feel that they are in the same group, which is more convincing; second, they serve as benchmarks. If these KOLs can get some special treatment (such as product-related souvenirs, job recommendations, etc., remember that the treatment must not be too materialistic, and it is best not to give money directly, because the cost is too high, and once the service is purely for profit, the possibility of KOL deterioration is greatly increased), it can often motivate other users to develop in this direction.

(3) Organize activities regularly to build user stickiness

This activity can be online or offline. For example, learning communities such as the Operations Research Society organize special discussions every Tuesday and personal sharing sessions every Thursday, all of which are online activities. The advantage of this regular activity is that it can cultivate user behavioral habits. It turned out that every Tuesday and Thursday was the research club's activity day, so on these two days, he would habitually wait in front of the community at a specific time.

In terms of activity selection, we must start with “light, short, and high-frequency” activities in the early stages, as this will help to quickly build user stickiness.

• "Light" means that the activity cost is relatively low, including both the enterprise's human and material costs and the user's participation costs.
• "Short" means that a single activity should be short in duration. Don't organize it like a talent show, with auditions, preliminaries, quarterfinals, semifinals, and finals that take ten days or half a month. Then users lose interest, leaving you alone to entertain yourself.
• "High frequency" means that the frequency of activities must be guaranteed, and they should not be held only once on a whim. Instead, you should develop the habit of holding events at fixed times or locations. This will help users develop a habit. It would be best if you don’t have to notify them, and they will know which platform you will hold the event on that day.

Of course, as mentioned above, communities are not necessarily online. If conditions permit, we'd better hold some offline activities regularly to let users get to know us better and let users deepen their understanding of each other. Xiaomi, for example, has always held offline gatherings for its core "Mi Fans" users, firmly grasping the hearts of this group of high-value users.

(4) Improving operational efficiency through tooling

To do community operations, you must understand some tools and techniques. Otherwise, the difficulty of operating a community of hundreds of people can be imagined. Here I would like to recommend Xiao U Manager to everyone, which can help you better manage your own community: including sign-in, activity, summary of group chat highlights, group task release, etc., all in one step.

In addition, many communities nowadays are based on WeChat. In fact, WeChat itself is also a very good tool. Especially in helping users “climb stairs”.

Now, in addition to having more and more WeChat friends, we also have more and more WeChat groups. Sometimes, if I don’t read the group for a while, there will be hundreds of unread messages in the group. If someone in the group shares some valuable content during this period, it will be too tiring to slowly crawl through the posts, and it would be a pity to miss them. At this time, you can use WeChat’s search method to quickly find the relevant information .

For example, let the group owner send a secret code before the content starts sharing: such as #爬楼20170201201#, then I can just enter the secret code in the "Search content" of the WeChat group to quickly locate that location; and WeChat also supports searching by group members and by date; in addition, opening a picture in the "Chat File" and long pressing it can also locate the chat location of the picture, which is quite convenient.

Of course, if some communities want to do group sharing, in addition to direct voice sharing in the WeChat group, they can also use third-party live broadcast tools such as Qianliao, or use Himalaya 's broadcast.

at last

The above is the author’s introduction to some methodologies of community operation. One thing that the author did not mention is that if a company’s overall business model is based on community operations, rather than just using community operations as a means to assist in strengthening the product-user relationship chain.

Like a certain e-commerce company mentioned in the article, which does not develop apps or websites, but gathers users completely in the community, its business model is completely based on community operations. The WeChat parent-child community "Uncle Kai Tells Stories" also belongs to this category. In this case, another point to consider is: we must find the foundation for the commercialization of the community. Because the ultimate goal of any product is to make a profit, in this case the community is their main way to achieve commercial monetization.

Once we combine the theory with our own product features and successfully operate a community, we can then copy this model to other communities and quickly expand it. After all, a huge user base has always been what Internet products are obsessed with.

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The author of this article @糖愫尔 is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!