What aspects should be taken into consideration to build a good UGC platform?

UGC , or User-Generated Content, refers to content generated by users. A UGC platform or product is an Internet business model that is based on the spontaneous production of content by ordinary users, and which triggers the connection between people and valuable content, between people, and between people and business, ultimately generating commercial value for UGC suppliers.

The UGC platform emerged with the development of Web 2.0, and its development has generally gone through the following stages:

From the forum in 2004 to the app community in 2010, UGC has been constantly changing its presentation methods with technological changes over the past six years. The development of UGC has gone through the graphic era, video era, short video era, and live broadcast era. The carrier of UGC has also correspondingly undergone a transformation from PC to APP. As the number of Internet users began to expand, the content produced by users has become increasingly fragmented.

Current Internet products all have UGC attributes to a greater or lesser extent. Some exist as core functions, such as community products like Tieba and Douban . Some exist as auxiliary function modules, such as the comments on NetEase Cloud Music . Some extend from the core functions and run through the entire product structure. For example, WeChat , from the Moments updates to the official accounts to the message area, all have UGC elements.

UGC products also display different forms according to their content and form, such as Tik Tok , Himalaya , Changba , etc. that focus on video and audio, and Zuji that focus on pictures. If we look at the content, there are successful UGC platforms in various fields such as tourism, knowledge, photography, fitness, and food, such as KEEP, Mafengwo, etc.

It is almost achieved now that there is no platform without UGC.

In fact, a good UGC platform is an ecosystem.

The UGC platform is not only a platform for users to produce content, but also a platform for users to display and communicate. Therefore, the essence of the UGC platform is social . Whether content producing users can find a sense of accomplishment, content consuming users can find satisfaction, and how to promote communication between users are the keys to the success of a UGC platform. An excellent UGC platform undoubtedly successfully solves the complex triangular relationship between users, content and platform. Therefore, a good UGC platform is like a well-circulated ecological system.

There are many ecosystems on the earth, and UGC products are also diverse. However, in summary, three major problems need to be solved to build a good UGC platform:

1. How to motivate users to produce content?
2. How to display user-generated content?
3. How will the content be distributed?

1. How to motivate users to produce content

The various elements of this problem can be broken down into a number of important sub-questions:

1. Who are the users of UGC platforms and how to acquire them?
2. What kind of content should be produced?
3. What kind of incentives and operating systems are used to encourage users to produce content?

1. Users of UGC Platforms

A mature UGC platform has a variety of users, with good and bad users mixed together. They can be roughly divided into celebrities, professional users, contributing users, active users, and ordinary users . Their numbers form a pyramid from top to bottom. Each type of user has different contributions and status to the platform, so different strategies need to be adopted when acquiring them, and different methods also need to be used when operating them.

Although celebrities and professional users are famous, influential, and have professional production capabilities, they do not have much influence on some UGC platforms. Because these users are few in number, busy with their own work and less active, they often use a platform because of the benefits of the platform. They generally come when it is beneficial and leave when it is not. If the platform relies too much on these users, it will increase the instability of the platform. Therefore, for celebrities or professional users, the platform can spend a lot of money in the early stage to invite them to the platform to exert their impression and attract users, or invite celebrities in the later stage to make the platform even better.

Contributing users and active users are the main force of a platform. They have a large base and are active. The former are motivated to produce content, and the latter are motivated to watch. Their positive interactions create the atmosphere of the platform. Managing these two types of users and expanding their numbers is crucial to the success of the entire platform.

Therefore, on a platform, the curve where the number of fans is concentrated among users should be like line B in the figure below.

The user ratio of Platform B is relatively healthy, and the number of fans of the top users is not too high. If, like Platform A, fans are concentrated on a few top users such as celebrities, this increases the risk of the platform. Once the top users withdraw from the platform, the consequences will be disastrous; and the activity of other users is reduced.

2. How to cold-start the platform and acquire the first batch of users

After determining the user target, you need to consider how to acquire the first batch of users for the platform and perform a cold start.

Different UGC platforms adopt different methods according to their own tone and resources, but in summary, they are nothing more than the following aspects: mobilizing interpersonal relationships around you, going to forum communities where potential users are located, exploring users from competitors, discovering users through SNS, etc.

Some UGC platforms have a high-profile positioning, focus on user quality and content quality, and strictly screen the first batch of seed users . The most typical ones are Zhihu and Douban. Zhihu adopted an invitation system and mobilized the leading Internet figures to support the platform. The platform's style immediately improved, and Internet newbies watched it crazily. Then Zhihu relaxed the requirements for answerers and increased the base of platform users.

The same is true for Douban, whose first batch of users mainly came from the experience of its founder Abei. Abei is actually a very famous programmer in the domestic Pascal community, so almost all of Douban’s early users came from the Pascal community. The entire Pascal community members covered a wide range of topics, including philosophy books, high-quality literature books, humanities books, etc. Moreover, programmers in the entire community were using a product called Blog at the time, so these members all had good UGC literacy and were very accustomed to writing long articles.

Zhihu, Douban and other high-end UGC platforms have found high-quality UGC users in specific regions, from celebrities to professionals to ordinary contributors, and promoted them, achieving a top-down cold start. However, some UGC platforms, such as Maoyan, adopt a bottom-up approach.

Maoyan is a ticket purchasing app. They want to guide users to write about movies and participate in discussions based on ticket purchases. How do we find the first batch of users who write movie reviews? We find them among the basic users who buy tickets.

First, they analyzed the ticket purchase data of ticket buyers, and picked out 25% of movie enthusiasts based on their weekly ticket purchase frequency, collections, short reviews and other data.

Then add these 25% of users to the group. If there are a large number of them, you can segment them according to their different interests and add them to different groups. Assign someone to manage the group, maintain daily activity, maintain good relationships with key people, collect user feedback, and encourage users to produce content through various reward rankings.

When the above-mentioned groups grow to a certain size, the roles will be reversed to allow users to fully operate and manage the community . Users are allowed to create their own groups and serve as group owners, and Maoyan officials are only responsible for guidance and material support. Then, expand this scale and expand the number of groups. Maoyan officially holds some offline activities to maintain the relationship.

There are also some platforms that have worked hard in the early stages and used media accounts (such as WeChat public accounts , Weibo, etc.) to accumulate users, such as Lizhi FM.

The early users of Lizhi FM products came from the 1 million followers of their WeChat public account. They were developing products just in time for the golden age of public accounts, and now they have started to use frequency modulation on public WeChat accounts.

They carefully selected 500 Chinese bloggers, and after discussions, put the program on the official account, allowing users to listen to it by keywords . At that time, everyone thought it was great to listen to the program on the official account, and the host was also very excited to help spread it. The number of followers of WeChat public accounts has increased dramatically, reaching millions. After the Lizhi FM platform was launched, fans became the first batch of users.

Then in the early stage of the product, in order to ensure the quality, the Lizhi team hired professionals to coach and train the anchors, carry out planning, and let the anchors manage the fan base.

Therefore, when acquiring the first batch of new users and conducting a cold start, you can adopt a top-down or bottom-up approach based on the characteristics and tone of your own platform, or you can adopt a new approach based on your own characteristics.

3. What kind of content do users produce (reducing content production costs)

Since UGC users are of varying quality, and each person has different thoughts and knowledge structures, the content produced is bound to be very different. However, the platform can actively regulate the content produced by users through product design, rules and operating methods , and even guide what kind of content users produce.

When UGC platforms design products and specify what kind of content users produce, they must follow an important principle, which is to minimize the cost required for users to produce content. The lower the production cost, the easier it is to use such a platform, and naturally the more popular it is, and the more UGC will like to use it. (Similarly, the lower the cost of consuming platform content, the more people will be attracted to watch.) The following methods can be used to reduce the cost of user-generated content.

• Reduce particle size. For example, Weibo stipulates that text content can only be sent with 140 words, a maximum of 9 pictures can be uploaded, and the video upload time on WeChat Moments cannot exceed 10 seconds. Imposing restrictions on quantity reduces the cost of content production and also reduces the cost of content consumption.
• Use technical means to make tools easier to use.

For example, asking people to create a high-end photographic work every day would seem very difficult, as it requires a lot of intelligence, physical strength, and technical skills, and many people would certainly not do this.

However, some photography apps have added templates to improve the composition and color tone of photos, which instantly improves the style of the photos. For example, the image filter Mix uses technology to reduce the cost of user creation, allowing almost everyone to easily take stylish pictures.

So how do you take pictures that are interesting and meaningful? The "Zuji" app solves this problem. They invented a new idea for processing pictures, adding two black bars above and below the photo, adding a line from a movie, and of course, the various filters that other apps have. This makes the photos look like a movie, and the pictures have narrative qualities, which can express more abstract emotions or more complex storylines.

Zuji combines movie lines, the combination of lines and images, and the narrative of movie images, which in themselves require very high intellectual costs, in a "plausible" way through modularization and the extended imagination of a single picture. This is equivalent to grafting other people's intelligence onto oneself, so everyone likes Zuji's filters very much.

The same is true for videos. VUE can shoot good-looking short videos, but UGC platforms such as " Xiao Ka Show " and "Tik Tok" provide standard "content copywriting templates". Users do not need to rack their brains all day to think about how to create, just follow the filming like crazy.

Content production and creation is an extremely mentally demanding and exhausting task. Everyone likes to take pictures and write, but not everyone becomes a photographer or writer because many people are unwilling to continue to consume their intelligence. Therefore, if a UGC platform can reduce the users' intellectual costs, it will definitely be popular.

4. What incentives and operating systems are used to encourage users to produce content?

What methods should be used to encourage users to produce high-quality content? The platform needs a set of systematic rules to allow good content to float to the surface and low-quality content to sink. The general methods are nothing more than the following categories.

1. Single content incentive artifact - like

This type of incentive method is well known to everyone. It includes not only likes, but also hearts, collections, reads, replies, and thumbs-up. (The number of likes and readings on Zhihu and WeChat public accounts) This method is the most direct way for content producers to experience a sense of accomplishment.

2. Exposure Rewards

The platform’s rankings, or recommendations in manually recommended banners and other locations, etc. I produced high-quality content, and you recommended it. I gained more fans and friends on the platform. So next time, in order to attract more fans, I will produce more high-quality content. I have so many fans on this platform who like the content I produce, and I will not leave this platform easily. As a fan, I see that there are things and people that interest me on this platform. I have content to watch, people to admire, and friends to talk to. I will definitely not leave this platform easily.

3. Rankings

Some platforms artificially set up certain rankings and display rankings on a daily or weekly basis. In order to be on the rankings, users naturally have to produce high-quality content. A typical operation is live streaming.

Incentives can be divided into short-term and long-term. The short-term one encourages users to produce high-quality content every time, while the long-term one allows users to maintain their creative enthusiasm for a longer period of time.

In the UGC ecosystem, if users only rely on the content provided by the platform to satisfy themselves spiritually, they will not be able to maintain their enthusiasm for a long time, and it will naturally be difficult for the platform to maintain a healthy ecosystem.

A good ecosystem should be one in which people are not only connected but also have interests connected with each other. This is one of the strongest relationships in modern society. Therefore, a UGC platform must master the channel resources to help users rise and help users with the potential to rise.

For example, if an independent singer provides music content on a platform, if the platform can help the singer gain a large number of fans and successfully transform into a singer who releases albums, and even ultimately succeed in commercialization, the relationship between the singer and the platform will be more stable and long-term. To achieve this, if the platform itself has the resources of China's largest record company, then this will be much easier to accomplish.

3. How to distribute content

After users produce content, how to accurately distribute it to corresponding users is also a very important issue. This not only allows consumer users to easily find the content they want, but also helps producer users open up sales channels and increase their enthusiasm for creation and production.

The distribution method of public WeChat accounts is relatively backward, and is only distributed by fans. Followers share it in their circle of friends or groups, which leads to secondary dissemination. This distribution method is basically based on relationships among acquaintances and friends, and the scope of dissemination is relatively limited. Toutiao adopts recommendation-based distribution. After users produce content, they label it and the machine recommends the content to a group of users. If the click-through rate is high , the machine will make a second recommendation. This recommendation method breaks through the fan limit and has a wider dissemination.

The distribution of UGC content is an important topic. Currently, some UGC platforms generally use machine algorithms, topics, groups, etc. to distribute content. There are some methods as follows:

1. Special topics: The topic banner at the top of the comment channel, as well as the self-made columns in the comment planning (mentioned above), are planned and completed by the official editor;
2. Ranking: Today's ranking of the comment channel allows you to see the posts with the most comments that day, which are automatically presented by big data crawling;
3. Popular: You can see recent interesting comments through the information flow of the comment channel, which is also automatically presented by big data crawling;
4. Distribution based on relationship chain: In "My Followers", you can see the follow-up dynamics of the users you follow, and you can also enable system push of follow-up messages;
5. Based on the two micro-communication channels of the exclusive follow-up planning column: the average reading volume of WeChat is 100+, the "latest push" in the menu bar remains at the content of March 2016, and the interaction on Weibo is also capped at ten digits. It is obvious that there is a lack of a separate manager, and it only serves as a supplementary channel outside of the terminal. What is puzzling is that the articles published by the app are still directing traffic to it every day.

The author of this article @Simon Ju was compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

Product promotion services: APP promotion services Advertising platform Longyou Century