Taking Knowledge Planet as an example, we will teach you how to operate and promote a paid community

Community operation is a part of user operation in the operation module. Compared with other user operation tasks such as collecting user suggestions, answering questions, and releasing information, community operation is a little more complicated. Because this is a two-way job with instant feedback, every move of the operation will get real-time feedback from users. If there is not much feedback, it will become a dead group. If the feedback deviates from the direction, it will cause operational accidents.

Even if the community is well operated, it cannot escape the curse of the group's life cycle. Communities that can operate for a long time need to establish a set of rules. The establishment of these rules requires time and continuous guidance of operations.

Community operation itself is difficult, and the operation of a paid community is even more difficult. We know that there is a payment rate in products. For example, the payment rate of games is around 1%, which means that among 100 people who play the game, only 1 person will spend money to play the game.

Similarly, the proportion of users who will pay to join a group is also very low. These people are very smart and have their own calculations about cost-effectiveness and input-output, and they have higher requirements. How to meet the needs of these users and build a sustainably operated paid community is the focus of this chapter.

This chapter takes "Knowledge Planet" as an example to analyze how to operate and promote a paid community from the following four modules:

1. Introduction to paid communities

2. Ideas for Creating Paid Communities

3. Preparation work for building a community

4. Promotion Channels

Part 1 Introduction to Paid Communities

What are paid communities?

Explanation in one sentence: Groups or circles that require payment to join are called paid communities. Different from free groups, such as QQ groups, where you can join as long as you pass the verification, a small number of groups require payment, with the amount ranging from a few yuan to more than ten yuan.

What forms of paid communities are there?

Here we will only talk about the two most common ones. One is the WeChat group , a circle created by the KOL himself. Group members are not allowed to invite others in. Members must pay a fee to the group owner before they can enter. The amount is generally around a few hundred yuan, depending on the influence of the KOL. The other is Knowledge Planet, the product that this chapter focuses on. It can create high-quality communities. Its functions focus on knowledge accumulation, member management, and knowledge monetization. Because it is an APP for communities, it has more advantages than WeChat groups in terms of community functions.

Why choose Knowledge Planet?

When comparing the functions between WeChat groups and Knowledge Planet, I found that each has its own advantages and disadvantages. In terms of ease of use, WeChat groups have more advantages. When users use WeChat, they can communicate and learn knowledge with group members. The disadvantage is that the information cannot be accumulated. Once there is too much information, it is impossible to find the desired information, which is not conducive to the accumulation of knowledge.

When using Knowledge Planet, you need to download the APP, or you can follow the official account . The usage experience in the official account is average. If you use the APP, the experience can score more than 90 points. The advantage of Knowledge Planet is that it can accumulate knowledge. The published articles, cases, and questions and answers can be saved, which is a bit similar to Tieba . Adding the like and praise functions will also help motivate group members to produce more. Considering various factors, we finally decided to choose "Knowledge Planet" as the carrier for precipitating knowledge.

One thing needs to be clarified, when users pay to join a planet, the planet's development company will take a 5% commission.

Why do we want to create Knowledge Planet?

Since the operation of the "Tiger Talks about Operations" public account in May this year, an average of one original article has been produced every week. The content is mainly operational knowledge , plus some workplace insights, and has accumulated a lot of fans. The disadvantage of public accounts is one-way communication, with one person producing content and many people viewing it, and no interaction. There is little knowledge about the user portraits of fans, and there is even a feeling that users cannot be captured.

In order to see fans up close and increase the interactivity among fans, two operation communication groups were created. During the operation, it was found that there was a lot of chatting, but there were also sporadic industry discussions, knowledge sharing and question answering. It seems to be of little help in improving the capabilities and increasing salaries that operators urgently need.

Thus, the idea of ​​creating a high-quality community came into being. After investigating the mainstream gameplay on the market, we finally set our sights on the Knowledge Planet, and the paid circle of "Tips for Promotion" was born.

2. Ideas for Creating Paid Communities

1. Why do users come?

When users join any community, they have a consideration deep in their hearts: cost and return. In addition to the well-known cost of money, there are also costs of time and energy. These implicit and immeasurable costs can all be counted as costs. For example, I have joined 100 QQ groups, but no more than 5 of them are active every day. The other QQ groups are not active because of time constraints.

As for rewards, taking the operations group as an example, in addition to obtaining useful information and solving problems, making connections, getting job recommendations, etc. can all be considered rewards. When users join a community, once the formula: cost ≤ return holds true, user stickiness will increase and the community will become valuable. When users join a community, they value rewards, which can also be called user needs.

2. What are the user needs of paid communities and what are the solutions?

Requirement ①:

Learning knowledge: Users need to enter verification information when joining a QQ group. Most of the verification messages I received were about learning operational knowledge, exchanging operational knowledge, newbies seeking guidance, and junior operators seeking to join. From this, it can be seen that the main purpose of users joining the operational group is to learn. After joining the group, users can learn by reading useful information, being guided by others, completing homework as required, etc.

Solution:

1. Sharing of useful information. As an organizer, I share useful information in the circle. In order to increase the appeal of the information, I will share some information that can only be viewed by paying elsewhere. Establish a sharing mechanism among group members to encourage everyone to share useful information that they think is valuable, such as creating the tag #干货分享#.

2. Online sharing classes. For students who don’t like reading but prefer to listen to teachers’ lectures, courses are shared online. After the sharing, homework is left. The homework can be completed within the circle and can be commented on and accumulated as knowledge.

Requirement ②:

Solving problems: Junior and even senior operators will encounter problems that they cannot solve at work. If they cannot find anyone with knowledge in this area within the company, they will come to the group for help. For example, after the product is put on the Apple shelves, it cannot be searched; how long does it take to get the version number approved; how to analyze the reasons for the decline in daily activity of the product, etc. After the questions are raised, students who know the answers will be happy to help answer them. The deeper the questions are, the lower the chance of getting an effective reply will be.

Solution: Encourage everyone to ask more questions and establish a rule that all questions must be answered. Questions asked within the circle are much more formal than those in the group. When answering, the focus is on resolving the issue rather than just getting by.

Requirement ③:

Recommending jobs and making connections: In the workplace, no matter what level, most people have the need to change jobs or switch jobs. As a vertical community, it will also attract the attention of recruiting companies. In terms of personal connections, everyone hopes to meet industry experts, and learning from them can help them improve themselves quickly.

Solution: Invite headhunters into the circle and share internal referral jobs, because internal referrals are more targeted than submitting applications on recruitment websites. To solve the problem of personal connection, invite KOLs to join.

3. Competitive product reference

Analyze the circles with better operations and see others’ good operation strategies and shortcomings. After analysis, we decided to decentralize, encourage user output, and establish a reward and punishment system.

3. Preparation work for building a community

Opening a circle: The opening of a planet requires an invitation, and finding the operation of a planet will make things more efficient. When creating a planet, the two options of fixed duration and fixed term were confusing. After detailed consultation, I chose fixed duration.

Circle materials: There are 4 options: name, description, icon and price. These four options are the first information that users are exposed to, and they play a decisive role in whether they can be converted into circle users.

Origin of the name: The name should intuitively express the core value of the circle. At the beginning, I named it "Home of Operations", focusing on sharing operational knowledge and covering existing fans. Considering the payment conversion rate and the goal of 1,000 paying users , I felt that it would be difficult to achieve and I had to expand externally to capture more operational users, not my fans. During the promotion, we found that although the operating circle was not small, it was still not enough to support 1,000 paying users based on the users that could be captured. Therefore, we changed the name to "The Art of Promotion" and expanded it to all users who had the need for promotion, thus expanding the scope of target users to infinity.

Writing an introduction: The introduction is an explanation of how to play the circle and further promotes users to join the circle. Before writing the introduction, I drafted two rules for joining the circle, the rule of input and output, and the rule of mutual help. The purpose is to hope that students joining the circle can help those who can be helped, and be helped by others at the same time. This introduction was revised three times before it was finalized. It is still not perfect. The content is a bit long and not suitable for reading. Some circles only have one sentence in their introduction, which is quite arrogant.

Once all the above content is confirmed, the circle is officially created.

4. Promotion Channels

The first three steps are the preparation stage, or in product terms, internal testing. When the circle is created and users are attracted in, the real public testing will begin. The biggest problem for operations in public beta is how to promote it? How to improve retention ?

Promotion channels:

Own channels: official accounts and QQ groups.

In the promotion of public accounts , converting public account fans into paying community users is the most common method.

The entrances to promote public accounts include: tweets, which guide users to join the circle by pushing articles; automatic replies for first follow-ups, which let new fans know about the paid community business. Fans with paying habits will be directly converted into paid community users; menu bar, which adds a description link of the paid community to the menu bar, which is clicked once per user on average; paid community link push, a killer push method that I have only used once. Multiple pushes will affect the user experience .

The promotion effect of QQ groups is not as good as that of official accounts. It can be soft-implanted when chatting, and the user experience will not be too bad.

External channels: Zhihu and other media.

Zhihu has a good traffic-generating effect. Many paid community operations will be released on Zhihu in the form of soft articles or hard advertisements. Since the circle cannot be searched, some people who want to join the circle can only enter through links shared by others on Zhihu. In addition, the target users of the circle are relatively similar to the users of Zhihu, so it is a good choice to direct traffic to Zhihu.

QQ group email is also a channel. You need to join multiple QQ groups because some groups do not have the group email function. When sending group messages, you need to optimize the copy . The conversion rate of the copy can differ by more than 5 points.

The above are some operational ideas for paid communities. During the operation process, the problems are more complicated than imagined. For example, how to improve the activity level, how to ensure that everyone can complete their homework on time, and how to give community members enough rewards are all problems that need to be solved. The operation of a paid community is not a one-day job. Once the community has passed the seed stage and grown, coupled with a virtuous cycle, the value of the paid community will be enormous.

The author of this article @老虎 is 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