4 keywords to ignite social media marketing, everything you don’t know is here!

During our practice, we found that many companies’ so-called social marketing ultimately had no sales power or results. For example, they learned how to use Weibo and WeChat public accounts, but did not achieve their business goals.

So what is the logic behind it?

Weibo, WeChat, short videos , etc. are like our social marketing arsenal. It only takes a short time to learn some of the operations, but there is a lack of a systematic approach on how to detonate them more effectively.

To this end, I have turned the social marketing approach in 2018 and for a considerable period of time to come into four "Cs":

Context

Community

Content

Connections

The so-called new 4C rule is that we can target specific communities (Community) in appropriate scenarios (Context), and use disseminative content (Content) or topics to quickly spread and disseminate connections between people (Connections) along their social relationship networks, thereby achieving effective communication and value.

Scenario thinking is a very important node in igniting the community.

People often ask me that the number of readers of their WeChat public accounts has always varied between 30-50, and they want to achieve exponential growth.

I would say: As long as you master the scenario thinking, it is very possible to explode 100,000+.

If there is no difference between its content published today and three months later, it means that it is not situational or timely. In fact, content is king is not a concept, but a foundation. However, if you want to detonate the community, you need a scenario, because in this way it is more likely and more effective to accurately influence specific customer groups and get deep into their hearts.

This scene is the best time when everyone is paying attention.

For example, Durex ’s marketing case of “Rainy Day” is based on a scene where it rains heavily before getting off work. At that time, active users on Weibo were all paying attention to how to get home after get off work. Seizing the opportunity and integrating the concept of entertainment marketing was a great way to attract the attention of netizens. It was a very smart marketing move.

In the era of mobile Internet , a few years ago, BAT was still clamoring for platform competition, traffic competition and entrance competition every day. In fact, we can see that at the product level, they are also shifting from traffic competition to scenario competition. Products have become "unimportant". What is more important is the scenario in which users use your product.

If your product has no consumption scenarios, purchasing scenarios, or usage scenarios, it will be very dangerous in the future and will not have its specific commercial value.

With the development of artificial intelligence and big data , we are entering an era of scene perception, which can perceive the personal status of different groups in specific scenes: time, place, what they are doing, how they feel, whether they have such specific needs...

If we want to ignite a community or conduct precision marketing, we need to perceive the specific scenario and then provide corresponding services.

In addition, from the perspective of the scene, it includes three major dimensions: time dimension, location dimension, consumer needs, emotions and topics that constitute such a scene in the new space.

I usually don’t publish an article immediately after writing it. I think that would be rather self-centered and I should integrate the content and scenario.

I often tell my assistant that after writing an article, we should wait for the right opportunity, and not publish it if there is no opportunity.

I once wrote an article about the competition story, covering the seven Internet wars. If it was just an interpretation of the Internet war case, it would not have any momentum and its dissemination would be limited, so it was not published at that time. I asked my assistant to prepare for the publication only after the data dispute between Alibaba and SF Express occurred. Unfortunately, due to the intervention of the government, the two parties quickly "made peace". The dimension of the scenario being leveraged was not long enough, which also had a certain impact on the effectiveness of the article. You can only continue to wait for some commercial competition to happen, which is how you can interpret the scene to accurately deliver your content to the people you want to influence.

If your competitor doesn't have a social mindset, you can just forget about him. Without community thinking and organization, the so-called C2M, C2B, S2B, O2O , etc. are all empty. You can let manufacturing companies provide corresponding products based on the needs of users in the community.

When making a dialectical analysis of the community business model , I would think that for a long time in the past, China’s marketing and business can be understood as a “pig-killing model.” The users of this model mainly use infertility, vitiligo, floor tiles, beauty salons, English training institutions, etc. to lure users in by offering various small favors and then start cutting the flesh.

Now that consumption is upgrading, users are becoming smarter and can see through those deceptive tricks in minutes.

This "pig-killing model" of the community has turned to the "fish-raising model" , which means truly managing your user assets. First raise the fish, and then charge admission. Those who are interested can come to watch, or experience the fun from killing fish to eating fish.

In fact, this only extends the "pig-killing mode" relatively from the dimension of philosophical time. For example, Xiaohongshu and Luoji Siwei all follow this model. They first use content to build up the community, and then increase customer value by selling other commercial products, ultimately realizing commercial value.

The reason why communities die is mainly because their social network structure is unreasonable. If a community only operates around one or two core nodes, from the perspective of network sociology, its structure and density are relatively concentrated, making it unstable.

To this end, when building WeChat groups and community connections, we must consciously construct the network structure, using large central nodes and some auxiliary nodes to connect. Increasing the degree of connectivity between different nodes can build a better foundation for the community structure, so that the community has the potential to go further.

In addition, managing a community means managing topics. The death of a community is due to the exhaustion of topics, and some adjustments need to be made to the topic setting and interaction methods of the community.

After returning from the United States, Xiaomi's Li Wanqiang once said when talking about the community that they are actively setting up an independent community content production team, mainly targeting Bilibili and others, to create customized communities for two-dimensional friends. In fact, if we want to ignite the community and build a solid community business, we must return to the user base, return to anthropology, sociology and social psychology.

In the era of mass communication, people rely more on purchasing various media to spread their influence. In the era of social communication, the driving force of the commercial brand marketing market on the Internet is content.

Michelin Restaurant is a very classic content marketing case, which perfectly illustrates the evolution of content and its value.

In 1900, Michelin launched the Michelin Guide, a 400-page guide with its iconic red cover. 35,000 copies were first distributed free of charge. The original intention was to assist drivers in properly maintaining their vehicles, selling more tires, and finding comfortable accommodation.

It did work in the beginning, and after years of development, as the content became more and more popular among settled users and drivers, it was finally spun off from Michelin and became a new community business in the vertical field of food in the world. It can be said to be a treasure in the field of food reviews.

In the social era, every company is a content company. We can understand commercial value as content, which is actually the grenade and influence that detonates the community. In other words, if the scenario is more precise, you need to understand your user base.

However, how to obtain sales orders and commercial value often depends on content. It is like a virus. When it is placed on the connection of social relationship network, it can self-organize and automatically search paths to influence specific groups of people. This is the charm of content and the core competitiveness of future enterprises.

Tencent defines itself as a connector . The academic support and solid content foundation behind the connection thinking mainly come from sociology. Its starting point is to connect the social relationship networks between people and present them through the network and data-based maps. Therefore, the dissemination in the community era is to let the content go along the social relationship network.

On the night of April 17, 1775 (the eve of the American Revolutionary War), two men drove from the suburbs of Boston to Lexington along two different routes. Along the way, they transmitted intelligence of the urgent threat to an area that was about to be attacked by British troops.

The two night drivers were Paul Revere and William Dawes. They marched to Concord, seizing guns and ammunition from the colonial army. Both Revere and Dawes did their best to spread the news to as many towns as possible along their routes.

News of Revere spread like wildfire throughout communities including Charleston and Medford. Word of Dawes did not spread like wildfire, and in towns like Waltham, even the leaders of the local militia were not alerted to the British move.

Why is there such a difference in the reception of the same message?

Revere's success was due to his extensive network of strategic connections, while Dawes had no similar network.

Revere knew a lot of people, and in every town he came to, he knew exactly which door to knock on, who was the leader of the local militia, and who was the top person in the town. Not only Revere, but leaders of these towns also personally sent people to drive to nearby areas to announce the threat alerts. Thus, Revere's news spread quickly throughout the area, while Dawes's news did not spread.

The networks of relationships in which we are embedded have a profound impact on the success or failure of the activities we carry out.

Regarding connections, I divide them into four types: one is based on content, two is based on topics, three is based on identity, and four is based on actions.

The key is how we can create connections and utilize connections, and stimulate the connection of social networks like the Ice Bucket Challenge. It cannot be the connection between offline physical bodies and the social network graph in cyberspace. Only by making the connection more effectively and putting the content into specific social network nodes can we make the community social network move, and there will be a great possibility of detonating the community.

This 4C method of detonating the community can help to better build models and method systems, that is, to find the specific group of people you want to influence in the right scenario, create viral content based on your understanding of the cultural structure of the community, and then amplify the social network connections of this group of people, and finally detonate the community.