How to guide users to create content from 0 to 1?

1. What did Lukou Community do from 0 to 1?

Lukou App is a community for women to share their shopping experiences, which is somewhat similar to Xiaohongshu . When we first started to build this community, we spent three months at stage zero. This team focuses on strong operations , so what did we do in the zero stage?

1. Seed user cultivation (stage 0)

The earliest PC version community did not have any users, so what should we first consider is the value of the community? Who should the user be? Where are you from? If it is a shopping sharing community for women, then the users are either first-tier women or second- or third-tier users. We try to invite these users to the community through different channels to participate in the zero stage.

At the beginning, the community had no users and no posts. The team had only three founders. Each girl was thinking about what her interests and hobbies were. Each person was divided into a category, and each person had 100 aliases under this category. We set up a pyramid with these 100 fake accounts. What is the personality of the fake account at the top of the pyramid, how many posts should be made, and what tone of voice should be used in replies. What kind of user is the mid-level persona and which city is he from? Everyone has a table to maintain users, which takes one to two months. After dividing the interests into categories, search for knowledge fragments on Baidu or Google , and add a personality to make the top account as real as a big V.

Back to App construction, after each operator has 100 fake accounts, the rhythm can be built like this within 1 month: the top fake accounts will post the content first in the first three days. The content at that time is text and pictures, and there are also Taobao links. The tone of voice should follow the character's setting. For example, the speaking style of a white-collar worker from Shanghai may be a little arrogant. We created the account for a month and then invited users in.

What kind of users should be invited? After trying Douban , Weibo, and Tieba, I found that Weibo users would be more suitable for the Lukou community. Because Weibo users have a strong sense of participation. Taobao has also carried out refined operations in this area, and every detail and data must be paid attention to . Only when stage zero is done well, the community can slowly exit the stage without interfering in the operations. So the zero stage is very important.

2. Cultivating high-quality content (Phase 0-1)

From the zero to one stage, mid-level users from various channels such as Weibo and Douban came in. After they come in, how can we get users to interact? Douban users love to write but not to interact. We use aliases to make them feel the community’s favorability, gradually trust the community, and slowly demonstrate their friendliness. Weibo users are good at writing fragmented things, so we will use small accounts to encourage them in the user's way, or suggest that if the post can be longer and shared more often, they will like to read it more.

Different channels have different refined operations of UGC , including comments, posts, replies, etc.

At this time, it is necessary to build the community’s own KOL . For example, if a user wants to be famous but has no chance, the community dividend can now push him and make him feel that there is a steady stream of community traffic . This person will then be happy to operate himself. Why not promote the big Weibo accounts that attract traffic? Because they have already experienced the feeling of becoming an Internet celebrity . At this time, when promoting the KOL of the community, Weibo users will feel that apart from having more fans on Weibo, their level is not better than that of the people in this community, so their vision and defensiveness will gradually lower. This is a psychological tug-of-war.

As the number of users grows, we need to introduce community rules to solve existing problems in the community. For example, if there are small advertisements or people are selling things for cash, we can formulate some rules to address these phenomena and slowly bring about changes. If there are KOLs, opinions on rule-making can be extracted from different people.

The stage from zero to one is the stage of cultivating high-quality content . The small vests in operation, especially the top vests, can slowly exit the stage. When a new KOL emerges, we need to focus on discovering and activating mid-level and bottom-level UGC users.

3. Scalable thinking (stable development stage)

When the user base reaches a certain scale, the product needs to be combined with early verification results to package the community value. When different users come in, can the content satisfy them, what do the users gain here, and what can they become in the future.

At the same time, top users prefer to monetize quickly, and it is difficult for them to wait until they have helped build the community to a certain pace before monetizing. Therefore, the community should consider this issue for top users in the early stages, which can be equivalent to special benefits. Of course, if some top users are not suitable in the early stage, but have more traffic in their hands, then we should consider how to renew these groups in a very natural way to inject new blood and quickly integrate into the community.

Phase 0: Solve the UGC structure model and get the community running

The structural model of UGC is the content body of the community. We focus half of our energy on building the main content and half on interaction. The methods of operating early communities written by most people are similar, the biggest difference lies in the attention to details and refined operations. This includes how many pseudonyms should be used to reply to a post, whether it is a machine reply or how to do it. If you find that this user is very good and you want to retain him, you will trigger 500 fake accounts. You will know what to say, what time to say it, and which fake accounts to reply to, all of which are done in a planned and rhythmic manner.

In creating the community's tone, small-scale testing and adjustments based on data feedback can be used. For example, in order to encourage users to click to view the content of the square, the operation randomly selects some users and sends them private messages. The recommendation method of the private message content and the copywriting are cute or more personalized, which will increase the user's desire to click.

We have a pyramid model. At the zero stage, the top is our own staff, the middle users are invited from Weibo or Douban, and the bottom users come from precise promotion channels . We compared it with Weibo. The top of the pyramid structure of Weibo's UGC content production has more than 1 million fans, which is very influential, and some even have WeChat public accounts. However, the structural model of Lukou does not match that of Weibo's top users, so there is no need to compete with them for top users.

Therefore, after thinking for a while, we decided to give up introducing Weibo celebrities. They leave the community too quickly and their loyalty is almost zero. On the contrary, under our silent and subtle vest operation, Weibo's mid-level users are jubilant and contribute a lot of content to the community like chicken blood. This enthusiasm also radiates to more users. This is an example of a healthy UGC structure.

The purpose of refined operations is to guide UGC users at every stage, from posting to interaction, to complete the creation of early community tone and continue these tones.

Phase 0-1: Verify UGC and product value

The stage from zero to one at the intersection is to verify whether UGC can be successful and whether users can publish and create content according to the operation rhythm. I think it is better to think about one question instead of using too much data to verify the success of a community: "How do we retain a user?" To get this answer, we have done a lot of invisible and visible surveys, and the users' answers have gradually made us understand that this is what our user portrait is like, and we just need to serve this group of people well.

Although the product value is different from what we set at the beginning, since the users' "answers" after stage 0 tell us that this community is what they like and rely on, the next step is to think about how to get more users to create content when we scale up.

In this session, I used a real example to illustrate that the success of the community's Phase 0 will affect the atmosphere of the community in the next few years: When sharing this PPT, I logged into the intersection again. If a community has not been logged in for two years, there are still messages from users two years ago, saying that they are still thinking about you. This is actually the community retaining users, and their feelings, all their concerns, and all their memories are left in this community.

2. Why don’t users create content?

Failure Case - Vivavideo American Community

Xiaoying has about 500 million tool download users worldwide, and it has been working on transforming tools into communities since 2014. The more famous short video platforms in China now are Kuaishou and Douyin , but at that time, Xiaoying’s daily active users and tool downloads were already very large, and it was a community in the large-scale operation stage.

It can be said that Xiaoying was lying on a gold mountain of traffic when it was transforming its community and had no shortage of traffic. However, after the US community was launched in February, the data showed that the number of views continued to decline from March to the entire June, while the number of tool downloads remained good. Therefore, converting tools into communities is inherently more difficult than directly building a community, and the cold start should be more refined.

Why is it more difficult to transform tools into communities? Because users come for the tools and leave after using them, they don’t subconsciously want to post content here. When users open the App to complete their needs in the editing scene, the first thing they think about is to quickly share it in the chat group or on FB. Occasionally, he opens the community tab, but the current content packaging fails to attract him quickly, there is no community atmosphere, and more importantly, there is no template-based gameplay (such as the lip-syncing of Xiaokaxiu , which is a template-based gameplay). This will result in the conversion rate of tool users to community users remaining stable and low, and the proportion of community posts remaining stable and low.

Another example: Xiaoying’s Chinese community has been running for two years. The operation often initiates activities and themes, but there is not much user participation. What is the reason? Is it because the activity is not attractive, or is it because the user group is wrong? Actually, it is not. We found that even if users don’t do anything, the community will still be good and users will come to check out the content because it is crawled. But the operations seem to have no existence and the data will not be particularly good.

This is a clear example of not doing a good job in the early stage of stage 0 operations and lacking community tone.

3. What role does “tonality” play in guiding users to create content?

The community always talks about tonality, what is tonality? From the perspective of atmosphere, it means that a culture has been formed. For example, the barrage culture of Bilibili . When watching funny videos, you are not just laughing alone. It feels like you are with good friends and have the same complaints. Many video websites have also launched the barrage function, but it will only become a platform function rather than a culture. For example, when users on Youku post comments, they all curse at others. Is it because they are different people? The person may be the same person, but the attributes change across platforms.

If explained from the perspective of "people", it can refer to a group of people. Bilibili has set the cultural tone for the two-dimensional group, so when users cross platforms to Bilibili, the character attributes will adhere to the tone of the Bilibili community. People like Kuaishou are also doing very well. They have found their space and gathered young people from fifth-tier cities. A community is a group of people who defend a culture. We always visualize it as a platform or something else. In fact, a company is also a community. People with similar interests will become a community with their own tone.

The same principle applies to teams and communities. A community is a group of people who maintain their content. People and content are the same: people are content and content is people. If the tone is formed in the early stage, users will naturally join this content community.

Overall rhythm: collect first and then release

The rhythm of the early community is to collect first and then release, first to form a small and precise group, focus on the early cultivation of community concentration, and establish an ecology. After the community tone is established, it will be expanded in a rhythmic manner, and then released step by step.

Content operation rhythm: from high to low

At any stage of the early cold start, it is necessary to carry out refined operations and pay attention to details. The operation rhythm of the content part should start with the aspects of relatively higher content quality. Users have their own experience, insights and aesthetics. First invite these users in, then slowly expand to enrich the community content. But it should be noted here that user operations should focus on strong connections and strong maintenance, that is, guiding users' UGC and guiding the level of content production.

To sum up simply, in the early cold start phase, more verification work is done. After achieving scale and becoming overall stable, we will move towards our ultimate goal. Many early stage operators don’t think much about the ultimate goal. So after taking over a community, how do you make it a good one? Think clearly about what the user group is, what the users can produce, what value they create, and what value they can obtain here. Once this ultimate goal is determined, we can continue to move forward at the pace of the team.

4. Some suggestions for operators

0 to 2 years : Find your talents and interests through work.

2 to 4 years : Improve your project promotion capabilities and broaden your horizons.

3 to 5 years : If the salary offered by the market is not 5-6 times the previous level, you need to consider whether to continue in this position or industry, and whether there are other better aspects worth doing.

More than 5 years : Maintain your professionalism, and repeatedly train and improve your professionalism.