B station community operation model!

As a relatively mature community platform in China, Bilibili has a wide range of content categories. The users and creators gathered on the platform have a strong stickiness to the platform, and the platform is developing steadily as a whole. The author of this article shares his analysis of Bilibili's community building. Let's take a look together.

Recently, with the conclusion of the 12th anniversary speech, Bilibili, which has turned twelve years old, seems to be standing at the starting line again. While summarizing the past year, CEO Chen Rui also once again emphasized Bilibili's learning attributes, ACG attributes and unique content ecology in his speech.

In his speech, Chen Rui also stated that the health of the community is more important than scale. In addition, the redefinition of "Bilibili is not a tool, but a community" is enough to illustrate the position of Chen Rui and Bilibili. It is not difficult to see that building a more complete community has become the new focus of Bilibili in the next stage.

1. Building a triangular cycle of communities

What does it take to build a complete community? For Bilibili, the answer is nothing more than three elements: platform content, up-hosts and users.

These three factors are also the key to Bilibili's rapid growth in recent years. Continuous breaking-circle behavior has made the platform content gradually diverse, attracting more and more users from all circles to enter Bilibili, bringing growth and money-making opportunities for content creators and up-masters, promoting the output of high-quality content, and once again enriching the volume of platform content.

The virtuous cycle of these three aspects accelerates the growth of Bilibili. However, although building a community also requires these three points, they need to be deepened to different degrees.

The first is the redefinition at the content level. Overly entertaining content satisfies people’s momentary happiness, but this momentary happiness conflicts with long-term benefits, which will affect the retention of some users and their attitude towards the platform. Moreover, if B wants to build a stable community, relying solely on instantaneous entertainment content will cause the community atmosphere to be somewhat narrow, so B station needs to redefine its own content attributes.

The second is the protection and constraints at the up-master level. Content creators are equivalent to hematopoietic stem cells for content platforms, continuously providing fresh blood for content platforms, so ensuring the survival of up-masters is the core point of content production. After surviving, it is also necessary to restrain the wild growth of up-masters and limit the quality of produced content to ensure the purity of "fresh blood".

The third is the improvement of the sense of belonging at the user level. The difference between a community and a platform is that a platform may only provide necessary services to users, while a community allows users to find a sense of belonging. This requires the platform to respect users from different circles, so that groups from each cultural circle can feel recognized and belonged on Bilibili.

2. Station B needs a community

In short, if Bilibili wants to build a complete community, it needs to take three actions: enhance users' sense of gain through content, ensure content quality through the support of up-masters, and ensure users' sense of belonging by improving the platform atmosphere. And through the cycle of these three aspects, the connectivity of the entire community can be improved.

And Bilibili has also made significant moves in these areas. For example, Bilibili has emphasized its label of "learning platform" more than once in order to redefine the tone of its own content from entertainment attributes to general knowledge attributes; in addition, Bilibili's support plan for up-masters and the application of the Avalon system are also aimed at accelerating the construction of a complete community based on content and community atmosphere.

Of course, the main reason why Bilibili puts so much effort into building the community is that a complete community will bring many benefits to Bilibili.

The first thing is naturally to speed up the triangle cycle again. The triangular cycle of content, creators, and users is the foundation of Bilibili's development, and the establishment of a community will increase users' and creators' recognition of the platform. According to Bilibili's financial report, Bilibili's MAU reached 223 million in the first quarter, and the average monthly active up-hosts on the platform reached 2.2 million, with both figures showing significant growth.

The second is the change in consumer perception. Becoming a community means that Bilibili is not just a tool for watching videos, but more like a cyberspace suitable for multiple users to coexist. Moreover, as the boundary between the online world and the real world becomes increasingly blurred, the importance of online living space is also increasing, and a community also means that users can have a more suitable online space for survival.

Finally, it helps to link up B Station’s overall business. If we expand the concept of community, we can extend it to cities, where there are various components with different functions that work together. For Bilibili, these components are advertising, games, live streaming, e-commerce and other businesses within the platform. The establishment of a complete community will also help the linkage and mutual assistance between different businesses.

3. Boundary Conflicts in the Bilibili Community

It is not difficult to see that building a complete community has many benefits for Bilibili, but nothing is absolute. Although community building has many benefits, the formation of a community often requires Bilibili to resolve certain conflicts, and the source of these conflicts comes from the boundaries of this community.

On the one hand, there is a boundary conflict between different circles of the platform. In fact, this kind of conflict has existed since Bilibili started to break out of its circle. New users are dissatisfied with old users who rely on their seniority and hope to see more content of interest on the platform, while old users are dissatisfied with new users who break the illusion and repeatedly criticize Bilibili for changing.

This kind of conflict still exists in the community. Users in different cultural circles tend to have a higher sense of identity with their own circles, but have a certain hostility towards circles that they do not understand or have conflicts with. This can lead to conflicts between different circles within the community, and this situation can persist for a long time.

On the other hand, there are the border conflicts that Bilibili encountered when expanding outward. This is actually the problem that Bilibili has always faced. From a "small but beautiful" broken website at that time to a large platform with thousands of content categories and business covering all aspects of pan-entertainment, Bilibili's growth has been in a battle with boundaries.

Moreover, as the size of Bilibili gradually increases, the boundaries it will touch will become more and more extensive and comprehensive. The problems it will face in the future will no longer be small issues such as how much the core ACG content will be diluted, but rather the issue of balancing multiple aspects including commercial monetization, content direction, and community atmosphere.

Moreover, the boundary conflicts between these two aspects are, to a certain extent, also essential issues in the development of Bilibili. If it wants to continue to grow, it cannot skip these issues, and the impact of these issues will become greater in the later stages. To put it more seriously, if Bilibili cannot find a good way to weigh the pros and cons and the priorities, it will easily lead to the failure of the primary community that has been polished for 12 years.

4. Community construction needs to slow down

However, although these problems are in front of us, Bilibili cannot rush to solve them. This is mainly because, to build a complete community, the platform needs to slow down and implement it step by step to lay the most critical foundation of the community and ensure that the top of the community will not be shaken in the future.

The reason why we need to slow down the pace of community construction is also closely related to these aspects.

The first level comes from the service objects in the community. Because millions of users are the ultimate service objects of the community, the construction of the community needs to take into account the emotions of the majority of consumers. And because consumer demand is not fixed, the platform needs to make appropriate adjustments to cater to changes in consumer demand, rather than establishing a fixed community in a short period of time.

The second level comes from the community’s service methods. As content platforms develop into communities, the services they can provide to users are often derived from the content, using existing products to provide better services to consumers. Since we want to provide services, we need to have a more detailed understanding of users and improve their experience with better services, which also requires long-term efforts.

The third level comes from the community’s service purpose. The ultimate service goal of the community is to enhance users' sense of belonging and recognition of the platform and the community, which requires the community to work together in many aspects such as content, services, and atmosphere. However, each of these aspects requires long-term investment and management to ultimately achieve certain results, which also shows that community building requires long-term development.

Therefore, whether it is Bilibili, which just turned 12 years old, Zhihu, which was listed not long ago, or even Xiaohongshu, which is on the way, these platforms have certain opportunities to develop into communities through content; but the problems they need to face are also similar, and they all need to slow down and build steadily.

Author: Liu Kuang

Source: liukuang11