Social media, 8 tips to help you master social media operations

In recent years, with the rise of major online platforms, self-media has also prospered and developed. However, after explosive growth in the past one or two years, self-media has reached a deadlock. Everyone is looking for a way out for the future of self-media, especially self-media people, who are extremely anxious.

As we all know, there are two obstacles that restrict the development of self-media:

One is the issue of content sustainability. How to continuously produce popular and high-quality content should be a common problem faced by all self-media people.
The second is the issue of traffic monetization. Self-media people work hard to produce high-quality content and attract a group of fans, but they do not have an effective way to monetize their efforts.

These two major obstacles naturally exist in self-media. Therefore, if we continue to follow the old path of self-media, it will be an unsolvable problem.

Nowadays, communities and community economy have been widely recognized, and self-media with their own fan halo are naturally endowed with the advantage of community. Therefore, I believe that self-media people should take the initiative to seize opportunities, upgrade self-media to social media , and obtain continuous content production and monetization capabilities. This is the best way out.

Content Production

1. Social media solves the problem of who to produce for

We know that the first thing to be clear about content production is who it is produced for, and this is precisely the weak point of self-media. Self-media often has a center that produces content, while fans consume the content in a one-way manner, that is, one writes and the other reads, and there is a lack of interaction and feedback between the two.

2. Social media solves the problem of how to produce

As mentioned before, the biggest problem for self-media is how to ensure the continuity of content production. As long as it is a self-media, it will face the problem of content depletion. Because the content of self-media is mainly produced by the center, it follows the PGC route. No matter how talented or productive a center is, there will always be a moment when it runs out of steam. Therefore, the model of self-media relying solely on central content production is unsustainable.

Social media is different. It follows the "PGC+ UGC " route: the content is jointly created by community members, and the generated content is processed and organized before being presented in the form of high-quality PGC content. Compared with self-media, social media, a way of producing content by group members, solves two problems:

(1) The issue of sustainability of content production. The wisdom of the group is infinite. Since the content is produced by group members together, there is no need to worry about content exhaustion.
(2) The problem of aesthetic fatigue in content consumption. There is a basic psychological law that when a person has actively participated in something, he is less likely to become aesthetically fatigued by the results produced.

Obviously, the content produced by social media has its own wisdom and sweat. Will you still get tired of it? As the saying goes, have loved, have tried, even if it is a pile of shit, it is the result of your hard work and careful defecation.

Content dissemination

We know that the operating model of self-media is simple, with only the processes of production (such as writing) and dissemination (such as watching). This leads to its single dissemination channel , and it can only rely on certain platforms to maintain a certain amount of dissemination. Once it leaves a platform or the platform's activity decreases, the high-quality content it produces cannot be effectively disseminated.

In addition, since self-media do not have a community to retain users and lack an effective monetization model, they often attach great importance to content copyright. For example, many self-media people prohibit other organizations and media from reprinting their content, because this will inevitably disperse the traffic of the self-media itself. For self-media people who rely on traffic to sell advertisements to make money, this is tantamount to stealing their jobs.

From the above two points we can see that self-media is limited in content dissemination, and is unable to form full-network dissemination. Let’s look at social media.

The content of social media is the entrance to traffic, and the community is the sediment of traffic. What's the meaning? That is, the content produced by social media can be effectively disseminated among group members without having to rely solely on other media platforms. The production of its content is completed by group members together, and the dissemination of content is also completed among group members. The group members of social media are fans, that is, users.

What is even more valuable is that social media can spread content across the entire network, unlike self-media which must stick to content in order to monetize. Therefore, as long as the source is indicated, the content on social media is very welcome to be spread by others, so it can easily be spread throughout the entire network.

For example, the super community Luoji Siwei , because Youku prevented it from adding advertisements, it turned to accumulating users to form a community. Nowadays, as long as Luoji Siwei produces content, it can be disseminated efficiently and in large quantities within its community. Even when selling things, members of its community are vying for it. This is the charm of social media in content dissemination.

User sedimentation

Compared with self-media, social media has adopted a more sustainable and effective approach in content production and dissemination. However, the most essential difference between social media and self-media is not this, but user sedimentation. This is the core of social media.

In self-media, content is the core of everything. It is the purpose of self-media and the basis of its value. Self-media needs to rely on content to realize its value. Therefore, since self-media has no concept of community, they naturally don’t care about user retention.

In social media, content is just a means. It is a tool to attract users and build communities. The community is the core value. Social media attracts users through content and then filters users through rules.

Therefore, the users selected by the community through a set of rules are often its own users and high-quality users. This is the basic premise and guarantee for the future production of community content and commercial monetization around the community.

For many paid communities that operate well, charging fees is a threshold. For example, the membership fee of Li Xiaolai’s “Growing Together” community has reached 7,000 yuan; and the membership fee of ScalersTalk’s mutual learning community requires each person to pay 1,000 yuan to join the group, and then they all stick to and learn one thing together and grow together.

Commercialization

The single operating model of self-media not only limits the dissemination of its content, but also leads to a single monetization model (selling advertisements). However, since social media has broken away from its dependence on content monetization, its business model is often ecological and diverse.

For example, if MINI Cooper wants to advertise, it can provide the right to use two MINI Coopers and organize a lucky draw in a community. The winner will get the right to use the MINI Cooper for one year. This will definitely inspire group members to spontaneously help promote the car.

When our mindset changes, the infinite possibilities of social media in terms of business models become apparent:

First of all, community members should be the seeds of the community. Group members are the first batch of seed users of community content and products. They watch and try out the products, give feedback, and even directly participate in the creation. They then conduct word-of-mouth publicity to the outside world and spread the community brand. And this will be invaluable for brand development.

Secondly, community members can jointly create content and products and “charge external fees”. Whether it is e-commerce , advertising, or membership fees, they are essentially "internal charges", that is, charging fees to group members. Since the content of social media is jointly produced by group members, we can naturally think of another monetization model - "charging external fees", that is, the community owner and group members jointly create content and products, and monetize them outside the community.

In general, social media adopts the "PGC+UGC" model in content production. In terms of content dissemination, it involves both group member dissemination and network-wide dissemination. It also pays more attention to user sedimentation, and has unlimited possibilities for commercial monetization. Therefore, we can see that social media will be the best way out for self-media.

Among all operational branches, the operation of communities or social groups is relatively unique, because their operations need to consider both "relationships" and "content" at the same time, and their growth and expansion also have their own unique logic.

The growth path of a community/social group from scratch to maturity has the following key nodes: ① Initialization; ② Establishment of trust and value; ③ Decentralization, the construction of a network of relationships between community members; ④ "Self-growth" of the community.

Creation and Initialization

The most important thing for the initialization of a community is to find a theme. A community or group exists based on a specific theme, and communication and interaction between members often revolve around this theme.

For a community/society, a good theme can either bring a special feeling (such as fun and resonance) or bring clear value recognition, that is, let users know what they can get here and how they should participate.

Generally speaking, the common way to acquire initial users is to attract acquaintances around you, or to conduct some targeted channel promotion based on the community's positioning.

Trust and value establishment

This is a link that almost all community/ community operators need to break through.

When you first join a group, unless the group owner has great influence, almost all users will have the mentality of "let's see what's here first". Whether you can break this wait-and-see mentality, establish a sense of trust between the community/group and users, and let users have clear value demands and dependence on the community/group will determine whether this community/group can become active.

Trust usually arises when the community provides services and rewards that exceed user expectations. For example, friends who joined an operations learning group originally just to take a look, turned out to be very useful to them by the various useful information posted by the group owner every day. One day, they even successfully completed a small project by applying the useful information shared by the group owner.

To put it bluntly, this process is the process from "not sure what I can get here" to clearly knowing "what value can be provided to me here". After this step, users who were originally just watching began to be willing to take more actions in the community, such as speaking, asking questions and complaining.

Of course, everything has its pros and cons. With a sense of trust and value, users will also begin to have expectations for the community. As the saying goes, the deeper the love, the deeper the hate. If their expectations continue to be unmet, these users may become angry or even turn against the community.

Decentralization of the community

By the second step, the interpersonal network of the community/social group should be highly centered on the community founder, administrator or star user, which means a greater risk - the survival and development of the community will depend on a few people. Once these people are overwhelmed, or once star users leave, the community will likely be destroyed. In fact, such scenarios have occurred repeatedly in the development history of many communities.

To solve this problem, decentralization is needed to turn a highly centralized network into an almost decentralized network. The difference between the two is explained through the following two pictures.

It can be clearly seen from the above two figures that the network in Figure a is completely dependent on node A. If node A disappears or crashes, the entire network will disappear completely. In Figure b, even though A is still an important central node, since the connections between other nodes have been fully established, even if node A is removed from the network, the entire network can still maintain a high degree of closeness and continue to exist. Even if multiple nodes collapse, the network still exists.

Basically, this is why communities need to be “decentralized”. There are two common decentralization routines:

The first is to cultivate and discover followers. Assuming that your community has universal values ​​that can be recognized by everyone and has established trust with the user group, usually during this period, some activists who recognize your values ​​and ideas will gradually emerge, and they have a strong enthusiasm and commitment to the community. You need to observe, encourage and discover them to help you do many things in the community. When the original one center becomes multiple centers, the vitality and sustainability of the community will be strengthened at the same time.

The second is to help build relationships between users in the community through guidance. The essence of a community is an information relationship network composed of many individuals, and QQ groups, Douban groups, forums, etc. are just carriers of this network. As shown in Figures a and b above, a community can only be truly formed when many individuals in an organization are connected to each other. The ways to facilitate users to build relationships mainly rely on discussion interactions and common behaviors.

The “self-growth” of the community

When a diversified relationship chain is established in the community, a community will have the ability to "self-grow". At this time, you will find that you can no longer fully control the community. Many events, topics and relationships will occur naturally in the community. This is also the state that community operators most hope to see appear and happen in the community.

At this stage, what operators should do is to draw boundaries or establish certain rules of the game for the community's behavior and speech based on the community's common values. Within the rules, everyone can discuss and interact completely freely. At this point, the community has basically entered a mature state. After that, the test of operation is how long the community can maintain its maturity and active state. Here are the following points to consider:

1. When a large amount of UGC is generated, how to screen out high-quality content for secondary dissemination and more accurate push.
2. How to sort out a content framework and system based on UGC to help and guide the scattered UGC content to be more holistic, structured, and sticky.
3. How to operate some activities within the community well, and even turn some activities into regular activities or events.
4. The final test for operations is how to expand the topics that the community can carry and increase the number of potential users by extending the topics. For example, the development of Zhihu is a typical example. Zhihu, which initially focused only on Internet entrepreneurship topics, now covers a wide range of topics.

Compared with the first three stages, the last stage of community growth is relatively better for operators, because there is more to play and they do not have to bear the pressure of "success or death" like in the first three stages.

It is conceivable that in the future there will be countless communities with a variety of ecosystems, and everyone can join multiple communities.

Self-media may have passed its golden age, and social media will be a new direction to create a sense of superiority for users. This will bring huge opportunities to self-media people. When people flock to social media, that’s when the traffic dividend explodes.