Build a community, don’t think that just leaving it there will increase retention and activity!

There are many experts on the Internet who have written many articles about community operations . I have also read many of them and benefited a lot from them. At present, I still consider myself a small learner in this area. Although I have operated traditional BBS and am currently working on the community, there is still a lot to learn about the community. The community is like a complex small society. Although users basically come here for relatively unified needs, there are disputes where there are people. Therefore, I think that building a community will gain more~~

This article is just a reflection and summary made by the author based on his own ideas in work, recording some of his own growth and enriching himself. If it can also make you think, it will be my luck.

Before establishing a community

Understand why you build a community

Many products on the market today have communities, but it is not certain whether every community is active.

Many products build communities because they see similar products have communities, so they want to build one. Or maybe you heard from others how much building a community can improve retention and activity, and you got itchy. I feel like my product’s low retention and activity levels are due to the lack of a community. So we hastily added a community module to the product.

But what exactly should this community do? do what? In fact, I haven't thought it through. I find this idea ridiculous. Especially for new products, a newly born product, which has not even done its main function well, expects an additional function to bring you high retention and activity. Are you kidding me...

In addition, the community established under this idea is basically a function that adds trouble. Firstly, the addition of a module means that technology, design and operations have to take time out to do this part of the work, which relatively disperses work energy; secondly, because communities are generally open, once they are established, there will definitely be people talking in them. If someone says something bad about the product, it will affect other users' understanding of the product.

Want to understand what path the community takes

The community being established is either following the high-end Zhihu route (although many people on Zhihu say it's a bit watered down), or similar to Baidu Tieba. Of course, sometimes it is not up to you to decide what route the community takes. It also depends on what model the users are suitable for and what model they are accustomed to. Maybe you think that only a high-end route like Zhihu can make your product look high-end, but your users don’t buy it at all. If your users are middle school students, maybe they are more suitable for Tieba and more accustomed to Bilibili~~ Bilibili's post-95 users, do you expect them to often write answers of more than a few thousand words...666666

Zhihu has become popular and everyone wants to learn from Zhihu. Become the Zhihu in each field. The community structure is also similar to Zhihu, with the word limit for replies increased to 2,000 words. But have the actual users been taken into consideration? Take middle school students for example, they usually post based on their mood or to address personal issues. They will directly ask what to do if they don’t know math? Just so willful! Of course, they couldn’t answer such a long word. It was a challenge to write on a computer, let alone on a mobile phone.

Therefore, before establishing a community, you must consider the actual situation of your users and think about what route your community should take to best suit your users. This is also the basis for establishing a community framework.

Want to understand what kind of content the community produces

What kind of content to create here refers more to figuring out which user needs the community needs to meet, and then expanding to related fields based on this need, and then screening and determining the main topics of the community. When a community is just established, it is certainly impossible to cover everything, so at the beginning it must focus on topics that best match the community's positioning, and then begin preparatory work.

Therefore, it is also very important to determine the content positioning of the community. If the positioning is not determined, then blindly preparing content will only lead to unclear community positioning, a mixture of all kinds of content, no unified style, and chaos. When you yourself can't even clearly explain your own territory and what it is for, how can you expect others to know what to do there and have fun staying there?

After establishing the community

Now that the community has been established, a series of community rules must be formulated to ensure that the community operates in an orderly manner and plays its role.

1. The establishment of a community must first have a set of rules, which introduces the community as a whole and explains the basic rules.
2. Community content must have a complete set of rules, including what kind of content to post, what kind of content is prohibited, what kind of content is defined as high-quality, what kind of content can be recommended, what kind of content is encouraged, the presentation format and recommendation mechanism of high-quality content, how to ensure the continuous output of high-quality content, etc.
3. There should be a complete set of rules for users, and different users may require different maintenance methods, such as seed users , core users, kol users, managers, etc.

In addition, various situations will arise in the operation of the community, which require operations staff to solve and continuously optimize. For example, how to guide users to post high-quality content, guide users from viewers to participants, encourage users to actively participate in community activities, user recall, etc.

In short, there is so much to talk about in community operations, so much worth studying and learning, and so much touching and fulfilling experience to gain. When your users are willing to tell you everything, when they care about you when you are away for a long time, when they really make progress and grow because of your help.

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This article was compiled and published by (APP Top Promotion) by @纪佳音. Reprinting this article requires the consent of Top Promotion , and please attach the link to this article!