APP operation: Talk about why you shouldn’t use money to incentivize user contributions!

The important role of operations is to establish game rules and create ways to play.

Using money to motivate users to contribute is equivalent to establishing a rule for "buying and selling" based on the number of times, and users will naturally follow this rule to trade with you. You tell users that it costs 1 yuan to post a message. In their eyes, the key point of the matter is the operation of "posting", and each operation costs 1 yuan. Instead of posting because they want to communicate with netizens or have some emotional appeal, under this premise, can you still require users' contributions to be high-quality content? Because the factor of "quality" is completely absent from this rule.

To give a vivid example: a tall, rich and handsome man is looking for a girlfriend. He doesn’t say that he is cultured and well-educated, but instead emphasizes that he has a car, a house and savings. The type of girl he will attract is definitely a materialistic girl who cares about cars and houses. Once you really become boyfriend and girlfriend, it is likely that money will become the important bond to maintain the relationship, rather than common hobbies or something. At that time, the tall, rich and handsome man should not blame the materialistic woman. Why is there so little communication on the spiritual level? It's your fault for showing off your wealth in the first place.

In addition, from the perspective of user needs, contributing content or interacting on your platform is not fundamentally for the purpose of making money. For general user-oriented UGC products, users' needs are nothing more than emotional appeals such as communication, discussion, and making friends based on interests. What operations need to do is to build a good content atmosphere, create a healthy user contribution mechanism and a complete user life cycle to meet users' emotional needs.

However, if money is used to incentivize users to contribute, it will go against the users' own emotional needs and confuse the material and spiritual approaches. The consequence is that it not only fails to meet the needs of users, but also confuses users and affects their perception of the product. I think this is the most fatal thing.

It is not impossible to use money as an incentive, but it is more suitable for contributions of standardized content. For example, Baidu has a crowd-testing platform that packages standardized operations into tasks and assigns them to ordinary users. For example, collect the merchant’s wifi name and mark product categories.

For example, Baidu and Meituan both call on users to collect photos of businesses. Every time a user arrives at a place, they just need to take a photo of the business facade with their mobile phone and upload it, and they will be paid according to the number of photos.

The common feature of these two examples is that they are both crowdsourcing tasks. Although they require human operation, the results are controllable and have clear goals. Just like workers on an assembly line, they have fixed operating procedures and specifications, leaving no room for subjective play, and they are all optional questions with little risk.

Pay according to the number of operations. Since the price of a single operation is low, the overall cost is also controllable.

When it comes to motivating user contributions, many products want to use points and levels, which is a completely thoughtless "lazy method". The starting point for deciding to develop a function must be user demand. The order of thinking is that users have this demand, and it can be met through a certain product or operation method, so we do it. Instead of saying, I want to increase DAU or retention, so I develop a points level function. The order of thinking cannot be reversed.

The idea behind point levels is that users can earn them through contribution, but what’s the point? Generally speaking, this means the exit of the points level, that is, how to consume the points after obtaining them. This means the same thing as money. I must be able to spend it before I have the desire to make money.

There are only two ways to get out of the points level: either material rewards, such as items that can be exchanged, or spiritual incentives, such as display privileges.

• If you choose material rewards, users actually contribute content, gain points and levels, and then exchange them for items, which is still monetary incentives. This is bound to produce a lot of watered-down content. It’s not that users are cunning, but that you use the quantity of contributions as incentives and don’t care about the quality of contributions.
• If you choose spiritual incentives, after users obtain points levels, they will get spiritual incentives such as priority display, titles, privileges, personal brand enhancement, etc. given by the platform. In fact, the points level is just a medium for this pile of spiritual incentives. It is a process result, not what the user ultimately expects to obtain. Instead of doing this, it would be better to directly connect user contributions with spiritual incentives.

For example, Zhihu does not have a point level system. Instead, it encourages user contributions through interactive methods such as likes, thanks, and attention, taking the spiritual approach. On the other hand, assuming Zhihu uses a point level, the result is that you get 5 points for 1 like and 3 points for 1 thank you, and these are added together to get the points you earn. Draw several lines to divide the points into different levels, and then design several icons to hang next to the user's nickname. Just think about it, do you think it makes sense?

Don't spend money, don't spend money.

APP Top Promotion (www.opp2.com) is the top mobile APP promotion platform in China, focusing on mobile APP promotion operation methods, experience and skills, channel ASO optimization ranking, and sharing APP marketing information. Welcome to follow the official WeChat public account: appganhuo

[Scan the top APP promotion WeChat QR code to get more dry goods and explosive materials]

This article is compiled and published by (APP Top Promotion). Reprinting this article must be approved by Top Promotion , and please attach the link to this article!