What is a community? How should it be operated?

1. Everyone is chatting in the community

Everyone is talking about communities, whether they are big Vs on WeChat or Weibo, or internet celebrities, community builders, educators, vertical e-commerce workers, etc. In fact, it is to provide a series of services to a certain group of people, which is nothing more than e-commerce, selling advertisements or selling memberships. The problems faced by community building are generally: what to do, which group of people to include, and how to get more people? What kind of services (e-commerce) do you provide? What kind of ads to sell? What kind of value-added services (such as selling memberships) can be provided to this group of people?

2. Let’s talk about social networks

In the past, social networks were designed with a series of online gameplay, aiming to enable people in the social network, whether they knew each other or not, to establish social connections and build a network of relationships in the social network.

However, social networks have not solved the "last mile", that is, the sinking of Internet services (such as O2O , which is the sinking of services and combined with offline scenarios): because it is decentralized, it is difficult to form a sense of belonging, so often the consolidation and opening of relationship ties between people requires each other to maintain and complete the "last mile", such as making offline meetings and holding offline salons. People autonomously establish groups to form small communities (for example, many WeChat groups and QQ groups are in a sense considered a small community), and the way people gather is relatively scattered.

Therefore, as a social networking platform itself, most of the monetization methods are still through selling advertisements. In fact, advertisements are not sold to social relationships themselves (that is, you will hardly see an advertisement during a chat), but are placed in the community feed formed based on the social topology network, such as QQ Space, Moments, and Weibo feeds.

3. How to get a group of people? This is a community.

To put it simply, the community business is to solve the problem of service sinking to the grassroots through community ties, that is, returning to the center. In the past, social networks were decentralized, but communities are actually non-decentralized. They gather a group of people through the operation of centralized (influential things), whether it is people, brands or certain topics. Of course, there will be various packaging in this process, no matter what kind of weird rhetoric: consumption concept, value concept and so on. In the final analysis, there is only one indicator: no matter what kind of community you build for highly educated women, a community of internet celebrity fans, a reading community, etc., the goal is to attract more people, regardless of whether they are originally interested in this centralized target or are cultivated later. Once they lose interest or a sense of belonging to the center, I am afraid they will leave.

So how do you get a group of people? This is a community, and you can package it however you want. Packaging is actually correct, and it is also correct to come up with some concepts, whether it is for financing or to hype up concepts to expand influence, etc., but don't confuse yourself and end up with something where form is more important than content.

4. Community Expansion

The values ​​and ideas of the community must be aimed at consolidating and serving this group of people and finding more people to join the community.

Because it is centralized, everyone will find that anyone who is a high-level participant in a community’s values ​​or sentiments is the big V or expert of this community. The reason is simple, because these people are amplifying the influence of the community center, and the greater the influence, the more people there will be. In a sense, having some influential people or things to build a community is monetizing their influence. The same goes for some people inviting influential people or things to stand for the community.

Therefore, the expansion of the community depends on centralized influence.

5. Community and Community

Many people still cannot distinguish between communities and neighborhoods (online communities). In fact, I have said in previous articles that communities provide people with an online identity, and communities are clusters of people. Therefore, many communities can be hosted through communities, so why do we need to create online communities? Of course it’s because the Internet can connect more people.

Take Luoji Siwei as an example: If Luoji Siwei had not been through the Internet, whether it was Youku, Weibo, or WeChat, how could it have connected so many people and assembled such a large community? Getting a group of people and continuously expanding the influence, whether it is persistent videos, audios, or New Year’s Eve speeches, etc., isn’t that what you are doing? With a lot of fans and members, you can provide services (sell books) and sell advertisements, and then make apps, that is, create content and build a community. The principle is very simple.

6. Conclusion

So let me summarize it again, to build a community: get a group of people, then expand the influence to get more people, provide services and sell advertisements to this group of people, after building an online community, provide them with online identities, and then sell value-added services such as memberships.

Coupled with the rise of the middle class, the dividends of consumption upgrading, and the fact that communities are easier to monetize through e-commerce, it is natural that everyone is talking about communities.

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