How to maintain seed users and enable them to optimize and spread products?

Maintaining seed users is actually a matter of communication. If a company's products meet the needs of users and the operators maintain good relationships with seed users, seed users will naturally be willing to stay and play, and their value will be revealed.

In fact, 99% of products will fail, and most of the failures are due to the failure to verify the product model.

Whether the product model is correct is the most fundamental factor affecting the product life cycle . To validate the product model, the most important thing is the quality of users. At the beginning of product development, we need to introduce seed users to verify our product model.

Introducing seed users requires a lot of manpower and material resources. If they are not maintained well, the value of seed users cannot be maximized, and it may even lead to the loss of seed users, and all previous efforts will be wasted. How should operators maintain seed users and enable them to optimize and spread products?

What is a seed user?

1. Innovators, Early Adopters

Operators use various means to screen out the target audience for the product and bring them together. The pain points of these target groups are more intense than those of general users.

2. Be brave to try new things

Seed users can accept the imperfections of the product, continuously provide suggestions for product optimization, and are willing to communicate.

How to maintain seed users?

1. If your product is just an idea and has not yet taken shape

Based on user needs, find your seed users and verify your ideas. For example, if your product is a food tool product, you can organize an offline food preparation salon to share cooking skills with them.

When a certain online education product was first established, it held free offline open classes every two months. You can participate as long as you register on the official account and get the invitation code. Not only do they adjust the course design based on students' feedback, they also distribute leaflets similar to those of New Oriental reviewers, striving to provide students with a better learning experience.

After one year of offline accumulation, the course system of this online education product has basically taken shape, it has its own community , and has accumulated a certain number of seed users. After verifying the product model, the first online class was launched, and it officially became an online and offline learning community. Today, the courses of this online education product have been introduced as internal training courses by large companies such as JD.com .

After finding your seed users and verifying the product model, you can adjust your product based on the feedback from the seed users and start developing your product.

2. If your product is already formed

If your product is already established, you can recruit users to experience your product.

Before Onmyoji was launched, the game had been publicly tested. Users who reached level 15 during the public test could receive a special gift package. After this news was released, it attracted a large number of players. These players provided assistance for the testing of the game, verified the product model, and also put forward many valuable suggestions for improvement of the product.

Source: Onmyoji Forum

In the process of playing the game, users helped the product find a large number of bugs and put forward optimization suggestions. Not only that, Onmyoji's beautiful graphics and highly playable story have already gained a lot of word-of-mouth before it went online.

When Onmyoji was officially launched, it ranked in the top three on the iOS rankings and became a hot topic on WeChat Moments and Weibo.

When your product is already formed, recruiting users to experience the product is the fastest way to verify the product model, find your seed users, provide them with product trial rights, and help improve the product.

3. Maintain the presence of personnel

The maintenance personnel of the seed user group are also called managers. The size of the seed user group is generally around 100 people, and 2-3 maintenance personnel are required. The maintenance personnel have multiple responsibilities in the group.

The main responsibility of the maintenance personnel is to communicate well with the seed users. When the seed users raise questions about the product, the maintenance personnel will respond immediately and answer the questions. And record it. Seed users can also record their suggestions for improving the product or their ideas for adding new features.

Friction is inevitable among seed users during discussions, and maintenance personnel must also control the situation to avoid escalation of friction and resulting in large-scale seed loss.

4. Three important maintenance skills

(1) A sense of participation can bring seed users closer to you

The enthusiasm of early Mi fans is well known. How do they achieve this for a new product? Let’s take a look at how Xiaomi’s operators get along with users.

Source: Miyou Community

The above is a screenshot of the Miyou forum. Users give feedback in the forum and the operation staff responds to the feedback immediately, confirms the solution of the problem within a week, and updates the problem solving status in real time.

Originally it was just a casual complaint from a user, but Xiaomi officials took it so seriously. If it were you, would your favorability towards this brand be improved?

(2) Give users a sense of respect, so they are more willing to stay and play

At the beginning of operation, seed user maintenance personnel encourage seed users to produce content and affirm users who already have content. The following is an answer from an early seed user of Xiami on Zhihu.

Source: Zhihu @Liu Lu

While seed users provide improvement suggestions for their own product optimization, they also spread good user word-of-mouth for the products.

(3) Seed users enjoy privileges

Seed users are the users with the strongest demand for their own products and they are certainly eager to try out the new features of the products. Before the sports and fitness product Keep went online, it recruited experience officers to experience free fitness classes.

Source: Keep Weibo

(4) Initiate offline activities and aggregate seed users

Seed users have something in common, so launching themed offline activities to gather them together and listen to their real opinions will be of great help in improving products and maintaining seed users, and will also help establish valuable social links.

A lot of thought was also put into the event invitations, customizing them for each seed user so that they would feel valued and even have a sense of honor, and spontaneously spread the event based on their own social media .

Summarize

When maintaining seed users, the method used is certainly important. However, a good experience is often also a major focus of seed user operations . If the seed user's expected experience score is 60 points, and you provide him with an experience of 80 points, the seed user's favorability towards you will be greatly improved. Maintaining seed users is actually a matter of communication. If a company's products meet the needs of users and the operators maintain good relationships with seed users, seed users will naturally be willing to stay and play, and their value will be revealed.

Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media advertising

This article was compiled and published by @活動盒 (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting! Site Map