Community operation from 0 to 1500+, the 5 key words I summarized

Some people say that a community is a net woven by users. When we use this net to go fishing, we may not catch any fish at first, but we cannot say that this net has no value. Maybe your fishing ability is not good enough! The most important thing is how to improve your abilities, become an excellent community operator , and even build a team. The author of this article talks about his and his team's experience in growing a community from scratch to a scale of 1,500+. We can learn the secrets of operation from it.

It is impossible for people to survive in isolation; they must always rely on groups.

In recent years, with the booming social economy, related terms such as social self-media and social e-commerce have continued to emerge, as if as long as you have a relationship with the community, you can quickly achieve commercialization and make huge profits.

At the same time, the forms of community have also become richer, such as QQ groups, WeChat groups , Xiaomi circles , Weibo groups, Alipay groups, Maimai groups... However, the only one we use every day is probably WeChat groups.

After a period of wild growth, the community began to gradually settle down, and its deeper value was slowly discovered. It has become an important traffic entrance for enterprises, an important channel for enterprises to connect with users, and a base for continuous communication and interaction with users.

Since communities are so important to businesses, how should we build an excellent community? I summarized a few key words :

1. Restraint

Zhang Xiaolong once mentioned that WeChat has been relatively restrained on the road to commercialization, and is unwilling to commercialize too early or excessively. Therefore, even when placing ads in Moments , we are cautious, fearing that it will affect the user experience.

The same goes for communities. Most of us join a community with the initial intention of learning something. This is relatively well-intentioned. At least we don’t join with the intention of destroying it. However, when the number of people in the community is large enough, some people begin to try to break the existing rules, such as posting advertisements, and some even join and sell their own things to others. When others see this, they also start to follow suit, thus resulting in the "broken window theory". If it is not guided or stopped, it may eventually lead to more and more bad money and less good money - bad money driving out good money.

2. Subtraction and Focusing

These two words are often seen, but if we look at our WeChat, I believe that everyone has at least dozens of WeChat groups. However, not every group is fully utilized, and many of them are in a useless state of "tasteless to eat, a pity to throw away".

At first, we joined groups crazily, scanning every QR code and joining every group. Later, we quit some groups probably because there were too many spam messages and this caused our phones to become increasingly laggy. However, in fact, we still had illusions about most groups and were reluctant to quit.

If we really want to run a community well, I think the first thing we should do is to clean up our own WeChat groups, quit those "useless groups", and only keep some groups that are truly useful to us. For example, I now only have company-related groups and several external study groups on WeChat. The advantage of doing this is that it leaves you with more time to do valuable things and avoids these invalid information taking up too much of your time and consuming your energy.

3. Attention and reputation

We all know that every community has its own rules. Anyone who actively applies to join agrees and is willing to abide by the rules of the group. This means that you voluntarily put an invisible shackle on yourself to restrict your behavior.

However, after being in the group for a while, we began to consciously break free from the shackles. I don’t know if you have noticed that you often see some people posting advertisements or irrelevant links in the group. Even after the group owner or some group members remind them, they still act like Gao Yuliang in " In the Name of People " and openly "sophistry" in front of everyone.

No one is a fool, and it is clear who is right and who is wrong, especially in some relatively professional mid- to high-end communities, which can easily arouse others' disgust. When you post an advertisement, your purpose may be to increase exposure in order to promote yourself or sell products.

There is nothing wrong in gaining attention, but it can be done in the wrong situation - when the community members have a low match and fit with your target user group, and the community has an independent and clear theme. In this case, although you may gain attention by posting advertisements, you will definitely lose your reputation, which is a form of negative attention.

To give an inappropriate example, some celebrities, in order to get on the hot search list and increase their exposure and topics, do not hesitate to reveal things that destroy their reputation. This kind of behavior is tantamount to destroying oneself, NO ZUO NO DIE!

4. Sharing and Silence

The Bethel National Training Laboratory in Maine, USA, studied the knowledge retention rate of humans after 24 hours of learning under each instruction method and found that: we can only remember no more than 10% of the content through reading, 20% through combined listening and audition, 30% through demonstration... However, by teaching others, we can remember up to 90% of the content. “Teaching others” means “sharing”, and the process of sharing is actually a process of helping digestion and deepening understanding.

Therefore, I suggest that you should frequently share some opinions related to the community theme in the community, whether your own or others', which can inspire other members to communicate and thus spark more ideas. In this process, your further thinking prompts you to upgrade your cognition, or you are inspired by other people's opinions. These are all things the community gives back to you, and they are also the practice of altruistic thinking.

Of course, a community cannot always be active, and not everyone is willing to share. Most people are habitually silent and just watch quietly. Many community operators suggest activating this group of people to make the community active.

But I don’t think so. After a long period of experience in operating communities and joining groups, I feel that a qualified community should share regularly and it is best to form a long-term mechanism, rather than blindly pursuing activity and taking up too much time of community members.

Except for the time of sharing and communication within the group, the community should remain silent at other times. Do not post meaningless things such as emoticons, pictures, videos, etc., and do not flood the screen with messages. Because most community members may not participate in the sharing and discussion within the group in a timely manner, if they go back and review the content in the group later, there will be too much irrelevant information, which will increase the difficulty of viewing and affect the experience.

Therefore, this requires community members to have a certain degree of self-control. In addition, it is best not to post anything to the group late at night, as it can easily affect others’ rest. Especially after 11 o’clock at night, you must remain silent!

5. Criteria for an excellent community

People often ask me to recommend some excellent communities. In the past, I would definitely say: join a community that is highly matched with your needs, so that it will be more targeted. And now, I would definitely recommend the community operated by our team - Qianhe Club. This is not an advertisement, it's just a matter of "promoting the best people regardless of their relationship with us".

The theme of Qianhehui is to focus on community practice and user operation . In other words, it is a community that studies corporate communities, focusing more on practice and emphasizing summarizing and improving community theory from practice.

Nearly 1,500 people have joined so far, and I think the reason why everyone is willing to pay is not just because it is great value for money. What is more important is that Qianhe will be more in line with the image of an excellent community in our minds. It is completely different from most paid communities and truly provides products and services, which is something that all members can actually feel.

Qianhehui has two core service modules. The first one is the regular weekly mentor sharing, which is to invite some industry mentors, especially experts with practical experience in community and social practice to share in the group. After the sharing, the courseware will be placed in the member background so that members can repeat the learning.

The second is the sharing of community practice cases. This is not available every week, but rather we study some companies that have done well in user communities and have achieved great results, interpret and analyze their practices, and thus provide us with some reference.

In fact, only these two modules are enough, which completely exceeded expectations, because many members said that after listening to the sharing for the first time, they felt that the money was well spent. We will also initiate some learning activities in the group to "force" those who have poor self-control or often cannot spare time to attend classes to take the initiative to study Qianhehui's courses. There is also the group leader, Teacher Xiaohe, who posts some morning readings every morning. Of course, these are all related to the theme of Qianhe Club. I think this approach alone can serve as Qianhehui’s third largest service module.

Maybe someone will say that I am too subjective, so I would like to ask: What is an excellent community? Does the membership fee have to be high, or does the group members have to come from prominent backgrounds?

In my opinion, a good community should be "profitable". In other words, if even one sharing in the community can make me suddenly realize something, or even if a sentence or a word from someone can inspire me and make me understand, that is enough. At least for now, the Qianhehui community meets all my expectations for an excellent community.

Having said that, you may have noticed that I have been talking about community operations from the perspective of a community member from the beginning to now. Is this a deviation from our topic?

In fact, the first half of the Internet is to seize traffic, and the second half is to carry out refined operations on users. The fundamental transformation of traditional enterprises lies in changing from a selling mindset to a user mindset, and from focusing on "things" to focusing on "people". In the future, users will become the most core assets and competitiveness of enterprises. Therefore, only by shifting from operating commodities to operating user relationships can we seize the initiative in the market.

Community operation is ultimately user operation. Zhang Xiaolong once said: A truly good product manager can instantly turn himself into an idiot-level user, a picky idiot user. Steve Jobs could turn into an “idiot” in 1 second, Ma Huateng needed 5 seconds, and he himself needed 10 seconds.

Therefore, if you want to truly understand your users, you must learn to think from their perspective. Try to turn yourself into a user, throw yourself into the user group, feel it with your heart, and see what the users around you are paying attention to, what they are communicating about, and what their attitudes are towards many things. If you can do this, I believe you will definitely be the operator who understands users the best.

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