Umeng: 5 tips to increase user activity through in-app communities

To what extent can the community influence the user activity of an app? Or user retention? Some time ago, we visited some developers and learned that through effective community operations, the next-day retention rate can be at least 5% and up to 40%. This data is very impressive. I hope that after listening to my speech, everyone here will start paying attention to the community functions within the APP from today.

I want to enjoy the benefits reserved by this community as soon as possible. Building a community is just a simple first step to bring together APP users, but if you really want the community to maximize the activity rate of your APP, you also need to customize and operate this community according to the characteristics of your own APP. Below I will combine the methods and techniques of micro-communities to help everyone become more active in the community.

1. Vertical segmentation

First of all, we need to use topics to vertically segment the content. Topics can not only classify content in the community, but also identify attributes that users recognize. Topics are both classification sections of the community and labels for users. Topics are the basis for your future refined operations, so topics are very important. For example, our micro-community has a demo, which is equivalent to an independent APP. We have built several topics, including micro-communities, demand suggestions, and problem feedback. If we find in the community that a user has posted content that includes problem feedback and iOS SDK, we can basically confirm that this user is likely to be our iOS developer. If we have an SDK update below, I can directly tell him what we have updated through this method, and you can update it.

In addition, we need to clean up the topics every once in a while, especially some topics with low activity and high timeliness, so it is very important to maintain the quality of the topics in the long term.

2. Various forms

There should be various forms of participation. Even within the same community, different users need to be satisfied by different social functions in different scenarios. For example, some students may post some content to express their feelings, and other students may like or comment on it. At this time, the social cost may be lower. However, for some chicken soup-type content that can trigger people's resonance, such as Chai Jing's "Under the Dome", the form of forwarding may be more in line with the user's scenario at this time, and everyone can use this form directly.

In addition, the forms of expression should be diverse. Each APP has its own user group, and different user groups have their own usage habits, so we must customize our functions according to the characteristics of each user. For example, we currently only support text and pictures. If there are sounds and videos, how can we support them at this time? We can use one of our additional attributes to carry audio or even video content.

3. Quick response

In the community, we must try every possible way to increase the speed of establishing connections between two users. Let me tell you a joke. I heard an example some time ago where a classmate finally plucked up the courage to confess his love to the goddess he had admired for a long time. However, the goddess only saw the confession email two years later. This was a very tragic thing. Therefore, when setting up push notifications, we must enable efficient push notifications so that timely feedback can be provided when there are urgent social behaviors in the community. Secondly, the operations staff must ensure the online time. Especially in the early stages of establishing your community, you should actively handle user complaints and suggestions. This ensures that your new users feel that the community is stable and active.

4. Good atmosphere

Since it is a community, it is inevitable to avoid various junk content. We must make full use of the various mechanisms in this micro-community, such as reporting, administrator review, customized sensitive words, etc., and use these mechanisms to resist pornography, gambling, drugs, small advertisements, etc. As for some unwanted behavioral habits in the community, such as some active users with "personalities" who are always frantically posting emoticons and deliberately causing trouble (for example, if the community is very active and your competitors want to ruin it, they may hire people to post messages in your community), the administrator must stop this bad behavior in a timely manner, and in serious cases, they can even ban the users directly. Only when users feel that your community atmosphere is good can a mechanism be created to make the community have a mechanism and atmosphere.

In fact, what is our ultimate goal in building a community? The ultimate goal, which is also the ultimate goal of our operations staff, is that when your operations staff are not around, your users can operate on their own according to a set of mechanisms and atmosphere that you have established and follow your rules of the game. This is our ultimate goal.

5. Make good use of recommendations

We remember this saying: the closer the social relationship, the more active the user. This social relationship is close, and we have three levels. The first level, social networking among acquaintances, is when two people know each other. This is easy to understand. If one of your friends is in a community, then I will most likely follow my friend in. The second level is strangers, but the physical distance is relatively close. I am working here and you may be working next door, but we may have something in common. At the third level, strangers are physically far away but spiritually close. What does mental distance mean? For example, if we have common hobbies, this level is very high. Therefore, we can advance social relationships one by one according to these three levels.

First, acquaintance, second, physical distance, and third, psychological distance. Therefore, we need to use the existing relationship chains to recommend friends. For example, if your community is built on a group of students, we can fully utilize the relationships on Renren to recommend users to add friends. If your user system is based on mobile phone numbers, you can use the user's address book to recommend friends.

In addition, we are currently testing a recommendation system that can recommend the most active users and the hottest topics in the system to users in the community. In addition, we also support fully customized recommendations. The higher the quality of the recommendations, the more active your users will be.

6. Effective guidance

● The entrance should be conspicuous

The more conspicuous the entrance is, the lower the cost for users to enter, and relatively speaking, the larger your base will be. The larger the base, the higher the user activity will be. This is an example of our internal testing partners. The first one is Yuntu TV, and the second one is the lottery example. Let’s take a look at the entrances set up in these two examples. For Yuntu TV, we marked it. It is a menu in the second section. The user actually needs to click twice to enter. The first click is here, and the second click is here. We zoomed in on this lottery community and found that it is actually in the middle. Users only need to click once after entering. Obviously, the user's entry cost is much lower in the second one. We recommend that everyone use the second method. Later we did a simple analysis of the data and found that under the same conditions, the number of new users entering the second type of community is about 2 to 4 times higher than that of the first type.

● Guide users to form attention habits

Because our community just said that the ultimate goal is to enter the third level, which is to be able to settle all the people who share this common interest into the community. Only when a user has this kind of relationship chain and common interests, and then follows the corresponding person or topic of corresponding interest, can his complete interest chain and relationship chain be deposited in your community. Only when his interest is settled in your community can this user be considered stable, or in other words, the quality of this user is very high.