Taking Maoyan Movie as an example, the UCG platform operation strategy is explained in detail

Logically speaking, we should first prove that Maoyan UGC was "successful" at that time. I have attached a comparison data that I recorded at the time with Douban . The conclusion is that among theatrical films, our UGC volume is the largest, exceeding Douban.

Step 1: How to analyze user needs

At that time, we hoped to build Maoyan into a "Douban for popular movie lovers." This positioning seems to be quite clear and feasible now, and this group of people and demand also really exist.

In order to fully understand user needs, we communicate with users in large quantities, frequently and continuously, such as having dinner together in the evening, watching movies together on weekends, etc. We also consult some professionals in the industry. After each exchange we would have meetings to discuss, and gradually I gained a certain understanding of this group.

I used the user stratification theory shown in the figure below to analyze, and Maoyan’s core users can be roughly divided in this way.

The first layer is celebrities, whose appearance can endorse the brand of the product and bring about a fan effect. This is mainly accomplished through communication at the business level.

The second layer is professional users. In the film industry, these are groups such as screenwriters and film critics. They are not numerous and their circles have distinct characteristics, so there are other strategies to deal with them.

The third layer is contributing users, which for Maoyan are high-frequency ticket buyers and UGC users. They do not have professional backgrounds, but are the backbone of the entire product. Only after you have dealt with this group of people, the other levels of users will have the possibility to exist. This article mainly talks about the operation methods for this part of users.

The fourth layer is active users, who frequently visit Maoyan. Most of them consume content but do not have the ability to contribute content. The first three layers of users have the greatest impact on them.

The fifth layer is ordinary users. They have only downloaded and registered on Maoyan, or have made purchases, but have no loyalty to the product and are not in the core user group. They are a small group of people who follow the 80/20 rule.

From this stratification, we can see that each layer of users has its own value, are interdependent, and need to be operated with different strategies. But which group to start with first depends on the conditions at the time. It is difficult to deal with celebrities and professional users. Our strength was not enough at that time, and celebrities would not come if there were no fans of the product.

Therefore, we could only start operations from the third layer, drive the fourth and fifth layers, and after forming a user scale and reputation, we could reversely drive celebrities and professional users. This was the operating strategy at the time.

Next, we will focus our efforts on the third group, which are high-quality UGC contributing users. This is how I describe their needs and usage scenarios:

1. They often buy tickets to go to the cinema to watch movies. They have watched a certain amount of movies and have their own understanding of movies.
2. They will open the Maoyan Movie app every week to see what movies are released that week, how much the tickets cost, and also browse some fresh and interesting information.
3. After watching a movie, they will open Maoyan on the way home to see what others think of the movie, and they may also write a few lines of comments of their own.
4. Sometimes they want to know information about a certain movie, such as who is the starring director, or want to know which movies a certain actor has appeared in.

The above are the needs of UGC core users, and we hope that these people will browse and contribute content frequently and interact with other movie lovers. Only by cultivating users' usage habits and gathering a certain number of active users can we achieve our goal of making Douban a popular platform.

To put it another way, this goal is to have more and more UGC users and build a closed loop of users consuming and contributing content, so that it can be successful.

Step 2: How to get seed users

With this goal in mind, I wondered what resources were available at the time and where to find UGC users. Obviously, they are the ticket-buying users of Maoyan Movies. At that time, Maoyan’s ticket-buying users definitely had the largest market share among all online platforms, so the users who came to buy tickets every week were my gold mine.

I made a guess on the spur of the moment: users who buy movie tickets more than twice a week are movie enthusiasts, who are different from those who watch movies for fun just to go shopping and pick up girls. So I found out the users who bought tickets once or more than twice within a week, and found that the latter accounted for a not small proportion, reaching 25%, which is a considerable number of users. The next step is to find a way to filter out users with UGC capabilities and habits from this group of users.

The specific method is actually nothing special. It is just to plan an event and then push it to these 25% of users. This sentence sounds simple, but there are many key points when it is broken down into details. Let’s take the most important point as an example, which is what kind of activities will be more effective.

This requires analyzing the characteristics of this part of users. I selected 200 users from this 25% and manually checked the movies they had previously marked as "want to watch". I found a pattern: these users all have a clear preference for a certain type of movie, such as Hong Kong movies, Marvel , and movies starring stars like Lu Han and Kris Wu.

So we know how to do this activity. Each time there should be a different theme, such as Marvel, Stephen Chow, Hayao Miyazaki, etc., make a list of movies, and let this group of users write ratings and short reviews of the movies on the list, and slowly cultivate the habit of this group of people.

This is one of the ideas for organizing activities. There are several others, but I won’t go into details. When doing operations, you need to analyze user needs more and try more. You can’t just think about doing an activity without knowing how to think and analyze specifically. This is mindless operation.

Such activities are actually user washing, but the users are washed from ticket purchasing users to UGC users. A few points to note:

1. No matter how large the volume of the product, the effect will disappear after the user washes it a few times. If you monitor the data, you can find that the conversion rate is the highest in the first few times, and then it gets lower and lower. You need to make a good judgment. When the effect drops to the bottom, it means that the user has almost been washed, and this method can be stopped.
2. Pay attention to the frequency and method when washing the user. In order to continuously bring in UGC users, you can wash them at a high frequency, which can continuously bring in new UGC users and help cultivate the atmosphere. But you certainly can't harass the same group of users frequently, asking them to do this and that. Even the most powerful stimulation will fade away after too many times.

These 25% of users can be further segmented, and different activities can be promoted to each group. For example, "The Incredibles" is very popular this week, so you can make an event page full of Baymax images and push it to users who buy tickets for this movie. It will absolutely drive them crazy with cuteness, and the conversion rate of UGC will definitely be high. This is the refined user demand. The more accurate the push, the higher the conversion rate.

Since then, we have continued to do one thing, which is to divide users according to their interest in film types and push different content to different groups. Firstly, this is to give existing users more opportunities to be browsed, which is a precise distribution of content; secondly, it is to continuously reinforce to users the information that Maoyan is creating content and cultivate user minds.

Step 3: Create a group

While cleaning up users, you can't just sit there doing nothing. Continue to monitor the converted UGC users, and observe their contributed content, personal profiles, tagged movies and other information one by one. As soon as you find valuable movie enthusiasts, get in touch with them one-on-one and add them to a group.

Therefore, by continuing to wash users, monitor the results, and find people to join the group, after several cycles, there will easily be more than a hundred people in this group. This group of people are the core users of Maoyan Movie UGC. They are the locomotive that drives hundreds of thousands of subsequent UGC users, the creators of the community atmosphere, and the promoters of external brand communications. Their value is enormous.

A group is just a way to gather core users, not the ultimate goal of operation. Because these users have a lot in common, and communicating with each other is one of their needs, this group was formed. This also makes it easier for operations to communicate and manage, issue event notifications, collect user feedback, etc.

After these 100 people join the group, the next thing to consider is how to manage them. This is not just a group, but an organization, so it has all the elements that an organization should have, such as a name, access system, rights and responsibilities, and most importantly, a management team.

Running a user organization is like managing a company, with processes such as recruitment , management, motivation, and elimination. as follows:

Company recruitment: Attract job seekers for interviews through its own recruitment channels , and only those who meet the requirements can be hired. This is similar to the introduction of new users into a user organization.

Company management: After employees join the company, they need to abide by the company's rules and regulations, such as not being late, leaving early, fighting, or swearing, etc., and the company will also pay employees' salaries. This is similar to the management system of a user organization, with both responsibilities and benefits.

The company's incentives are employee awards, quarterly/annual bonuses, etc. These are incentives outside of salary. You can only get them if you achieve your goals. It's okay if you don't. This is similar to when you operate a user organization, you hold some activities every week or month to reward physical or virtual things to stimulate these users to continue to contribute.

Elimination by the company: If you have serious violations of discipline or poor work performance, you will be asked to leave. Of course, you can also choose to resign voluntarily. The same applies to user organizations. Those who fail to meet the minimum standards will leave and will no longer be able to enjoy benefits. Both companies and user organizations need to maintain a certain level of liquidity.

Here is a rough list of specific things to do:

1. User operation .

Someone is needed to maintain this group, keep it active on a daily basis, maintain good relationships with key people, and collect user feedback. It is particularly important to identify key users. The ideal model is someone who has ability, time, authority, a lively and open personality, and a love of making friends and having fun. Let such people become the management team of the group and work for you in the future.

2. Event operation .

You cannot rely solely on the group's regular system to motivate users. Even if you have rankings and awards every month, users will eventually become tired of the group. Moreover, the monthly cycle is too long, and the weak period in the middle will pull down the data, so targeted activities should be carried out for this small group of people. Although their number is small, their output capacity is large, and it is definitely worthwhile.

The above is what the UGC core user group does at this stage of group building. Don’t underestimate this group of people, they can fully drive the activity and atmosphere of a product in the early stage.

Baidu Knows is a product with over 100 million visits, with hundreds of thousands of people answering questions every day, but the official only needs to maintain those one or two thousand people. This is the driving role of core users.

Step 4: Community Operation

The core user organization can operate for a period of time and will bring continuous results. But at a certain stage, we will find that the bottleneck has come, the phenomenon is as follows:

1. The number of core user groups is increasing, from 100 to 300 or even 500 people. We have to consider opening 2 or 3 groups. As the number of members increased, the activity and atmosphere actually decreased. There were always only a few people talking in the group, and the positive attitude that everyone had before seemed to be gone.
2. With the rapid development of Maoyan, the data of the entire product has increased rapidly, including DAU, ticket purchasing users, UGC users, etc. As the overall market is rising, the contribution of these hundreds of people seems increasingly insignificant. For example, Maoyan previously had 10,000 UGC pieces of content every day, of which 70% were contributed by core user organizations; now Maoyan has 200,000 UGC pieces of content every day, of which only 10% are contributed by this organization.

The embarrassing thing is that running this organization was our most important thing before. Judging from the current situation, the most important thing can only account for 10%. The value is too small and it is unacceptable.

There are several difficulties in solving this problem:

1. If we simply want to increase the number of user organizations, we need to form at least 10 groups of the same size and contribution capabilities. This will increase the manpower cost of operations. We won’t be able to manage so many people like in the previous model, and there won’t be enough funds to carry out incentive activities.
2. The core users who meet the requirements are almost being squeezed out, and the contribution of existing users is slowly decreasing. Maoyan is about to reach the end of its life cycle, and it is difficult to find new users who meet the requirements. There are not that many candidates.

This problem troubled us for a long time. We tried many methods but to no avail. Our boss also began to question this model. I don’t remember under what circumstances, but I came up with a seemingly reasonable plan and started to implement it the next day. Let’s call this plan “ community operation” for now.

The idea behind the operation of Maoyan Movie Community is as follows:

1. The roles are reversed, and the community is fully operated and managed by the users.

The manpower and resources for operation are limited, so we cannot devote a lot of people to manage many groups separately. Therefore, I want to maximize the motivation of users. That is, Maoyan completely hands over the ownership of the group, and it is entirely up to the users to build, manage and benefit from it. There is only one requirement, that is, the name must contain Maoyan Movies.

The previous practice was for the official to set up groups and attract users. The status of the official and the user is a bit like that of the boss and the employee. The user will have a fixed mindset that you must have a purpose and I must help you with your work. No matter how nice you say, I am a passive role, so it is impossible to be very active.

The current practice is that this is the user's own business, and the groups are created by themselves. Maoyan official is only responsible for operational guidance and support in terms of materials and prizes. This fully mobilizes the enthusiasm of users and leaves a lot of room for imagination. As long as they are willing to do it, they can do it well.

2. Create a large number of groups and cover a large number of users.

In order to increase the proportion of core user groups in the entire Maoyan UGC, for example, from the 10% mentioned above to 60%, my operating model must be able to cover and affect more users, so the solution is to create more groups.

Taking into account that the activity level will decrease when the number of group members exceeds 100, we recommend that the number of members be controlled at 60-80. Therefore, 50 groups need to be established to cover 4,000 people.

The problem is how to create and manage a large number of groups with limited manpower. This is combined with the first point mentioned above. If it is established and managed by users spontaneously, we only need to provide early promotion and guidance, and only give resources to those communities that have reached a certain scale and have outstanding performance. This will be discussed in detail below.

3. Maintain the user base’s dependence on Maoyan.

One difficulty with this model is what the benefits of these groups to Maoyan are and how to measure them.

First of all, any community organization will be attached to a certain brand or theme, such as Wu Xiaobo Book Club, but Wu Xiaobo has never participated in it. I think Maoyan is a brand that helps group owners gather users. For an organization composed of such a group of people, the brand loyalty is naturally very high.

Secondly, based on their brand attachment, these users will definitely continue to use Maoyan, but we are not sure how often and what they will do. But as long as the community is well organized, once a week is not a problem. Assuming that 40% of all community users will use Maoyan UGC every week, if the community has 4,000 people, it can bring 1,600 high-quality UGC contents; if it has 10,000 people, it will be 4,000 pieces. The scale and imagination space are large enough.

The above is the idea of ​​community operation. Here is how to do it specifically:

1. The life cycle of the community is planned, as shown below:

This is the operational strategy of this matter. This project is initiated by the official and is completely open in the initial stage. Anyone can create a group and recruit people. The official will not stop or support them, and let them fend for themselves. This is a process of natural elimination. The labor cost of this link is close to zero, and it probably only requires answering some inquiries.

The growth stage refers to groups that have reached a certain size and level of activity, and they begin to receive official support, including assistance in recruiting people, organizing events, gifts, etc., to support them in getting started.

The core stage means that after a period of operation, a very small number of communities stand out. The group owner is capable and has resources; the group is active enough, with many offline and online activities, so it becomes a group that the official focuses its resources on supporting.

2. After completing the planning, we will start public recruitment.

This involves the problem of cold start . If I only post an activity page and tell everyone the above information, no one will read it and the effect will definitely be very bad.

Using the cold start idea, we first carefully selected 10 people from the existing core user group, and communicated this idea to them one by one, constantly talking about it, and even meeting them in person to chat. The purpose is to let them build a few such communities as models, and then I will recruit publicly. Everyone only needs to look at the model to know what it is and then follow suit.

These 10 people are friends who have known us for a long time and are very familiar with us, so it took us just one week to establish the first community, which we named "Maoyan Fan Club." The first group of fans watched the movie offline over the weekend and took some photos.

We took these fan clubs and photos and immediately wrote a very simple recruitment post, with brief text and their weekend photos, telling everyone that the "Maoyan Fan Club" has been established and that you can get various benefits. Why not join it quickly? We are recruiting members for the first batch of fan clubs. Secondly, leave a recruitment entrance and state "Do you also want to set up your own fan club? Add me XXXX."

After writing this post, I quickly pushed it to Maoyan’s active users. Soon these 10 communities were established, and many people were applying for new communities. The cold start phase was over.

The picture below shows the earliest batch of communities that were established. There were not many people at first, but then the number of people exploded.

3. The next step is to repeat the previous step many times.

Every week we publish information about the communities that existed last week, including their numbers, activities, and group photos, just like reporting our performance, while continuing to recruit. So, this was a stage of rapid growth. I remember it took us only one month to have 20 effective communities.

These users would also write posts summarizing the activities, and we would also put up some promotional spots on the site. During that period, this event was very popular, and those active users, regardless of whether they participated or not, at least knew about this organization.

During this stage, the operations person in charge of the project had a harder time, because she needed to communicate with users and train them on how to create groups and recruit members; she also needed to screen out groups that were operating well or had potential, and provide support resources. That period was indeed very busy.

I need to emphasize that from the beginning of this project until I resigned, only one person was involved, which at least proves that this model is more cost-effective.

4. We had been operating for three months and had about 70 communities covering about 6,000 people. After having a certain number of communities, we will start to do some key support work.

We found that there are two types of themes for users to establish communities. One is regional in nature, such as the Beijing branch and the Shanghai branch; the other is thematic in nature, such as Marvel, horror movies, and Japanese comics. We select key communities from these and allocate more resources to them.

For example, for local branches, we have set up branches in all the top ten cities with the most users purchasing tickets on Maoyan Movies. The large number of tickets purchased in these cities indicates a large demand, and the Maoyan brand is highly recognized by local users, so this is one of the key points.

In addition, for thematic communities, we chose to foster communities such as Marvel, which mostly have young people and have enough movies and topics. However, for various reasons, thematic communities have not been performing as well as local branches. It seems that this form of community must return to offline to be stable.

By this stage, the Maoyan Movie community had been established. Subsequent daily operations will follow the ideas in the three stages shown above, continuously attracting capable people to build groups, supporting groups with potential, and allocating resources to the top groups.

In fact, this idea is the same as the operation of Tieba . The top bars do not need too much intervention from the official operation of Tieba. They just need to do a good job of monitoring and avoid any chaos. Their energy is focused on supporting some bars with potential, or bars in specific categories, such as those that can be monetized. I won’t go into details here.

Summarize

Let’s go back to the pyramid in the picture below. This article talks about my ideas and specific practices when operating the third layer of “contributing users”. This is not the whole of Maoyan’s operation, but only a part of it.

To briefly complete the article, we have also achieved good results in the first two layers. As for celebrities, we were the first to invite them to make recommendations on the movie app, and Taopiaopiao followed up later; as for professional users, we also invited a well-known film critic in the industry to join us very early on.

The above is the record of Maoyan Movie’s UGC operation. I hope it can be of some help to everyone.

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