Brief discussion: What is the basis for building a good UGC community? And its operating routines

Since the concept of Web 2.0 was proposed nearly 15 years ago, the idea of ​​UGC (user-generated content) has been deeply rooted in people's minds. UGC can be expressed in many forms. Videos, pictures, texts, and sounds can all be its carriers. Moreover, it has become an indisputable fact that Internet companies in various segments now attach great importance to UGC. But we must also admit that just because your product supports users to write reviews does not mean you have built a UGC community. A product called a UGC community must be a company’s main business or an indispensable core module to support the main business.

This week's topic is, what is the basis for building a good UGC community? How do they build their own moat? And as a user, why do you contribute your content?

The foundation of the UGC community is the level of user interaction and the richness of topics. Its essence is to migrate the communication between people in our traditional offline life to the online level. Therefore, we can learn from people’s motivations for chatting to build the basic elements of a good UGC community:

1. Information asymmetry between users;

2. People have different opinions on certain things, and this dispute is widespread and continuous;

3. Everyone has a certain degree of interest in the topic itself or its elements.

Through these three points, we can understand why the UGC content of some startup websites often turns into awkward chats. Because their existing business systems do not support these three elements, or their community operations do not stimulate the three potential elements in users.

People’s hearts are not set in stone, and business positioning is not necessarily static. Let’s take a look at how relatively successful UGC community products overcome the dilemma of awkward conversations in the early stages.

1. Support and packaging of KOLs

It is an essential process to invite some big or small names who are already famous in the field to stand up for the community. These KOL users bring their own traffic and topics, and can also make your humble start-up instantly flourish.

2. Satisfy the user’s selfish mentality

In other words, it means providing some kind of value to users, the scarcer the better. The definition of value is actually very broad. For ordinary users, it is the pleasure and practical value after obtaining content. For KOL users and active users, it is more likely to be a means of monetization and spiritual satisfaction. Spiritual satisfaction includes honor, fulfillment of morality, social welfare, sharing mentality and social status, etc.

3. Use scarcity to attract users

Whether it is the invitation system of the PMCAFF community, or the review system of Everyone is a Product Manager and the Jianshu homepage, they are all artificially creating a kind of scarcity, making content contributors feel that the opportunity to be original is precious and they hope to cherish it. The high-value content produced in this way will in turn attract more users to enter and identify with the community.

4. Accurate users, no noise

Why can the comment section below the news and everyone’s circle of friends only be considered UGC sections but not good UGC communities? Because users are not precise and there is too much noise. You can take a look at the comments in the news section. There are a lot of trolls, and most of them criticize in different ways. The whole atmosphere is like talking at cross purposes. The problem with the circle of friends is that most readers gather because of people, not because of things. This limits the topic space for people to interact to a very small level, and the setting that content is invisible between discussants who are not friends with each other greatly reduces the chances of producing high-value content.

5. Ecological closed loop

If your community is independent of your entire product system, then the users your community targets may not be the users of your main business. What’s even more cruel is that such communities often have very few real users except robots. In this case, community operators should rethink the positioning of their community.

6. Visible and effective channels for upward mobility

This concept originates from sociology and game operations . Its essence is to give trial users and ordinary users hope that they can become core users or KOL users one day. "A soldier who doesn't want to be a general is not a good soldier." Core users and KOL users are the banner of the community, while ordinary users and trial users are the cornerstone of the community. On the other hand, because each individual's output capabilities and style are limited and fixed, ordinary users will inevitably get bored after watching for a long time. Therefore, if the user class fails to iterate, ordinary users will flee over time, and the flag without a foundation will fall.

The above are all strategic ideas. For specific products and specific users, what tactics should operators use to mobilize users' enthusiasm and contribute content? Friends shared many cases from their own experiences. Let’s take a look at them one by one.

1. Target a single user group and rely on user collaboration to increase community cohesion.

@了了

I prefer “Ten People”, which few people know. It is a content creation and sharing community based on story collaboration. Simply put, it is what a high-level storytelling product likes, with a simple interface and a literary style. It is very targeted and only does one thing, which is to use your imagination and make up stories. It stimulates users' sense of cooperation and gives them a great sense of accomplishment after completing a complete story. There are community-specific rules and culture, which makes it easy to retain target users .

2. KOL role model motivation and the sharing impulse in human nature, while also considering tapping into the monetization needs of core users.

@王小蛋

The atmosphere for writing travel notes on Mafengwo is quite good. The daily Fengshou and Baozang travel notes are a kind of encouragement. Seeing others write so well, I also want to try;

The second is psychological motivation. They like to share and want to help others through their own travel plans, which gives them a sense of achievement.

Finally, Mafengwo has a good product experience and the process of editing travel notes is very easy. After doing this, many travel websites will purchase their guide information to fill in their content. At the same time, online and offline are combined, making it very much like a gang. Each city has a helmsman, as well as a bee chief meeting and offline activities . Online, these big Vs produce high-quality content to drive the atmosphere of the entire community.

3. Target niche groups and grasp their inner pain of “few friends who understand me, and who will listen when the strings break” and the sense of surprise after “meeting old friends in a foreign land”.

@rt-ing_张启

NetEase Cloud Music was the first to select these niche folk songs, create a brand tone, stimulate people's inner emotions, and make the content more touching.

My motivation for contributing:

• This song is like a key that opens my heart and makes me want to leave words as my own record.
• I have knowledge and my own understanding of this content, and I want to write some stories and people related to this song.
• Listen to your favorite folk radio station and interact with the DJ host.

4. Teaching and learning benefit each other, and while outputting content, you can improve a practical skill in your real life. In addition, visual methods are used to improve personal contribution feedback. Similar methods include likes, rewards, being pinned, etc.

@Xueya

Seven or eight years ago, I formed a team with my classmates at Baidu Zhidao to answer computer-related questions. On the one hand, it happened to be related to my major in college, and I felt a sense of accomplishment in answering questions. On the other hand, Baidu’s user system and incentives were pretty good, and I liked the diamond-level virtual logo at that time. At that time, the team used the same titles as the military flag, the military division brigade, similar to the diamond and platinum in Honor of Kings . The diamond group's logo was particularly beautiful. I answered 167 questions, with an adoption rate of 41%.

@Li Xiaobai

Qiongyou, I have published a long travelogue on it. The first time I published it was really for the purpose of giving back to the community, because I referred to too many guides from it. The subsequent publications were to earn coins to exchange for gifts.

5. Generally speaking, spiritual feedback is more lasting than material feedback and is conducive to the healthy development of community culture.

But this does not mean that material rewards are completely unacceptable. Operations need to focus on whether they can use a series of inducements to get users to contribute sufficiently heartfelt content. Instead of just patting your butt and walking away after taking advantage of the situation.

@wrong

The platform I have been sharing most recently is Dianping.com, for the purpose of free meals and points redemption. It took me two months to reach Level 4, and then I had a free meal once a month. So I encouraged everyone around me to sign up. Dianping has a daily free dining check-in points system, and if you spend 4,000, you can exchange it for a PASS card. Very few people go to check in, and people who have used it before told me that it is very difficult and the cards often expire.

In order to test this function and its necessity, I signed in and forwarded the messages every day and found that this function is very powerful. Basically, I could reach 4,000 in about two months. But he ensures your daily open rate and forwarding rate. After becoming a member, you need to send at least four reviews every month to maintain your membership, which ensures your activity and contribution. Later I found out that if you write a review every day, you will be given 35 points. When paying on Dianping, 100 points = 1 yuan.

I studied the entire membership points system in a very systematic way, and found that it is really great in every way.

Now I often look through my old Moments, looking for photos to write reviews on. When you write a review on Dianping, if it is more than 100 words + 3 pictures, it will be given a high-quality review, and then the system will select the review and give you 100 points at its discretion. So most of the reviews you see are accompanied by pictures and text.

There are thousands of excellent UGC communities, but the basic business logic and operating methods mostly cannot escape this circle. This article should have ended here, but the author suddenly thought of a question: the UGC community may be the entry point for stranger social interaction . Social networking that simply serves the purpose of dating is not social networking at all, it should be called " O2O transactions". The charm of UGC may have inspired Momo to expand its business to a certain extent.

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