One article thoroughly grasps the essence of community operation

The topic of community operation is an over-mythologized field, but it is also a very important promotion method. The first prerequisite for the formation of a community is that everyone in the community believes that they can benefit from it.

1. Analysis of the roles of participants

If we break down a community, we will find that it is made up of many individuals. These individual participants can be divided along two dimensions.

The first dimension is demand. People with the same needs can easily gather together. For example, fat people who want to lose weight. The needs of every fat person are very similar, such as losing weight, wearing smaller clothes, or other similar extensions, which makes it easy to form a community.

Some of the fat people may be new media editors with a monthly salary of 5,000 yuan, a 40-year-old civil servant, or a restaurant owner who makes a fortune every day. They have different identities, but the same needs.

The second dimension is identity. Using common identity tags to build a community is very effective. For example, the threshold for participating in self-media communities is set at 200,000 Weibo fans, so that everyone’s identity is unified - they are all self-media people with 200,000 Weibo fans or more. Then the content of communication and the value of exchange can be amplified around this identity.

There may be self-media people with food themes and self-media people with car themes. They may have no connection at all, but they have the same identity labels, so there must be points for communication and exchange.

Therefore, needs and identity are the two major dimensions for dividing community participants. Regardless of which dimension it is, participants in this community must believe that they can benefit from it. What does it mean to profit from it? Everyone in the community will think that the value he gains in the community is greater than his own contribution. If he does not think so, he will quit the community.

Different communities have different types of interests. Some communities can help you obtain information, some can help you develop habits, and some can help you discover what is worth buying. Different interest points will lead to different levels of activity.

For example: Huxiu authors group. Huxiu is a media platform that brings together authors who have published articles into a community, and the nature of this community is to discuss opinions and exchange information. Because media platforms publish a large number of articles, such communities are very active and a large amount of content is produced every day.

2. Find other people’s social media promotion

You don’t necessarily need to have your own community, but you need to find the right community, then contact and cooperate with them to achieve your promotion goals.

Let’s analyze the identity and needs of the square dance community with examples. People who participate in square dance communities are basically elderly people. This is an identity defined from an age perspective, with women making up the majority. In terms of demand, square dancing can provide physical exercise and also allow people to communicate with other elderly people, so they won’t feel too lonely.

With the identity and needs of the square dance community, the bank's financial manager came on the scene. The financial manager found that his target customer group was very similar to that of the square dance community: they had a certain amount of cash and were also interested in financial management.

He analyzed the characteristics of the square dance community and realized that these elderly people danced because they needed companionship and hoped to communicate, so he joined the community to dance together, accompanied other participants and chatted with them. After a few weeks, everyone began to trust the financial manager more. He then talked to everyone about financial management, starting from parenting, weather, and health, and finally he got some orders from the square dance community.

So when we are struggling with how to start operating our own community, it is better to first see if there are any established and suitable communities around us. We can take the initiative to look for it, because the characteristics of people in the community are highly similar. If we find the corresponding community, we can start promoting it directly without spending time building it ourselves.

We must realize that a community does not necessarily have to belong to us. You can cooperate and promote with communities established by others. As long as you find the right people, the effect of the cooperation will not be too bad.

3. Three Models of Enterprise Communities

Whether a community should have as many rules as possible or as few as possible depends on the community’s model and replicability.

There are three models of communities.

First, cooperate with the product to provide more value based on the product.

Second, help improve the product by organizing communities, allowing team members to have close contact with users, understand core pain points, and iterate products.

Third, maintain core users and better retain important participants through community.

The most important thing is to make the community and products complement each other. If there are any flaws or weaknesses in a product or business model , the community is a good auxiliary solution.

An air purifier company called SciX. This company has only been established for a few years and is relatively niche, but people who know it tend to recognize this brand. Products like air purifiers require a production and delivery cycle. When entrusting a factory to produce them, it is best to order a larger quantity at a time. The same applies to logistics. If there is not a large enough order at one time, coordination will be troublesome.

So SciX created a community with group-buying attributes based on this situation, and included old users who had purchased SciX purifiers in this community, as well as new users who were interested. When everyone has a need (for example, when the smog index in Beijing is reported to be 400-500, there will be a heated discussion in the group), everyone will organize a group purchase, and orders for 30 purifiers at a time will all be given a 10% discount. In this way, users are already interested in purchasing, and group purchases can get discounts, and seeing that many people in the group have signed up, it is easy for them to place an order together.

For SciX, it can communicate with the factory and logistics at one time, solving the problems in the company's existing production links. At the same time, products like air purifiers have repeat purchase demand. One machine may be able to purify the air in one room, but if you have multiple rooms, you will have to buy more, so group buying itself is also very attractive to old users.

In addition, filters also need to be purchased. In cities with severe pollution, filters may need to be replaced once a month, which means 12 filters need to be replaced a year. This has also been made into a group purchase and circulated in the group.

Such a community does not require very detailed rules, as long as everyone understands the rules and procedures of group buying.

The second model is to improve the product. This is a very common model. For example, angel user groups, product coverage groups, tasting groups, and brainstorming groups can all be classified into this category. The biggest goal in such a community is to get all the opinions and views of users on your product. The ideal situation is that you will also have a new understanding and cognition of the users, so that the product will become better during the next optimization and improvement.

Example: Get is a paid content app. In the beginning, Getai needed a group of users to give feedback on the Get App and find bugs, so we formed a closed testing team. The closed testing team was divided into Android closed testing team and iPhone closed testing team according to the mobile phone models. Each closed testing group is a WeChat group with nearly 100 people. What follows is the key content.

The closed beta test did two things. First, each participant was given a 100-yuan voucher, which they could use to purchase any paid e-book or audio in the App. Second, Dedao’s CTO, Mr. Kuaidao, also joined these two groups and communicated with users regularly. If someone finds a bug, he will personally say sorry and tell everyone that the bug will be fixed.

Is this costly? Actually it’s not that bad. Because the content obtained is all electronic products, they will be purchased repeatedly and will not increase the cost too much. But for an individual user, a limit of 100 yuan is enough to buy the corresponding product. Therefore, we successfully completed the initial product optimization in this way, and later carried out large-scale promotion.

The third model retains core users. Core users can be the user group with the highest paying amount or the most active user group. If you are a content platform, then the group with the highest quality of submissions are the core users, so core users must be well maintained.

For example: the online community. Zaixing is a paid knowledge appointment, where experts provide knowledge, students pay, and have one-on-one appointments with experts. There is an expert community in the industry, one of the goals of which is to ensure the number of orders received by the experts, and an incentive policy has been designed in the industry.

In the early days, if a trader received 100 orders, the trader would send him a big cake. In this way, experts will share photos of cakes and the recognition behind them in the community. Other experts will notice and then actively express their desire to increase the number of orders and ask if there are any promotion opportunities in the industry. In this way, experts will be motivated to take more orders.

IV. Reproducibility

Replicability means that you can have a community and then replicate it in another place. The influence of the community will grow and the number of people will increase. Just like in the early days, KFC opened branches in many cities, and eventually people all over the country knew the brand. So what conditions are needed for a replicable community?

Three characteristics of a community:

First, there are a large number of volunteers in the community. This means that a large number of people do not receive wages. They join this community for other reasons and devote their time and energy to it.

Second, the concept of serving customers rarely exists in the community. The community will not divide people into two groups like a company, one is Party A and the other is Party B, and Party B needs to serve Party A. A community brings people together to help each other achieve a goal.

Third, the community has an open nature. They continue to welcome more people to join, and it is not a relatively closed private organization.

These three community characteristics require a very clear set of rules to assist in the replication of the community. If the rules are not set, it will easily disrupt the original community design.

How to design rules?

First of all, we need to have a very clear positioning of the roles in the community, and secondly, there must be a very clear task definition for each role. The community is highly mobile, and the army may change but the camp remains the same. We need to design the roles of key positions well and ensure that there are always people in these positions so that the community can function normally.

For example: Toastmasters is a speaking community that originated in the United States and now exists in more than 140 countries. What this speech community is best at is copying. In terms of role definition, it regards the community as a small company, and the team inside is divided into four management roles: chairman, finance, external vice chairman, and internal vice chairman.

The chairman is like the CEO of a small team. His primary goal is to ensure the survival of the community. He is a bit like a firefighter, fixing problems wherever they arise.

The finance department is like a financial director, ensuring that every member pays dues on time, that community expenditures are within budget, that there are no major financial problems, and that all paperwork is handled properly.

The vice president of external affairs is like a marketing or public relations director, who is mainly responsible for promotion and publicity, as well as maintaining the community’s website.

Internally, the vice president is like the operations director, ensuring that members within the community have sufficient understanding of the Speech Association and are familiar with every necessary step for upgrading (every member of the Speech Association can be upgraded). Therefore, this vice president will constantly explain and encourage everyone to upgrade. In this way, the most basic design roles have been assigned. As long as these four people are there, there will be no major problems with the community framework.

Another decision-making system of the Speech Association is designed for daily activities. Members of the Speech Association all have the goal of improving their speaking skills, and daily activities are designed around this goal. There is an offline gathering every week, and the speech communities in more than 140 countries all have this idea.

There are various roles in this party, and each role is played by different people each time. The roles include host, speaker, commentator, timekeeper, grammarian, and impromptu speech host.

The host must ensure the smooth arrangement of venue equipment and personnel.

Speaker, give a speech on a topic.

The commentator gives feedback to the speaker based on his performance, telling him what he did well and what needs improvement.

The timekeeper records the time taken by everyone and criticizes the host if he should take two minutes to open the show but actually takes three minutes.

The grammar monitor records the grammatical problems or waste words of all personnel.

The impromptu speech host prepares some impromptu speech topics in advance and invites members to give impromptu speeches on the spot.

With the role definitions of management and daily activities, a community can already function normally. However, because it is a replicated community, it is necessary to think carefully about the relationship between communities. When you have replicated enough communities and they are running well, you need to consider how to connect these communities.

There is a very simple method - PK competition. For example, the Speech Association will organize speech contests to mobilize the surrounding communities, and everyone can make new friends during the competition. Expand the competition from the regional to the provincial, then to the national, and finally to a world-class speech competition, spanning all speech communities. This will allow participants from different sub-communities to get to know each other, expand their circles, feel that the community itself is more valuable, and attract new people to become interested in the community.

V. Key points for evaluation results

From the user's perspective, analyze whether a community is good or mediocre. We can proceed from five dimensions. On the one hand, you can analyze your own community to see which aspects can be improved. On the other hand, you can also see how similar communities to yours perform in these dimensions and make a horizontal comparison.

These five dimensions are first attempt, investment cost, renewal, recommendation and exit cost.

The first attempt is that users are willing to try this community. You tell everyone in some way that you have a community and how to play. Someone expressed interest and joined in to try it out. The effectiveness of this effect is determined by your community design and promotion methods. When promoting, you can invite people one by one or in large quantities, and then calculate the conversion rate .

The second is the input cost. Participating in a community takes time, and some even cost money, and these are all user costs. Therefore, with the same number of users, the higher the cost of user expenditure, the more valuable they think the community is.

The third is renewal. Let users invest repeatedly to see if they can stick with it for a long time. Because many times users will choose to start trying for various reasons, such as seeing that the copy is well-written and making an impulse purchase, or because you personally invite them and they feel embarrassed to refuse, they grit their teeth and join, or the community they expect does not match the actual situation.

In either case, after a while, they will leave. At this point you need to have an idea of ​​how many users there were at the beginning and how they left. If the ratio is very high, it means that there may be something wrong with the community model.

The fourth is recommendation. Recommendation is a good indicator of value assessment. How many users will be proud to tell others that they are participating in this community? How many users will actively invite friends to join your community?

Regarding recommendations, there is a method that can be used to test it, called NPS, which stands for Net Promoter Score. The recommendation value is the possibility that your users will recommend your product to their friends. This method is used for community recommendation evaluation. NPS is equivalent to a questionnaire survey. The question on this questionnaire is: How likely are you to recommend the community to your friends?

The scores range from 0 to 10. 0 means absolutely impossible, 10 means extremely likely. After community users have answered this question, statistics can be compiled and the scores can be divided into three levels. Those who answer 9 to 10 points are recommenders, and they are more likely to recognize this community.

Those who score 7 to 8 are relatively neutral and passive, and this group of people can be ignored for now. Finally, there are 0 to 6 points. These people are dissatisfied critics who do not particularly recognize your community. After obtaining these three categories, you can calculate according to the formula: the number of recommendations minus the number of criticisms, divided by the total number of samples, and then multiplied by 100%.

In this formula, neutral and passive people are directly ignored because they don’t care. They think this community is okay, but they may also join other similar communities. Only the most and least liked groups are recorded.

Through this formula, we can get a quantifiable answer. If the net promoter score is higher than 50%, then you can breathe a sigh of relief. You are doing well. It would be even better if it can reach above 70%. But if it is lower than 50%, you have to think about why? How can we improve it? Because most people do not recommend or are not satisfied with your community.

The fifth is the cost of leaving. The higher the cost of leaving a community user, the less likely they are to leave. For example, the Speech Association has a business opportunity system. If a user reaches level three, once he leaves, the upward channel will stop. At the same time, it would be less likely for him to see his social friends who he communicated with every week. These all constitute the user's leaving cost, so the higher the leaving cost, the lower the possibility that he will leave.

You can use these five dimensions to evaluate your own community, and at the same time use these five dimensions to evaluate communities similar to yours, so that you will have a deeper understanding of the overall community.

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

This article was compiled and published by @凝了5课 ( Qinggua Media ) by the author @聚了5课. Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!