How to operate a good community?

Introduction: Although all operations have commonalities, there are still many differences in specific aspects of operations. This article mainly analyzes the problems that most community operations usually encounter, including the difficulty of starting a community, the improvement of the quality and quantity of seed users , and how to combine operational means for maintenance. If you read this article carefully, you will definitely find some operational answers you want.

As an operator with a practical background, I will not rashly teach people how to get started with operations based on theoretical knowledge, because your own situation may not be the same as others, the scale of your company, and the resources it owns and allocates to you may not be the same as others, so the problems you encounter in the project (community) stage are also different. There is a saying that goes, "Everything is different, like a mountain between two mountains." So I can tell you responsibly that all operations theories that skip your actual situation and talk about theories with you, telling you that all processes can be applied, are just hooliganism.

We can analyze the problems you encounter through examples and similar solutions, combining processes with ideas for responding to different situations and practices. In actual situations, we can help you solve the problems of community startup and operation efficiently and directly.

1. Before launching the community, you need to understand the company’s purpose of building the community.

The reason for clarifying this issue is just like salespeople need to know the product they are selling before selling it. When new operators join the company, they are in the running-in stage. The higher-ups will not tell you in detail why you want to build this community. Then you can explore the reasons for building the community yourself. Generally, there are the following reasons.

1. Communities that provide personal and corporate spaces, classified information, novels, games , Q&A, and dating, such as Tianya and Mop.

2. Provide services for the company's core business to attract target users and potential users and achieve economic transformation. These are generally e-commerce communities, such as educational institutions, financial products , and communities that charge membership fees for certain services.

3. In order to enrich their own APP experience and create communities for user segmentation, tool apps will do this, and some UGC products will also do this. The Baozou Comics Forum belongs to the latter.

Nowadays, many APPs have their own communities. There are pros and cons to building communities. The advantage is that it can increase user activity and stickiness, and can also be promoted through the community, which can be used for both offense and defense. It is also more reliable when launching activities, business orders, and collecting user suggestions. Even the community data that serves the APP is used as a bargaining chip in negotiations between the BOSS and investors . Of course, there is also the possibility of creating a community in response to the competitive environment. There are also some disadvantages, namely that some speech cannot be controlled and some negative content will appear, which requires us to deal with it in a timely manner.

To sum up, only by understanding the community you are involved in operating can you do preliminary preparations and some strategic analysis around this purpose.

2. Before launching the community, find seed users, fill in data, and collect bugs and suggestions.

What is the company's core business? What is user positioning? The BOSS has a plan from the beginning (but having a plan is one thing, and user portraits must also be followed up). Generally speaking, the product manager (or the BOSS himself is the product manager) will be responsible for the entire planning and structure of the community. So he is responsible for giving birth, while the operator is responsible for raising the children, and putting forward opinions and giving implementation from the perspective of operation and maintenance and management.

The principle of finding seed users and filling data is simple, just like when you open a restaurant, you can’t have no popularity at the beginning, you need to conduct a trial operation, privately invite a bunch of friends and relatives to support you, and then prepare your signature dishes.

But when the store was actually opened, there was no one there and the food was not prepared enough, so one can imagine how the business would be in the future. The initial bug feedback is like the decoration of a restaurant. If there are problems and they are not corrected, what will happen if the customers are hurt when the restaurant officially opens? Therefore, the suggestions of relatives and friends are also a basis for future restaurant management and food improvement (at the same time, we can also conduct a wave of research activities to increase interaction with users)

The following is my analysis of the product Mijing.

1. About the accumulation of basic users - preparation of bases for basic users

Find websites, forums, and other online gathering places with the same users as your current work as a base for capturing users

For example, the product Secret Realm is an early education product, so we can go to the early education, childcare, and education categories on Zhihu to capture seed users, because these are the birthplaces of seed users. If we go to Baidu Zhidao and Tieba, we need to note that the rules of these platforms are relatively strict and you can do it if you have spare time. The community can look for early childhood education communities, disguise themselves as parents or early childhood education experts, enter the community and convert users. Large professional communities are usually created by early childhood education companies or interest-related groups. Therefore, in this case, it is easier to integrate into the community by pretending to be a parent, and you can also poach people at the same time.

If the community is mostly composed of parents, you can pretend to be an expert and position your role flexibly and adaptably according to the specific situation.

In the early stage of product cold start, since most competitors in the same industry have strict management, do not rashly offend your peers before you figure out their ways.

2. Preparation for expanding user base: channel organization and planning

Look for big V accounts about early childhood education on Weibo and WeChat , inquire about the forwarding price, and then investigate whether the data of the other party's account is genuine. Otherwise, paying the cost is a small matter, but missing the opportunity and users will result in loss. Of course, you can also ask a public relations company to do it, but any public relations company will exploit a part of the fees in the middle. Their existence is just to help you save time and effort. If you feel that your industry is not suitable for public relations, you can also look for business cooperation, such as Douban's active groups, and ask the moderators about the promotion costs and seek cooperation.

If you want to expand your business quickly but do not have sufficient resources and strength, it is not recommended that you create your own media account. You have to maintain your own media account while accumulating users for your own products. This kind of feedback is not suitable for attempts in the initial stage and the gains will not outweigh the losses.

3. Screening of seed users

After you are fully prepared, the users promoted from various channels have different needs. Some users brought by big Vs are also very water users, so you need to retain new users through the community that comes with the product or by forming a community. After that, you can conduct trial lectures such as free public classes of early childhood education courses to screen out the first batch of users who are just joining in the fun. Don't rush to abandon the screened users, as they are likely to be potential users. Then calculate the conversion rate based on the users who participate in early childhood education activities, and finally turn them into paid seed users.

At this time, you can go to your competitors to directly poach seed users, such as their forums and communities, and win over people like young parents' representatives. Use their influence to drag away people who are related to them. This is very similar to going to school to win over student union representatives and club representatives. To catch a thief, you must first catch the leader. Although the metaphor is a bit inappropriate, the role of opinion leaders cannot be ignored. After having the core users at the beginning, you can then use operational means to operate this part of users, and then use word of mouth to spread and increase the number.

Next is the initial content filling to cultivate user habits, induce users to meet established needs, and do style orientation, while also satisfying user preferences. Using seed users to form word of mouth, establish an image, and attract similar seed users and general users (for example, if a novel website has more well-known writers, it will also attract other well-known writers to join). This is a practice that needs to be implemented from before going online to after going online.

Three basic and four major parts: content operation, event operation, user operation , promotion (operation)

The community is basically composed of posts and forums, and interactions are completed through topics and messages. For example, Zhihu is defined as a question-and-answer community, and the form of question-and-answer is also reflected through topics (questions), messages (answers, and comments under the answers). People who are new to Zhihu may think that only answers are important and are an important reflection of the content, but Zhihu experts complain that sometimes they can't find good questions. This reflects that the topic of the post is also crucial, and even the interaction in the comment section is equally important.

As a junior content operator, if you only create, copy, and reprocess content according to the requirements of your leader but don’t know why you should do so, then this will be the bottleneck for your promotion to mid- to senior-level operations. The entire community layout packaged for users is just a content display and output outlet. (Of course, this also includes the experience of interactive design and user operations, so the relationship between various operations and even other departments and positions is inseparable, which I will talk about below)

Event operations are responsible for stimulating and improving user activity, as well as setting some phased event goals, such as post output, user online time, browsing depth, payment rate, etc. Generally speaking, activity types are divided into daily activities and large-scale activities. However, every planning and formulation of activity operations will involve the community environment and user conditions. Therefore, not only content operations that create content need to understand user attributes and preferences, but event operations cannot avoid this as well.

If the audience of your community is literary and fresh, but you write a post full of foul language and explosive content, their hearts will be pounding!

If your community is aimed at the elderly, but you plan an extreme sports activity that young people like, their old hearts will almost stop beating.

Therefore, finding the right audience and promoting the right content is of paramount importance. The boutique supermarkets opened by Want Want Group, where I used to work, mistakenly opened stores in some old neighborhoods where people with low incomes gathered. As a result, the 3-yuan steamed buns sold were often complained by passers-by, who said that it was better to buy them at the market next door for 1 yuan each. On the contrary, the steamed buns at the store at Xinjiekou subway station in the center of Nanjing were snatched away by the office workers who swarmed in early in the morning. The wrong strategy led to the exit of boutique supermarkets.

This is why I described at the beginning the need to do various preparatory work such as early planning and positioning. Not only are the operational work of each functional position inseparable, but the communities that the operations serve and even the entire strategy of the company are also inseparable. One wrong step may lead to a complete failure.

User operation is the connecting bridge of other operations, and also the basis provider for improving the company and optimizing everything from strategy to tactics. In addition to basic user feedback collection and analysis, various operational means are also used to encourage users to meet the company's business needs and achieve certain goals and complete data improvement, such as user mechanism, user segmentation, user payment, user return, etc.

The above three operations all require knowledge of data analysis . There is an article about data analysis above - a must for operations, an introduction to data analysis, which you can refer to. Of course, data analysis skills also have their pros and cons, and some companies will separately delineate a data analysis (or operation) position, but just like design and copywriting skills, data analysis is a basic and critical professional quality in operations. (Some companies also divide design and copywriting separately)

The initial work of the community has been roughly introduced. The next work may be somewhat repetitive, but the operational work will also be turbulent due to some external factors (such as competitors and market environment) and internal changes (such as changes in business strategy, resource shortages, poor operations, and data decline). One aspect of the operation is to extend the life of mature products (here refers to the community). The real unknown situations and challenges have just begun after the initial work is completed!

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The author of this article @下宇说操作 is compiled and published by (APP Top Promotion). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!