Application of the user pyramid model: Zhihu case analysis!

As the proposer of the user pyramid model, the ideas of user operation in his official account articles can be sorted out and summarized as a guide for community operations . Taking Zhihu as an example, we conduct an in-depth analysis of its user pyramid model.

1. User pyramid model and its role

In reality, the two models are identical. It's just that the way of application is different.

The user pyramid model is established from top to bottom, with the upper level influencing the lower level. It is mainly to give us a clear understanding of the composition of users. In actual work, we often need to capture the top 20% of users in the pyramid; users can be used to effectively manage users; and each module can be broken down into small pyramids as a management tool to increase the relationship between users.

The user funnel model (inverted pyramid) here is different from the traffic funnel model we generally think of. It is mainly regarded as a path for user growth. We need to incentivize user growth; and it can be used to test the rationality and completeness of product architecture construction to realize user-driven products.

Overall, the user pyramid model is more used for user management to ensure activation and retention. The specific functions are as follows:

2. The practical significance of the user pyramid

Based on the user pyramid, this article lists the ways and methods of using user operations in work, mainly focusing on the grasp and application of user psychology: user-driven, bad money drives out good money, sense of honor, sense of participation, and sense of mutual assistance, etc.

After understanding the theoretical knowledge of establishing and applying the user pyramid model, let’s take Zhihu as an example to analyze the composition of its pyramid, mainly focusing on the following two aspects:

What: What is the user pyramid like? How: How to manage users and effectively promote user activity?

3. Zhihu’s User Pyramid

Zhihu is a question-and-answer community that positions itself as a "high-quality content community on the Chinese Internet." Briefly understand its architecture:

According to the user pyramid model, what is the basic four-layer structure of Zhihu's user pyramid?

1. Top of the pyramid

This layer mainly consists of operations staff, founders, other Zhihu employees and early seed users .

Zhou Yuan, the founder of Zhihu, and top Zhihu employees such as Huang Jixin and Li Shenshen have a high number of answers and are highly regarded. They are definitely the top figures in the Zhihu pyramid.

Early seed users:

As we all know, Zhihu adopted an invitation-based system in its early days.

The first batch of users included well-known industry figures such as Kai-Fu Lee , Manzi Xue, Xu Xiaoping , Lei Jun , Keso, and many people from the investment and media circles. They not only laid the foundation for the product tone of Zhihu, but also led to its rapid popularity in a short period of time.

This group of seed users played a very important role in Zhihu's community atmosphere and content. Although some seed users left Zhihu or stopped using it later, their contribution to Zhihu was undoubtedly of great help and promotion.

2. The second level of the pyramid

User management tools . Zhihu's management tools are mainly based on user organization.

1. The most typical “tool” of Zhihu is Q&A

Similar to the "host of the original post" in the forum era and the "blogger" in the blog 1.0 era, Zhihu has made the title of "question owner" popular. Let famous "friends" go from ordinary people to Zhihu "celebrities".

2. Roundtable: Online guest discussion

Each roundtable will invite 1 moderator and 4 or more guests with many years of industry experience to express their insights. The roundtable brings together a group of people who are interested in the topic in a limited-time discussion format, links the relationship between users and participants, recommends industry bigwigs, and also makes recommendations for active participants.

3. Zhihu Weekly

Zhihu Weekly often compiles outstanding answerers into weekly magazines. It will also be sent on various platforms, such as Amazon, Douban Reading, and other platforms, as well as user emails. On the one hand, the content of Zhihu Weekly can be produced by any user on Zhihu, which can greatly enhance the sense of honor of users whose answers are included; secondly, this can stimulate some users to produce high-quality answers on Zhihu. It is a good form of motivation for users.

4. Zhihu Live

Zhihu Live is of great help to the brand building of big Vs:

The promotion of big Vs on the homepage allows them to get more help; secondly, the initiators will generally put their own public account QR codes at the end of the answers and column articles to attract traffic. These all have a positive effect on the brand building of big Vs.

Earning a certain amount of compensation through knowledge sharing, this direct payment function also allows users to obtain great benefits.

It also complements the user life cycle:

Discover Zhihu - Get knowledge - Answer questions - Receive positive feedback - Make money through Live - Continue sharing

It is mentioned in the user pyramid model that we need to be good at utilizing users. To maintain and improve the community, operations alone are not enough. By launching multiple products, Zhihu has simultaneously solved problems such as improving the community growth system, motivating big V users, expanding the depth of content, and external malicious reprinting.

5. Zhihu Column

The column aims to provide writing tools for users who have continuous creation and collaborative writing needs on specific topics. To create a column, you need to apply and you can use it after passing the review.

The Zhihu column organization is similar to the form of moderators. A column requires the author to have long-term output in a certain field. There are often questions and answers like "The number of followers on Zhihu exceeds xx", "Questions with more than xx likes on Zhihu", etc. These forms of information are also a driving force to encourage users to continuously output and gain attention.

6. Public Editing

This is generated by the editorial team of users. Delegate power to users and let them participate. Their task is to supplement questions, revise language standards and even topic classifications.

3. The third and fourth layers of the pyramid:

Let’s first understand the user composition of Zhihu.

The most important factors surrounding Zhihu users are the number of likes and followers, that is, content consumers and content producers.

On Zhihu, there are often questions like "What is the answer with the most likes on Zhihu?" Therefore, users with more likes are usually considered to be people with higher attainments in a certain field, and therefore receive special attention. Users with a higher number of likes also have a great sense of accomplishment and honor.

We all know that most people are merely consumers of content rather than producers. So what percentage of Zhihu respondents are at the top of this pyramid?

Let’s look at a set of data first:

The distribution of the number of users who agreed with these is as follows:

The above data comes from the Internet: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/19781120

From the above data, we can see that:

Less than 20% of users have answered questions; only 8.76% of users have received likes; only 1.128% of users have received more than 100 likes (this part of users accounts for 10.1% of the users who received likes); only 0.1633% of users have received more than 1,000 likes (this part of users accounts for 1.86% of the users who received likes). In other words, Zhihu pyramid users only account for one percent! (For the time being, it is considered that users with more than 100 likes are pyramid users)

On the whole, Zhihu focuses on people and content, and demonstrates its sense of honor to users very well. However, Zhihu's pyramid users account for a relatively low proportion of the total number of users; the use of user tools is relatively small, and few users themselves initiate more high-quality and interesting interactive topics or columns. For Zhihu, promoting user activity and managing users are very core tasks. So how does Zhihu conduct user operations?

4. User Operation of Zhihu

Huang Jixin, co-founder of Zhihu, once said:

Recognition is the core experience that all social products and services provide to users.

From the third part of Zhihu’s user organization tools, we can see that the core experience Zhihu gives to users is actually the recognition of its professionalism. Agreeing, collecting, focusing, including in Zhihu Weekly, Zhihu Live and Zhihu likes ranking, etc., are all means to gain recognition for user answers. This is also because Zhihu pays high attention to and maintains the users at the top of the pyramid.

1. User-driven & Participatory

As we all know, Zhihu adopted an invitation system before it was opened. The professional answers of seed users formed Zhihu's unique community atmosphere, which not only allowed professionals to participate, but also was user-driven and improved the product mechanism, so that high-quality answers could be accumulated. In a revision of Zhihu, Zhihu changed the user timeline from topic dynamics to user dynamics, which caused an uproar. This also indirectly reflects that users are very concerned about Zhihu's dynamics.

2. Bad money drives out good money & organizational rules

Zhihu opened registration to the public in 2012. It has put a lot of effort into balancing "big" and "specialized", but has also been subject to some criticism. In order to avoid a significant reduction in the "aesthetics and quality" of Zhihu and to weaken the influence of "bad money", some measures have been taken.

In terms of product form, it provides a series of management functions such as anonymity, reporting, objection, no help, folding, muting, and account blocking to strengthen user supervision. First, it "hides" some topics or vulgar answers in terms of sorting and user behavior. Secondly, Zhihu officials have also made some regulations on the details of expression, such as language expression, symbols, format and other details of written expression. Users can provide feedback to the operation team by reporting private messages and reporting bad answers, which will be handled technically, and the mechanism will be improved step by step from scratch.

From the operational perspective, guide users to develop in a favorable direction. For example, Zhihu sets up restrained and restricted topics; some topics that are prone to being cluttered are not included in public content lists such as Zhihu Discovery, Weekly Selections, and Zhihu Reading. Perhaps this can provide some inspiration to the once literary Douban. In addition, by reporting private messages and reporting bad answers, we can provide feedback to the operations team, which will then be processed technically, and the mechanism will be improved step by step.

3. Sense of honor, helping to build the user's personal brand and helping the user grow

Traditional question-and-answer communities such as Baidu Knows and Wikipedia are also in the form of question-and-answer communities. However, on online services that are based on knowledge graphs, users find knowledge and just leave. Zhihu can help users build personal brands very well, has received a lot of attention, greatly improved user stickiness, and ensured that every answer gets the exposure and recognition it deserves. In this process of dissemination, whether the user himself has enough fans is relatively weakened.

Eg. A popular case on the Internet: Tian Jishun is an obstetrician and gynecologist. He originally had only a few hundred followers on Sina Weibo . Later, he participated in a discussion on doctor-patient relationship held on Zhihu, and quickly became a Zhihu celebrity with his professional and rigorous answers. It has currently gained 50,000 followers, answered more than 400 questions, and received 320,000 "likes". Answerers and sharers also gain recognition through “likes” and can build a great personal brand. Is this a good channel for the self-media which is very popular nowadays?

In addition, Zhihu can help spread content:

Zhihu's official Weibo account is also a communication channel, with 5.3 million followers at present. Friends who browse the Weibo account can also get information from some of Zhihu's selected knowledge and questions and answers. Secondly, good and excellent content will also be reposted on other platforms, and Zhihu jokes can often be seen in the circle of friends. The publication of Zhihu Weekly on multiple channels can also bring exposure to excellent answerers. For example, the "Zhihu Selections" sent to users on Douban, Duokan, Amazon, etc. every week helps excellent answerers to spread their knowledge. The "Zhihu Newsletter" sent regularly to news media has now been used by many media to contact interviewees through Zhihu, allowing users' insights in their personal fields to be spread. Zhihu has also recommended many users to participate in various industry salons, public speeches, etc., which are all magic weapons to increase the stickiness of existing users.

4. Sense of mutual assistance and interaction between users

The main focus here is on the relationships between users. It is common to recruit people on Zhihu and follow the WeChat accounts of various big names. Guide users to have broader and deeper interactions and transform weak relationships into strong ones. In addition, offline activities also promote the connection between users and user groups, making users more active on Zhihu.

5. Benefits to Users

Some columns opened by Zhihu, such as Zhihu Live and Zhihu, can bring direct benefits to users. Of course, for users, the biggest gains are getting likes and promoting personal brands.

6. Emotional Marketing

In order to discover new high-quality users and give more new high-quality answers the opportunity to be exposed, Zhihu's operators will communicate with newly discovered high-quality users, understand the users' professions and backgrounds, exchange professional knowledge with them, invite them to answer relevant questions, and even become good friends with the users.

Like many brands, Zhihu is also building its own brand invisibly. In addition to the platform's Zhihu Weekly, some "humanistic" language is also used to interact with users, such as "My Zhihu 201X", "Creation and Voting of Zhihu Mascot", "Zhihu World Cup Guessing Contest", "Zhihu Visiting Day" and many other operational activities to bring users closer to Zhihu, making users feel that they are part of Zhihu and are constantly working hard to make Zhihu better.

V. Summary

The use of the user pyramid model is a tool and means of operation. On the one hand, we focus on the top users in the pyramid, and on the other hand, we need to promote the growth of ordinary users, especially the need for insight into users and focus on the core experience of users, so as to grasp the core of user operations. To sum up, there are the following points:

Grasp the core user group at the top of the pyramid, establish product mechanisms and operation strategies around the core needs of this part of users; be able to understand the user psychology: sense of honor, sense of participation, sense of mutual assistance, etc., to create a good atmosphere between the community, users and users, and enhance the interaction and stickiness between users; help users build personal brands, enhance their sense of honor and belonging, so that users can continue to output more high-quality content; use a variety of user organizations and tools, borrow the power of users to manage the community, can get twice the result with half the effort, thereby rapidly expanding the scope of influence; use emotional marketing skillfully to make users feel that they are a part of it, and continue to work hard to make the community better.

above.