Is the community really out now?

Nowadays, it seems that everyone is paying more attention to WeChat operations . Community operations seem to be an outdated product in the eyes of many people. They believe that what the community did before can now be accomplished by establishing a few WeChat groups , and the timeliness and goal-orientedness seem to be clearer.

The rapid development of mobile devices has made community forums that have established a firm foothold on the PC seem unable to keep up. Therefore, many people have this question: Is the community really out of date?

I believe that many of my friends are like me. They learned a lot of knowledge from community forums on the Internet, starting from the earliest BT community, and then gradually moved to Tianya, Douban, and now Zhihu. In fact, in some specific fields or vertical fields, communities have always existed very strongly. For example, the familiar Zhihu is a model of question-and-answer community, while Douban, Hujiang.com, etc. are representatives of vertical field communities.

It can be said that the value of certain vertical communities is far greater than WeChat . Compared with Weibo and WeChat, the biggest advantage of the community is that it provides the target user groups with a place where they can choose to discuss. Each user in the community can see different topics and express their views on a certain topic. Other users can also express their opinions on this view. These advantages are difficult to achieve through Weibo and WeChat. The content pushed by WeChat public accounts every day is mostly screened, and it is difficult to classify and select the hundreds of messages in WeChat groups every day. At this time, the community is a very good existence and provides a platform.

I have previously operated two community forums, one is an online education community for financial certification, and the other is an online loan home. Although they are two different types of communities with different user attributes, the key to community operation still lies in two major directions: content operation and user operation .

Based on my own experience, I would like to share with you my understanding of these two major directions.

Community content operation

First of all, the most important thing is to determine the target group, so that the content of the community will set the tone, just like the previous financial certification community.

At that time, we had three target groups:

Financial institution employees

Non-financial institution employees

Graduates from the University of Finance

For these three types of people, we will produce different content to meet their needs. At this time, the community editor’s job is to find high-quality content posts and make good use of them, using various methods such as pinning, recommending to the homepage or channel page, adding highlights, marking in red, etc., to promote the posts to the place closest to the users. In addition to discovering or creating original good content, you can also use various methods to integrate and package high-quality content, such as monthly financial special planning, financial knowledge explanation, etc.

The ultimate goal of content operation is to allow community users to write by themselves, so that more people will be attracted to read and the entire community can achieve healthy development.

Community user operation

After talking about content, let’s talk about users. In fact, user operation has been mixed in the content operation stage.

Take Wangdaizhijia.com as an example. As a portal information website for the online lending industry, its target group is clearly people who invest in p2p. So, for operating the community users of Wangdaizhijia.com, the most important thing is how to increase the number of registrations of these investment users and how to keep these investment users active. Relatively speaking, the number of users in an industry's portal community will be relatively large. These users are often brought into the community by advertisements or word of mouth, and will generally browse the community first. Some people stayed at this stage, and some of them registered in the community. Among this group of people, some may find that your community has a good atmosphere and advertising value; some may find that the articles in this community are very valuable and resonate with them, and they must discuss them, so they register and enter the posting stage. Users will become tired after posting for a period of time, and this is when operations personnel are needed, who can disguise themselves to interact with members online. After a while, those who frequently post the top posts can no longer resist the urge to post their own posts and be the protagonists. So I just created an original post and asked others to push my post up, and thus, a high-quality user was born.

Having said so much, let’s get back to the topic and talk about a community that I am currently running: Dianrong Community. According to the latest ranking of Wangdaizhijia in July, Dianrong.com ranks third. As an online lending industry with more than 2,000 platforms, it is not easy to rank third. In the overall uneven environment of the online lending industry, Dianrong.com, which ranks third, is definitely a safe and stable guarantee for investors . Currently, there are more than 800,000 registered members in the community, and the number of posts per day is about 2,000. These are accumulated from the good word-of-mouth publicity in the past few years.

The key words for financial community operations are nothing more than: PV/UV ratio, number of posts and number of online users, section positioning, etc. In a nutshell, it is to accurately locate valuable traffic. Dianrong has put a lot of effort into operating the community before, which has been of vital help to my current operations. With good brand endorsement, we have accumulated a large number of high-quality active users. My next job will be to operate these core users, let them produce high-quality content, and then drive the entire community.

Regarding community user operations, there is a famous saying: "Active community users account for only 10% at most, while the other 90% are silent users who do not need social relationships and only use the community as an instant media and tool ."

Most netizens in the community do not want to post every day. Many times, they come just to find some information, or to ask a question that they cannot find an answer to, or they may come to watch something. Therefore, only by driving those core active users and then influencing the remaining 90% of users can the entire community become truly popular.

Now the daily check-in function of the website has returned to the community section, which makes it much more convenient for users to browse the community. At present, our community has a highlight - the points mall, which will be launched soon. The purpose is to allow community users to truly use the Dianrong coins they obtain in the forum for consumption. This is undoubtedly a very attractive project. Consumer finance is truly changing our lives.

Summarize

I have read the operational experience summarized by countless predecessors: do more, think more, and summarize more.

For the community, doing more means understanding users better and maintaining core users. Thinking more means that while using some Internet products in daily life, you should also apply some excellent operating methods to your own products. To summarize more means not forgetting data analysis and moving forward in the data.