Have you encountered a bottleneck when doing user operations? You can try the community operation model!

Currently, there are different understandings of community operations in the industry, but I think the concept is not important. What is important is whether it has guiding value for execution. There are many ways to engage in user operations , it is not as simple as just guarding a group and chatting with users. The community operation mentioned in this article can be considered a new idea.

Here, community refers to a group of people with common attributes (such as hobbies and regions). Community operation is to encourage users to spontaneously organize communities, with official support such as authorization, promotion, material gifts and management training, to guide community users to be continuously and frequently active on the product.

Four major characteristics of community operation model

①The number of users covered is large and there is room for expansion

Community operations are established and managed spontaneously by users and are not limited by the manpower of operations, so in theory they can cover thousands or even tens of thousands of users.

② User self-driven, fully utilizing and mobilizing user resources and enthusiasm

Under the centralized operation model, we can only rely on the energy, creativity and resources of official operators. Under the community operation model, users will voluntarily take out their time and resources to plan and promote projects. To a certain extent, this is also a kind of resource integration, giving users who are interested and have time the opportunity to display their talents.

③ A better grasp of demand

The most important thing in operations is to grasp user needs and plan things that users like, but this is also the most difficult thing. Because the butt determines the head, it is always difficult for operations personnel to consider issues from the user's perspective. Therefore, if users are allowed to participate in management, this problem can be solved. After all, users themselves are the ones who understand them best.

④Users gather due to common attributes

Users have a common language and are motivated to gather together because they have certain common attributes. This attribute covers a larger or smaller group of people, as long as the characteristics are obvious and can be clearly distinguished, it is valid. For example, interest attributes such as movies, football, and celebrities; geographical attributes such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou; profit attributes such as community homeowners committees and alliance chambers of commerce; and segmented attributes such as pregnant women, parents of children entering junior high school, and car clubs.

Specific practices of community operation

After understanding the concepts and characteristics, here are five points to describe the specific practices of community operations:

①Determine the community direction based on demand

Analyze the target user groups of the product, try to exhaust all demand points, and then select the direction suitable for community operation. For example, for a fan product, the user's need is to support their own star, including understanding trends, supporting works, participating in activities, and being obsessed with them on a daily basis.

If my product is used in offline activities such as celebrity press conferences and roadshows, I can set up fan clubs for popular celebrities in various places and let fans participate in, organize and promote activities to contribute to the product.

②User self-management

The most important point is that the community belongs to the users, not the mercenaries of the product. Because only in this way will users devote themselves wholeheartedly and mobilize all their resources to operate the community. This is the most essential difference from centralized operation.

As a product operator, my role here is to provide support and guidance. Operators formulate community systems and user rights, provide online recruitment and promotion resources, and material support such as gifts required for offline activities.

Since users may not be good at management, operators also need to follow up on the progress of key communities and provide some management suggestions. For example, strictly control the number of people in the community, make sure it does not exceed 100 people, and try to keep it within the range of 30-50 people.

③ Closed-loop incentive system

The community must be valuable so that users will participate and be active, which in turn promotes the continued operation of the community. This requires the design of a closed-loop incentive system, in which users play in the community according to designated "rules of the game ", guiding them to become outstanding members of the community and high-quality active users of the product. This is the most difficult and most critical part of community operation.

It is difficult to generalize about how to build an incentive system. First of all, we need to consider the ultimate purpose of operating this community. If the ultimate goal is to increase the activity of the app, then all operational means should be to direct traffic to the app, and the user group is only an auxiliary communication platform. Specifically, a system can be established whereby only those who contribute high-quality content on the app at least once a week can remain in the community and continue to enjoy the privileges. This is the simplest incentive closed loop.

④Measurement indicators

Community operation is a branch of user operation, so indicators are also needed to measure effects and progress. Since the purpose of operating a community is to increase product activity, the core indicators are consistent with the product, such as the UV, UGC volume, order volume, next-day/weekly retention, etc. There are also some process indicators, such as the number of new members in the community, the cumulative number of members, the proportion of active users, etc., which can measure the operation of the community itself.

Of course, there are certainly many situations where it is impossible to provide data, or it is impossible to prove the driving effect on product indicators. Some subjective judgment is needed at this time, and we must believe that not all operational methods have data to prove their effectiveness at any stage. Therefore, if you subjectively believe that it is feasible and effective, you can continue to do it. But there must also be a phased plan so that adjustments can be made in a timely manner.

The above community operation practices are generally applicable to the early stages from new construction to initial scale. It is likely that after having 10 active communities and 500 active users, community operations will enter the scale-up stage.

Bottlenecks in community operations

With the input of manpower and consumption of resources, the rapid growth in the early stage will definitely not be stable and sustainable. When it reaches a critical value, it will encounter bottlenecks, such as the following three:

①The growth rate of the number of people slowed down

In the early stages of community operation, the number of members will increase rapidly depending on the promotional resources invested. If the total amount remains unchanged, the growth that resources can bring to the community will definitely become smaller and smaller, so the growth rate will slow down. Without new resources or better approaches, growth may stagnate.

②Increase in management costs

As shown in the figure below, the management model of community operation is a pyramid, with senior executives assisting in management, and the official is only responsible for connecting with senior executives. However, if the number of executives increases, then official management costs will also increase. For example, if the number of executives increases from 10 to 50, the official manpower must also increase from 1 to at least 2. By analogy, the more senior executives there are, the greater the official human cost.

③Lack of product implementation

In the early stages of operation, communities existed in the form of QQ groups or WeChat groups , which were convenient and direct to use. However, groups are instant messaging tools , and it is difficult to accumulate content and relationships. Therefore, when the number of members in the community increases and the management model and activities become more complicated, it will be difficult for groups to meet the needs. It would be best if you could have your own product that meets the needs of the community. But this will take a lot of time and R&D costs, and many communities are unable to support it.

The above three problems will only be encountered when community operations reach the scale stage. If you want to make a breakthrough, you must adjust the previous model, otherwise the development of the community will likely stagnate.

The solution is to establish the complete life cycle of the community and provide corresponding operating methods according to different development stages. The core idea is to allocate manpower and resources to important communities, to motivate and assist them to make more contributions to the product; at the same time, to set a good example for other communities. See the figure below for details:

Community operation strategy

The life cycle of a community can be divided into three steps: initial establishment, growth and core, which is the process from small to large. Make targeted operation strategies based on the characteristics of the community at each step.

① Initial construction stage

After developing to the scale stage, there will be a large number of spontaneously added communities. Because they cannot afford the huge manpower costs, operators will no longer review and train new communities one by one. They can only open them up to users to create and manage them spontaneously after establishing an access system, and the official will not intervene. In other words, this is a stage of survival of the fittest, but it can increase the user base of the community without increasing operating costs.

② Growth stage

After the great waves, a few communities with potential and rapid growth will stand out and continue to be active. At this time, the operations staff began to intervene, paying attention to and supporting these communities, investing resources to assist in promotion and exposure, hoping to cultivate core communities that can be operated maturely.

③Core stage

In the entire community, most of the activity and contributions come from a small number of core communities, which is also in line with the 80/20 principle. The community at this stage is mature, well-structured, large in scale, and has many talented people. Operations personnel are encouraged to maximize their continuous contributions by focusing on maintenance and allocating resources to ensure the activity of the entire community.

The above roughly divides the life cycle of a community into three stages. Many detailed issues will be encountered during the implementation process. For example, how to specify the promotion standards for these three stages, whether there should be a downgrade mechanism; how to make users aware of this system without the launch of a product, etc. It is difficult to summarize universal rules for these problems, and we can only decide based on the specific circumstances.

For example, Maoyan Movie has accumulated a large number of movie-loving users. Unlike other competitors, these users are ticket-buying users who are accustomed to going to the cinema to watch movies. Analyzing the needs of this group, they can be summarized as ticket discounts, online communication, offline gatherings, advance viewing, reading and writing film reviews, etc. Based on these needs, it can be judged that offline gatherings and online exchanges are more suitable for community operation models.

Online communication refers to users discussing topics of interest in groups and apps, such as currently popular movies or celebrity trends, which belongs to the user's interest attribute; offline gatherings refer to users organizing group movie watching and gathering activities, which are usually participated by users from the same region, which belongs to the user's geographical attribute. Based on these two attributes of users, Maoyan Movie guides users to establish movie fan communities, hoping to cover tens of thousands of active users and thus boost the activity of the product.

• First, find suitable community leaders among existing core users, establish two communities as benchmarks through training, guidance and resource support, and then start formal recruitment on the online page. In the first recruitment, these two benchmark communities played a very important role in helping browsing users quickly understand the matter, while also playing the role of role models.
• Secondly, promote the recruitment page through internal resources and external channels . Applicants can add QQ to inquire the official for details. This step can be handled by a core user, who will be responsible for explaining and screening applicants.
• Then, the screened applicants will enter the stage of creating a new community, and the official will help determine the community’s theme, system and management structure. These tasks should be completed by community leaders, but in the early stages of operation, the official still needs to do a lot of communication and training work to support the establishment of this system. Once this stage is passed, the community's life cycle will begin to operate spontaneously.
• Finally, help the leaders of these newly established communities recruit members and quickly develop these communities to a certain scale, so that they become the second batch of benchmark communities. Allow users who continue to wait and see to perceive this explosive growth, attract new users to participate, and continue to expand the scale of the community.

After completing these four steps, the architecture of the entire community system is established and slowly begins to operate autonomously. In terms of specific results, Maoyan Cinema has established local branches in 50 cities, basically covering the cities with the largest number of ticket-purchasing users, and this number is still increasing. Afterwards, converting these users into active users of the app can increase the number of contributing users.

Assuming the community covers 10,000 people, and 40% of users convert online every week, there will be 4,000 contributing users. These top users can contribute high-quality film reviews and topics in a timely manner, which has a huge driving effect on the product. In addition, branches can also be based in various cities to assist Maoyan Films in continuing its vertical brand penetration. Although it is difficult to measure the short-term effects with numbers, it can also be considered one of the benefits.

Similar to the case of Maoyan Movie, there are many products that are also based on interests, such as food, travel, music, sports, etc., so these products can try to apply the community operation model.