If you don’t understand these, don’t start a community!

I was recently asked: How do you understand community operations ? What do you think is the biggest difference between your views on community and most current views?

Thanks to being frequently pulled into various communities, as an operator rather than an ordinary audience, I have made some observations and thoughts when looking at them with a critical eye, thus writing this article. I would also like to take this opportunity to summarize the common pitfalls in community operations, and will continue to update when I think of more.

In the past two years or so, I have been exposed to social networks and have a lot of private traffic, and my friends have been having lively discussions about it. "Community" and "private domain traffic operation" seem to have become a panacea for corporate revenue growth. Both large, medium and small online companies and offline physical stores have set up communities, always thinking that if they find a few people, buy dozens of mobile phones, create dozens of WeChat accounts, and recruit a few community operation employees to sell goods in the community every day, their business will develop rapidly. Is this really the case? Next, let’s discuss what community operation is.

1. What is the essence of community operation?

In the current discussion on communities, there are many discussions on how communities are changing our business models from the perspective of macro models and era changes, as well as discussions on how effective and good community means are from a micro perspective, and there is also a concept that defines communities as not just WeChat groups but a form of human connection. But I don’t want to talk about this. I want to stand from the perspective of an operator and restore the fundamental purpose of building a community and the goals that need to be achieved. A community can be seen as a place that can carry users and continuously reach them. Previously, these users may have been scattered everywhere, perhaps on apps developed by themselves, or on various platforms such as Douyin and Taobao, or in offline stores. However, now users are guided to WeChat, which has 1 billion daily active users, for unified maintenance and management.

From the perspective of the enterprise, the community or even the entire private domain ecosystem is the link between the enterprise and users, and can be regarded as a customer relationship management system (CRM). Since it is about managing users, it must be user-centric and user-oriented.

The way to build a community like this is clear at a glance, that is, people-oriented! Translated into operational terms, it means professional and sophisticated user operations.

Therefore, community operation is easy to understand. Community operation is a channel for operating users. If you want to operate users well, you need to focus on the user's life cycle. The ultimate goal is to increase the value of individual users. In the social channel, it is mainly reflected in improving retention and conversion (repeat purchase) indicators.

Therefore, let’s abandon the mindset of treating users as traffic and simply transferring them to social networks to harvest traffic, and transform into a user operation mindset that focuses on user lifetime value!

In the context of corporate growth anxiety, there is no traffic bonus, but there is still a user value bonus!

The key to operating a community well is to build a user management system to truly improve efficiency. What is tested is the comprehensive strength of the company's products, services, content, etc., which may not be as simple as imagined!

But in actual operation, it may be imagined to be too simple, which leads to the following pitfalls!

2. The pitfalls of community operations that I have witnessed

Pitfall 1: No matter what business the company does, it needs to set up a group

There are many myths about community operations in the market, and community operation training can be seen everywhere. There are community leadership camps, community president classes, community economic summits, etc., ranging from 99 yuan for a big-name sharing session to tens of thousands of yuan for two days and one night, where you can take home a set of universal community operation secrets. All reports say that today's businesses are worth re-doing using social media. Therefore, after reading numerous reports and attending numerous meetings, many bosses suddenly thought: “We want to create a community too!” They immediately bought a few mobile phones, created a few WeChat accounts, and started a WeChat group.

But in fact, not all projects can build communities, or in other words, not all companies can build communities. Because communities are likely to involve changes in the overall structure of online operations. For example, if an offline educational institution starts to build a community, it will inevitably need to consider the relationship between its original sales and current community operations. If the structure is not clear and the benefits are not distributed well, it will easily fail.

Judging from the actual business situation, many projects involve low frequency, privacy, short-term services, etc. Building communities is time-consuming and labor-intensive, and may not be cost-effective for enterprises.

So, what kind of business is suitable for community? You can think about it from the following five aspects.

Almost all products that require heavy services are more suitable for community and private domain. This is also the reason why the most successful community is in the education industry. Because educational products have high average order value and long decision-making cycles, long-term interaction with users is required. At the same time, although the consumption frequency of educational products is not high, course products usually range from low-level to high-level and have a certain degree of repurchase. In addition, the traffic cost in the education industry is too high, and refined user operations can help reduce costs. Therefore, building a community in the education industry is a more cost-effective approach.

In addition, communities can be used as an additional service in many industries. When product homogeneity is severe, it is easy to form differentiated competition by adding standard products and personalized services.

However, some companies do not consider the actual situation and blindly bet all their revenue growth on social networks, treating social networks as the only way for companies to build brands, create channels, and increase users. Therefore, they need to continuously harvest users in the community to achieve revenue targets, but in the end they find that it is tantamount to drinking poison to quench thirst and accelerates their own death.

Community is a good remedy, but not a panacea.

In fact, community building is something that requires a lot of manpower. Many companies hire a few community operators and manage hundreds of communities, but this may not generate much conversion. Therefore, when building a community, one needs to comprehensively consider issues such as operational efficiency, cost, and growth potential.

If you want to use community operations as the only growth channel, the simplest thing to do is to think about:

• The carrying capacity of a single community is limited. Can it generate stable repurchases?
• Can the management (staff + activity) costs of a single community be reduced after it becomes stable?
• How to continuously acquire new community members, by introducing products or attracting new members?

In addition, budgets and manpower are always limited, and the unlimited expansion of the community is also a problem. Think about it more. For the core growth business, besides social media, are there other ways to grow? For example, channel distribution, short videos, ground promotion, telephone marketing, etc.

Therefore, we need to make a comprehensive comparison of operating methods and choose those that are efficient, have room for growth, and are cost-effective. Business growth should also be a combination of measures, not just relying on one item.

Pitfall 2: Community operations are all about sales and customer service

Judging from major recruitment platforms, the demand for community operations has soared, and the education industry has the greatest demand for community operations positions. However, judging from many recruitment needs, the threshold for community operation positions is relatively low, and the position requires more sales ability.

I have come into contact with some people who used to work in community operations, and they also think that they are doing sales and customer service in the group. Especially those whose first job is community operation, they think that the operation work is limited to this. When I heard it, I felt horrified.

Many bosses and even community operators themselves believe that their day's work is nothing more than:

• Go to the company and send a morning report to 30 user groups
• Select a batch of product links, add copywriting, and throw them into the group
• Answer questions from users in the group
• Pull people, kick people
• Plan a check-in event and launch it next week
• Send red envelopes to encourage everyone to click on the link
• Send a round of good night posters to 30 users

This is still a relatively complete process. The incomplete part is regularly sending links to the group every day. Over time, it naturally became a community customer service who announced rules, issued notifications, and answered questions in the group. The more people in the group there are, and the phone is always in hand, even 007 is possible. What is the effect of doing this? Maybe I can only deceive myself: I really tried hard to interact in the group.

This is a mistake that many novice community operators often make. This is a typical case of using tactical diligence to cover up strategic laziness.

Here, I really want to give community operations a fair name and also give some small suggestions to community operators.

For enterprises, community operation is online sales, which is both right and wrong. The fundamental purpose of operating a community is indeed to increase revenue. Even the conversion rate of the community is a criterion for evaluating whether a community is a good one, but it does not mean that community operation is sales.

Offline sales are usually one-to-one, while online community conversions are one-to-many, and group members will influence each other. Therefore, if you rely on a single-point sales approach, you will definitely not achieve the desired results.

The sales process only accounts for a small part of the work of community operation. Usually I need to do a lot of work at the beginning, such as making the community active first, creating a community atmosphere first, establishing relationships with community members first, etc., and even how to design the process of selling goods in the community. For example: The first step is to activate users, the second step is to educate users, the third step is to stimulate demand, the fourth step is to stimulate emotions, and the fifth step is to complete the transaction.

This way the sales process becomes a natural process, instead of just throwing the link into the group and calling it a day. These efforts are invisible behind the scenes. The highest level of social conversion is to convert users silently, and these are based on insights into user needs, rather than on how superb sales skills are.

A truly powerful community operator must be good at operating users. He can operate well not only in the community, but also wherever the users are.

Because what’s important is not the community, but the users!

Therefore, as a novice in community operation, don’t do some superficial work, but think more about what value this matter has for users. What you do cannot be directly replaced by robots.

As for those bosses who only know how to set sales targets for you, and ask you to post links and answer questions in the community without telling you why they do this and how to achieve the goals, you can consider leaving, because you will not gain anything and will gradually develop cognitive biases about community operations.

If you can get the standardized community operation process (SOP) provided by the company, ask yourself more questions: why the process is set up in this way and why this thing needs to be done at this stage.

Improve your cognition and understand the overall situation of the community so as not to get lost in sales and customer service work.

Pitfall 3: 90% of communities die within 7 days

According to a survey, 90% of communities will decline and die before finding a reward mechanism. Why is this? Because most people don’t understand why they should form a community. Maybe they see that everyone around them is doing it, and they will be out of date if they don’t do it, so they blindly pursue the number of groups and group members. As a product that carries users, the community and even the entire WeChat ecosystem can retain users, sell products, provide customer service, complete brand promotion, etc., and can form a complete business closed loop.

Therefore, the community itself can be regarded as a product, and community operation is to operate the community as a product.

As a product, the basic points of community are the same as those of product development:

1. What value can the community I create bring to target users?
2. Can it continue to bring value?
3. How can we achieve the above two points?

The second thing is to think about how to achieve your own goals in the process of creating preset value for target users.

On this issue, many people may be thinking in the opposite or even wrong direction when it comes to community operations. Because they often think about what the community can bring to themselves or their company, rather than what the community can bring to users. This is actually a logical error.

Thinking from the logic of the product, the three most important points are: community positioning, community value, and community conversion.

1) Community positioning

• Target users: Who does the community provide services for? Is it a VIP user or a regular user?
• Community Services: What stable services are provided? Is it knowledge sharing or companion Q&A service?
• Community cycle: How long is the life cycle of a community? Is it a long-term community or a community established for a certain event, which will be disbanded when the event ends (flash group).

2) Community Value

What value does it provide to users within the community? Whether it can meet the principles of usefulness, interest and substance. Is it content that is useful to users, some interesting and engaging activities, or some knowledge or content sharing with scarce value?

3) Social Conversion

Why should users buy things in your group?

Think clearly about users' purchasing motivations, then improve social services and choose appropriate conversion methods. Think clearly about why users will pay for your product. Can your product satisfy their pain points? Is it the added value provided by the community? Or is it the trust in the group owner?

I won’t expand on this here. Next time I will write a special article on how the community’s positioning and value are reflected.

Pitfall 4: Indiscriminate operation for all users

Many people create communities by simply adding their WeChat friends to the group, and then discover that there is little communication between community users, no matter how the group’s agents try to create the atmosphere, the expected speeches by big names never appear. This is a typical consequence of not stratifying the community or providing differentiated services. If you are stuck in this situation now, I will send out some red envelopes to get everyone active, and I will find a few fake accounts to lead the pace in the group. You will find that no matter what you do, it is useless because the root problem has not been solved.

If you operate a community like a product, the user demands of this product may be different. If you want to operate this product well, it is best to separate users with different needs and then meet their needs in a targeted manner. This is user stratification.

For example, ordinary users want to acquire knowledge, while professional users want to meet more powerful people or gain a sense of honor, etc. Only when the needs of users at different levels are met can we talk about subsequent activity and conversion. Usually, the users of a product are distributed in a pyramid structure, with the levels from low to high being ordinary users, active users, contributing users, and professional users, which constitute the overall structure of the community.

Now that we know we need to differentiate users, what characteristics do users meet that reflect their needs? On what principles should the division be based? Based on data.

Users usually generate three types of data on a product: basic data, business data, and behavioral data. If these three types of data can be collected, it is almost possible to complete a user profile and demand modeling, and then improve business data in a targeted manner. Refer to a brief WeChat fan portrait made by a colleague of my team for a blogger with more than 5 million fans. At that time, we wanted to sell some customized peripheral products to these fans, and understand the needs of fans and recommend products that meet their needs. Fans come from various channels, so the portraits and needs are very vague. It is not certain whether this model will work, so this survey and analysis was conducted.

Finally, from a macro perspective, the above is differentiated operation for members within the same community. However, if there are large differences between members within a group, it is necessary to separate users with similar portraits and needs to establish more segmented communities. For example, paying users and non-paying users enjoy different products and services; for example, VIP user communities require meeting certain standards, and even paying annual fees ranging from hundreds to tens of thousands of yuan to enter. The purpose is to screen users and keep the community at high standards and quality. Therefore, if you want a community to remain active, it is not as simple as just organizing some activities on the surface. The most important thing is whether the population is segmented enough, the portrait is clear, and the needs are clear.

Pitfall 5: Selling products as soon as the community is created

I was shopping in a mall and came across a clothing store. The clothes were not cheap, so I didn't buy anything. The clerk took the initiative to add me on WeChat and told me to let me know when new models were available. Then, I was pulled into a community with only 25 people. As soon as I entered, I was told that I was participating in an event. The person with the best luck in grabbing red envelopes could get a wool coat and a 200 yuan voucher. Then they started to post pictures and videos frequently to flood the screen. The private messages I received were all kinds of discount and recharge advertisements, but no new product recommendations. I was wondering, when you added me, did you know what style of clothing I like? What are my product preferences? They sent me all kinds of advertisements right away. This is treating WeChat as group text messages. But have they ever considered the user experience of being disturbed by advertisements every day? Don’t ask me why I didn’t delete it, because I wanted to use it as a negative example for everyone.

After such a fierce operation, can you guess what the effect of the subsequent activities will be? I can tell you that there were only 25 people in the group, and 25 red envelopes were sent out. After 5 hours, when I checked, 5 of them had been received.

Creating a group is just a process of community operation. Group members have not established any knowledge or trust in the community rules or the brand. Why should users pay for it? So when you don’t understand your users at all, don’t provide any value to your users, and haven’t established a trusting relationship with your users, don’t talk about conversion. The core is that they don't understand why they are doing this. If the purpose of setting up a group is to organize an event to harvest customers, not only will customers not buy it, but frequent promotions in the group will also damage the brand value. A high-end brand will be made to sell like street goods, with a loud speaker shouting discounts every day, which is not worth the loss.

It is also an offline clothing store community. A store that I often buy from is much smarter. Although it is just a simple operation, the group is quite active from time to time. Users in the group will actively ask about the prices of clothing, and they can go to the store to try them on or buy them directly online. Although it is a small community, from what I have observed, the conversion rate is not bad.

To sum up, the reason is that the community has a clear positioning and its main purpose is to recommend new products. In addition, community managers are not customer service staff, but experts.

In the group, she doesn't send any promotional advertising information, nor does she use a loudspeaker to yell at everyone to come and buy. She just matches the clothes in the store and takes beautiful pictures for everyone to appreciate. In fact, this is essentially a kind of content seeding. The content of the community is various beautiful pictures of outfits. By establishing links with users through good content, users will naturally ask about the items if they think they look good. These items can be purchased in stores, which greatly shortens the user's consumption decision-making costs. This in itself provides value to users. When there is value in the community, everyone will cherish it and will be active in it from time to time, so that the community operation can develop in the long term.

At this time, the group manager who provides value to the community is no longer an ordinary customer service representative, but a clothing matching expert in everyone's eyes, so everyone trusts her recommendations and is willing to pay.

Conclusion

The above pitfalls are due to insufficient understanding of the community. Community operation is not just about creating a few communities. The most important thing is whether the company has the ability to build a more professional, richer and more efficient operation system. In short, the community is built on emotion, trust, and common cognition. It is a long-term and dedicated service, not a tool for short-term arbitrage. We need to gradually build community brand, community influence, and community KOL in community operations. These are the core assets and competitiveness of the community.

The methods and techniques of community operation are constantly changing. The only thing that remains unchanged is the insight into users and the grasp of their needs. When looking at it from the perspective of an operational user, the deeper you delve into the community, the more you realize that there is so much knowledge that you need to master and apply. In fact, the boundaries can be expanded further, and it is not just as simple as "customer service" and "sales"!

Okay, that’s all for today. I write down some thoughts to inspire myself, and then improve them when I have new insights.

There are endless tricks and pitfalls all the time. Leave a message to tell us which pitfalls you have fallen into!

Author: Fangsir

Source: Fangsir