Why do 99% of communities eventually become dead groups?

I just spent some time counting and found that there are more than 300 groups with chat records on my WeChat, but only 4 of them have active people every day in the past 7 days. For the rest of the groups, only a small number of people occasionally pop up, and most of them are in a dead state.

In the past two years, everyone has been talking about private domains (here specifically referring to the private domains of the WeChat ecosystem) and embracing private domains, fearing that they will not be able to get on the fast lane of private domain traffic.

Private domain is a good thing, and it can really make money if played well. Although everyone is almost sick of hearing the term private domain now, it does not prevent it from making money at all.

As an important part of private domain operations, communities undertake three important missions: traffic acquisition, commercial monetization, and new and old fission.

Precisely because of the importance of the community, the first action many companies take when engaging in private domain operations is to create a group first, no matter what.

Never figured out why? How to do it? This results in 99% of communities failing after a brief period of activity because there is no sustained and effective operational support.

Today we are going to talk about how 99% of communities die, and how to make your community the 1% that survives.

1. First, figure out why you want to build a community

Those who have worked in information flow and search delivery must have had this feeling: in the delivery process, the traffic owner is like the owner of a fishing park, and we are the people who pay to go fishing. How much can we catch? What size of fish was caught? It depends not only on your own fishing skills, but also on how many fish there are in the pond and what size the fish are.

The worst thing is, because the fish pond belongs to someone else, if the owner of the fish pond is in a bad mood one day and doesn't let us go in to fish, we won't be able to spend the money in our pockets, and our source of fish will be cut off.

If your destiny is not in your own hands, you will feel extremely insecure. That’s why more and more people want to raise fish themselves. It is not enough to contract a fish pond, we have to build the fish pond ourselves!

A community is a kind of fish pond.

Compared with traditional delivery methods, communities have at least four obvious advantages:

1. Absolute control

2. Free/very low cost

3. Can be reached repeatedly

4. Suitable for multi-stage fission

This is equivalent to taking the traffic into your own hands. You can reach your own users at any time without paying or obtaining permission from others, and in theory, you can reach them unlimited times.

More importantly, once users develop trust in the brand or are driven by interests, they will introduce new precise traffic into the community through secondary and tertiary fission, allowing your fish pond to truly realize "a source of fresh water."

2. Not all business forms are suitable for social networking

When building a community, don’t just do it for the sake of doing it.

We must be aware that community is a double-edged sword.

If the operation is good, it can help the brand earn a lot of money. If the operation is not good, if the problem is minor, it will at most cause some loss of manpower and material resources. If the problem is major, it will cause fatal damage to the brand.

Take consumer products as an example. Before the emergence of social networks, if there was a problem with a product, customer complaints were one-on-one. You just had to solve the problem of this one customer, and it wouldn’t have too much negative impact on the brand.

With the establishment of a community, when customers report their problems to the group, other group members will question the product. The amount of negative feedback received will increase by hundreds of times, and the possibility of external dissemination will also increase by hundreds of times.

For many new brands this is unbearable or even fatal.

Therefore, before building a community, you must make at least three judgments:

First level judgment: Is the business itself suitable for community building?

If you don’t know what the criteria for judgment are, just remember four words: reduce costs and increase efficiency.

For example, businesses such as product promotion, resource integration, and topic marketing are more suitable for social networking.

1) Product promotion

Sales promotion generally involves selling low-priced, low-profit goods, and sales need to win by volume. The one-to-many sales method of the community can naturally reduce costs and increase efficiency. When someone in the group keeps posting order information, others are more likely to pay and place orders out of herd mentality, which greatly improves efficiency. Efficiency is GMV, and efficiency is profit.

2) Resource integration

This type of business needs to be based on a platform and has high requirements for real-time communication.

The traditional way is to publish resource information on the independent site, and everyone goes to the independent site to find the resources they need and then contact the platform service personnel for docking. After the establishment of the community, each platform has basically moved the docking process to the community. When someone in the group is docking, other group members can also watch whether the information is valuable to them, which greatly reduces repetitive communication work.

3) Topic Marketing

Bring incremental value to the community by gathering users with the same attributes, such as lipstick recommendation groups, figure exchange groups, etc.

However, for some high-priced services that require one-on-one service and emphasize a sense of dignity or privacy, it is not recommended to create a community.

The second level of judgment: Is the current stage suitable for community building?

When it comes to e-commerce, for social e-commerce, the community is the basic infrastructure of the business, and resources must be invested in it from the beginning. For platform e-commerce, social networking is just a supplementary tool. It can be launched after the platform reaches a certain scale. Resources should be invested in other channels in the early stage.

Grasping the entry timing is particularly important for startups. Every penny and every resource of a startup should be used wisely.

The second level of judgment: Is the current stage suitable for community building?

When it comes to e-commerce, for social e-commerce, the community is the basic infrastructure of the business, and resources must be invested in it from the beginning. For platform e-commerce, social networking is just a supplementary tool. It can be launched after the platform reaches a certain scale. Resources should be invested in other channels in the early stage.

Grasping the entry timing is particularly important for startups. Every penny and every resource of a startup should be used wisely.

The third level of judgment: What is the expected ROI after establishing the group?

If you plan ahead, you will succeed; if you don't, you will fail.

The purpose of ROI calculation is to deduce a data model and list all the key points of the entire path on paper. Then you can clearly know which ones are very important, which ones are generally important, and which ones are less important in the process of operating the business.

Whether the data model is valid is directly related to whether there is a possibility of positive returns from building a community.

3. Give the community a precise positioning

There are three levels of judgment to make when deciding whether to start a community. Once you have decided to do it, you need to complete four questions before you start:

Question 1: What is the value of the community to the brand?

Question 2: What is the goal of the community?

Question 3: Who is the target group of the community?

Question 4: What is the value of the community to the target population?

Running a community is the same as doing business. A single win does not count as a win; only a win-win situation can last. The most basic logic is to provide customers with certain services or products in exchange for brand premium or profit.

Goals must be clear, values ​​must be refined, and when positioning the value of a community, it is very taboo to have…and…and…

If you ask for too much, you will end up having nothing.

4. How to make your community the top 1%

At the beginning, it was mentioned that 99% of communities eventually become dead groups. Everyone wants to be the 1% that survives, so what should they do?

1) Full-link SOP

Want to expand, standardize.

Most platforms run N communities at the same time, and these communities are operated by different people. In order to ensure that the operation quality of each community is high enough and the effect is good enough, it is necessary to formulate standardized operation SOPs. Community operators can express their individuality based on the established standards, which can maximize the guarantee of controllable results.

At the same time, the content displayed by the operator in the community should be fresh, full and interesting, but the operation methods and steps should strictly follow the operation logic, which tests the management.

To sum up: explore needs based on human nature, return to rationality to formulate SOPs, and then present them to the outside world in a humane way.

2) Do a good job of user segmentation

High-value users and low-value users must be properly stratified, and different groups of people must be placed in different communities, and then given corresponding operating strategies.

Users within a single community also need to be structurally stratified. A relatively healthy structure of a community is 1% co-construction members + 9% active elements (including their own agents) + 90% onlookers.

Taking the goods-selling group as an example, co-construction members have a stronger sense of ownership and can maintain the order of the community and ensure the stability of the community. Active elements can have sufficient interaction in the process of your goods-selling. It is still very embarrassing for a person to speak dryly. An interactive atmosphere will be more active, and an active atmosphere can mobilize the enthusiasm of onlookers to buy.

In the end you will find that those silent group members have great purchasing power. They don’t ask questions, don’t discuss, they just buy.

It's just so magical.

3) A suitable IP

In my opinion, there is no good or bad IP, only whether it is suitable or not.

Creating a suitable IP within the community can make operational work more efficient.

I have seen many, many corporate community group owners who are very "official". They give people the feeling of being emotionless robots. Such communities are unlikely to generate people's desire to participate.

Operating a community means dealing with a group of real people, so the operator must also be a real person with a distinct personality and high enough recognition. Because everyone is not communicating face to face, when the operator's personality can come to life through the mobile phone screen and make people feel comfortable, then he is a suitable IP.

4) Finally, serve! Serve! Still service!

Only good services can generate deep links.

Only good service can make people feel a sense of belonging.

Only good service can lead to active fission.

Only good service can create lasting value.

Only good service can make us earn a lot of money!

Author: Notes by Shi Guipeng

Source: Shi Guipeng's Notes (yibaiquan)