3 steps to teach you how to operate a good community

Community operation has become the core business of enterprises.

More and more companies are considering communities as a lifeline. How to maximize product value through communities has become a difficult problem that companies are eager to solve.

Although how to operate a community is not a new topic, there are still very few truly high-quality communities on the market; so how should a community be operated?

Today I want to talk to you about community operations. I believe that it only takes three steps to do a good job in community operations.

Without further ado, let’s get to the point.

Before we get into the specifics, let’s first understand what a community is: a community is a group of people with common interests, cognitions, and values ​​who come together to interact, communicate, collaborate, and infect each other, creating a value relationship that feeds back to the product or brand itself; so compared to personal accounts, public accounts, and the like, communities have more stable private traffic.

From a communication perspective, community is a one-to-many or many-to-many method. In the marketing chain, it has an amplifying effect in multiple links, whether it is attracting new customers, retention or conversion; and this amplifying effect is two-sided, that is, both the quality of the product will be amplified.

The above is about the meaning of community, which is relatively general. However, it is still necessary for enterprises to understand this. Because if enterprises want to do a good job in community operation, the first step is to clarify the community positioning.

1. Step 1: Clarify community positioning

I don’t think I need to say more about the importance of community positioning; let’s focus on how to do it specifically (the importance of community positioning is self-evident, so the author will spend more space to write about it, please read it carefully, I believe you will gain something).

1. Sort out the company's business processes

To do a good job of community positioning, we should first start from the company itself and clarify the position of the community in the company's business structure and the role it plays by sorting out the company's business processes.

How should an enterprise organize its business processes? In fact, it is done from two directions: transaction structure and transaction object.

By combing through these two dimensions, we can draw a business process diagram, which will make it easy to determine the position of the community in the corporate business.

Let me take the "education/training" industry as an example:

From the above diagram, we can clearly see the overall transaction structure of this enterprise; and from this structure we can judge that the enterprise actually has four transaction objects, namely internal lecturers, external lecturers, service enterprises and C-end customers.

So if an enterprise wants to establish a community, it needs to be clear about who the community is serving. The positioning and function of the community will vary for different service objects; for example, if it is aimed at C-end customers, then the positioning of this community should be a learning community, and its function is to sell related courses by sharing relevant knowledge.

2. Community Positioning

After we have sorted out the company's business processes, we will know the position of the community we want to establish in the entire business model and what role it plays.

After that we can start positioning this community. Yes, that's right! Sorting out business processes is not to position the community, but to serve the community's positioning.

Community positioning should be based on the emotional identification and value identification of target users.

The most commonly used method is the so-called 5W1H method:

• Why: Why do you want to create this group?
• What: What value can you bring to group members?
• Where: Where to create the group?
• Who: Who are the members of your community?
• When: When is the group created and how long is the group's life cycle?
• How: How to monetize?

Let's look at these issues one by one (some of which are reflected in the following steps):

why: Why do we need to create this group?

I think there is no need to elaborate on this issue anymore, because once you have sorted out the company's business processes, this problem will naturally be solved.

But here I have a point of view that I would like to share with you: Although community operation is very popular now, many companies are exploring this path; but in fact, community may not be suitable for all companies, or in other words, not all companies must establish communities; different companies have different goals at different stages of development. Whether or not to establish a community depends on what your current business model is.

This is why, before talking about community operations, the author suggests sorting out the company's business processes first.

Where: Where to create the group?

We need to know that communities do not only refer to WeChat groups (although WeChat groups are the most frequently used), but Internet platforms like QQ, forums, Weibo, Douban and other social platforms can all serve as our communities or private traffic pools; communities can even be offline platforms, such as the now popular Maker Cafe, etc. The key to choosing where to create a community is to see where our target users are!

As for the remaining questions about what, who, when and how, we will not discuss them below. Let’s continue to talk about the content of community operation positioning.

3. Establish goals for the community

After knowing why we need to create a group and on which platform to create it, we need to clarify the goal of creating the group; this is a little different from why we need to create a group - why we need to create a group is to clarify the position of the community in the entire business process, which is a strategic consideration; while setting goals for the community is a tactical issue, and the goals need to be broken down in detail based on the purpose and status of the former.

For example, education/training institutions usually create groups for the purpose of selling courses. To achieve this goal, we need to break down the goal first. The commonly used breakdown method is to use the AARRR model, which is to attract new users, activate, retain, convert, and spread. So when we build a community, we need to achieve these functions.

At this time, you may find that it is unrealistic for one group to achieve so many goals, so we need to think of a way; and the best way is to divide the community into parts; for example, divide the community into new member groups and retention groups. Therefore, the so-called community operation should not be mistaken as just a group. In many cases, a community is composed of multiple groups with different purposes!

Having said that, we can roughly understand that according to the company's business process, we determine the positioning of the community and its main role; then according to the business goals, we establish small communities and determine the broken down goals for these small communities; in this way, our community operations become small groups such as new member acquisition groups, retention groups, sharing groups, etc.; and each group will have a very clear goal. These together constitute the corporate community operation goals.

In addition to segmenting the community, it is also necessary to clarify what state different communities need to achieve in order to be optimal.

For example, if a group is full of target users but no one talks to each other, that is meaningless. Or if the group is filled with 999+ messages every day, that would harass customers. Therefore, we need to use data to define a standard that can help achieve our goals.

For example, I believe that factors like topic participation, problem-solving rate, content forwarding rate, number of content likes/comments, etc. can all be used as criteria for determining community activity; of course, this also includes some subjective perceptions, and these criteria need to be clarified before establishing a community; in this way, through data presentation, we can clearly know whether the status of each segmented community has reached its optimal state? Is there anything that can be improved? And is there any deviation in the achievement of the goals? etc.

OK, let's go back to the 5W1H principle we just mentioned. We have already talked about why and where. Based on what we have talked about in this section, we can further solve the problem of who and when:

Who: Who are the members of your community?

When answering the question about community members, most companies simply and crudely believe that community members are basically equal to target users; but the reason why I want to talk about this after talking about the community goal issue is that I believe that community members are not completely equal to target users.

As mentioned before, corporate communities are composed of small communities with different purposes or segments, so different groups have different members; for example, a new customer acquisition group, a qualified new customer acquisition group, its members must not only include target users, but also potential users, followed users, etc.; and for communities like retention groups, its main members should be paying customers.

Of course, this can be further subdivided, such as paying users who come in through the 1 yuan trial class, or customers who purchase offline training camps, etc.; this part of the community members is mainly absorbed from the new group, and there is no need to attract traffic through channel promotion; and communities like sharing groups, because the purpose is to let customers recognize the value of the company through our services, and thus spontaneously promote it, so this type of community members are mainly absorbed from the retention group.

In addition, the resources that companies devote to different communities should also be different. For example, for education and training companies, there is no need to allow some teachers and big names to join groups for attracting new members. However, retention groups and sharing groups require teachers and big names with a certain degree of influence to take charge.

When: When is the group created and how long is the group's life cycle?

This issue also needs to be operated according to the characteristics of the segmented groups. For example, the characteristics of the new member acquisition group are short, frequent and fast. Everything is centered on getting the target users to pay. Companies should not expect the life cycle of the new member acquisition group to be very long. To put it bluntly, if there is a disagreement on certain values, it should be abandoned.

For retention groups and sharing groups, you need to consider the life cycle; because the core purpose of these groups is to enhance users' sense of belonging and strengthen user stickiness.

Of course, in actual operations, it is impossible to wait until all the new customer groups are full before setting up a retention group, nor can it be said that one should start planning to set up a retention group as soon as someone places an order. Instead, adjustments should be made based on actual conditions. This stage requires a sense of rhythm, and it also depends on whether the company’s own resources in this regard are adequately prepared, and other factors should be considered comprehensively. If conditions do not permit, do not set up a retention group first, and you can also consider one-to-one service and other methods.

2. Step 2: Clarify the community management system

After completing the most important task of community positioning, the second step is equally important. When operating a community, many companies tend to focus on the creation of community content. Moreover, there are many summaries of community operation failures on the Internet, and most of them attribute the reasons to community positioning and content.

However, according to the author's observation, the primary reason for the failure of community operations is the positioning problem, and the secondary reason is not the content, but the group system!

Community management often determines whether the community interaction system can operate for a long time! ! !

After all, any decision and creativity requires someone to implement and execute it, and there must be rules in this process; at the same time, the community system is also a manifestation of protecting user rights and interests, and it can also cultivate user usage habits through rules.

Community management includes many things: such as entry regulations, elimination rules, reward systems, member sharing rules, as well as some group activity rules initiated by the group owner, etc. The formulation of these rules still needs to be determined based on the company's positioning of the community and the main task objectives after the community is segmented.

So there is actually nothing much to say about this aspect. However, the author still wants to emphasize one point, that is, the purpose of formulating group rules is not to make the group owner superior, but to strengthen the connection between members through certain norms; at the same time, the group owner needs to achieve a balance and distribute credits.

The best way is to take advantage of human weaknesses and let members help manage the community; after all, every community member desires to be valued, recognized, and become the big fish in a small pond; so how to select managers is also an important part of the community system (don’t think that community managers must be from companies, sometimes letting users manage users can have greater unexpected gains).

3. Step 3: Community Content Operation

The community content is actually divided into two main parts:

There are two types of content: content generated by enterprises and content generated spontaneously by users. The former is mainly in the form of soft articles, videos, materials, activities, topics, etc.; while the latter is mainly in the form of topics.

Although community content can be roughly divided into these two categories, the author believes that the most important content for a community is actually the topic; after all, the core of a community is a group of people with common interests, cognitions, and values ​​who come together to interact and communicate.

Therefore, no matter whether the content is generated by the company itself or initiated by users, no matter whether you are in the form of soft articles or videos, or planning an event, it will all come down to the topic in the end.

Only when your topic is attractive enough and profound enough, your community members will naturally be activated by you!

1. Focus of community content: Topics

So what kind of topic can capture users?

Let’s first look at the types of topics:

In fact, topics can be roughly divided into four categories: professional topics, personal topics, hot topics and universal topics. This should be relatively easy to understand. What needs to be noted is that when you don’t know the user very well, you can use universal topics to break the ice. Once you have a certain understanding of the user, you can talk to him about relatively professional or hot topics. As for personalized topics, they are actually a type of topic that is intended to further narrow the distance with the user. This requires you to do enough user research before you can use it.

2. Topic discussion process

The purpose of a company publishing a soft article, a video, or even planning an event is to bring up a topic and activate users; so once we have determined the direction of the topic, we need to do a good job of organization, that is, to ensure that the topic is effectively developed and carried out in an orderly manner.

There are two forms of topic discussion: one is random discussion and the other is formal discussion.

Whether it is a casual discussion or a formal discussion, the general process is as shown above.

However, in actual operations, we often combine these two discussion modes together. For example, we can have a random discussion on a topic in the group first. Then the initiator can record the key points based on the results of the discussion and invite interested users to have a formal discussion at another fixed time. Usually, a relatively good lecturer will be invited to the formal discussion, and members can ask the teacher for advice and interact with him based on the results of the previous random discussion.

Of course, companies can also directly invite relevant teachers or industry experts to give lectures and interact on a certain topic.

In the discussion of topics, we usually follow the two methods of random discussion + formal discussion or only formal discussion, and we will not choose random discussion alone; because sometimes even if the discussion is very intense, it is meaningless if it does not help us achieve our goals. Therefore, we still need to use certain guidance to make the topic discussion play a further role in promoting the goal achievement.

OK! This is the end of the three steps of community operation.

Of course, if you want to really operate a community well, just reading these is definitely not enough. The above content can only be said to be the prerequisite work for community operation. It also includes community activity, community conversion and the HOW issue in 5W1H, which have not been discussed in detail; in addition, it also includes community resource integration, online and offline community closed loops, etc. Regarding community operation, the author found that there is too much to write about, so he temporarily decided to divide it into two chapters, so that you will not be too tired when reading (actually, I am just lazy)

Finally, I would like to emphasize that when we read various books and articles about operations, in addition to learning from the experience and knowledge of the masters, we must also develop the habit of thinking and apply the results of our thinking to practice.

If you just study blindly but don't know how to think and apply, then even if you are given a supreme martial arts book, you still can't become a hero who roams the world!

Author: Pi Ye Operation

Source: Pai Ye Operation (pyyunying)