Community operation: How to recruit 500 users from a cold start?

At the beginning of the 20th century, various "natural factors" inevitably represented the rise of WeChat communities. For the education industry, especially in the field of teaching and training, the circle of people in the community has become a very important work indicator in the market; because only with enough traffic at the front end can the subsequent enrollment conversion be guaranteed to form a funnel.

The establishment of each community has its initial value, such as communication groups, learning groups, lecture groups, etc., because this can help operators have a core gimmick when attracting traffic.

For example, there are expert teachers in the group, and any relevant questions can be asked in it; you can also select several learning materials based on the attributes of this group to attract traffic, for example, you can get learning materials by joining the group.

For the education industry, the most common thing may be lecture and open class groups. Whether it is K12, children or even the study abroad industry, you can often see many institutions holding lectures on various topics to attract users to join the group, and then send some related information or books to increase the reasons for users to join the group.

When it comes to giving a lecture, I think there are two very important points: one is the seed users during the cold start, and the other is the active interaction before the lecture starts to increase the lecture viewing rate.

Both are important and indispensable. If one of them is not done well, the event will be meaningless.

A few days ago, I just managed a community lecture event for a K12 education and training institution. In 2 days, I started an online group from scratch and recruited 500 people. At the end of the lecture, the retention rate reached 95%, and the viewing rate of the entire lecture reached 60%.

1. Review and Sharing

The theme of our lecture activity is an open class centered around the 2021 new high school entrance examination. This time, we tried to give our first lecture at this time, which actually took a lot of time to prepare. It just so happened that there were no institutions in the same field and regional market conducting similar lectures at that time, so we had certain advantages in terms of theme and time. It is also the main background of the event.

Now that we have a theme for the event, what we need to determine is the source of the seed users; because the organizers have only been doing offline work before and have no online foundation, there are no social media resources in the publicity channel.

However, there is a very important stickiness factor in the K12 field - parents and students who have enrolled in classes will add the teacher’s WeChat; because they need to communicate about learning, once they have enrolled in a class in an institution, they will basically trust the teacher.

Therefore, the teachers’ circle of friends and the parents of children who were attending the class became our only source of seed users for promotion. After the event poster came out, we prepared a script for the theme of the event and for joining the group and sent it to the teachers. We asked the teachers to post it on their circle of friends and invite the parents who had registered to join the group to attend the class. As a result, sixty to seventy seed users came in on the first day.

For giving a lecture, this number of seed users is enough; of course, the more seed users there are, the larger the base number of fission will be.

After those sub-users come in, we need to do fission to make the snowball bigger and bigger.

A very important point about fission is the bait of fission, which is related to whether there will be people in the group who will pull their friends to join the group for your benefit.

The theme of this event is the new high school entrance examination, so we selected two types of materials and carried out a two-stage recruitment process; for example, if you invite 2 people, you can get the first set of materials, and if you invite 4 people, you can also get another set of materials at the same time.

Of course, we have made some comparisons in the information. What we hope is that all parents can sprint towards the highest level; therefore, the bait for inviting 2 people is only temporary information, and only after inviting 4 people can you receive a more complete information package.

I have done a calculation here, because the base number of seed users is so large, and the threshold we set is not very high (if the threshold is set too high, we may lose the parent participation rate); even if most of the seed parents participate in recruiting people, it will not reach the full state.

So on this basis, I added a community invitation ranking list. The top three parents can get some additional exclusive benefits. This benefit must be differentiated into some materials or something; it would be best to get physical books or something, because physical learning materials are definitely more tempting to parents than electronic versions.

After determining the fission bait and rules, the rest is mainly to mobilize everyone in the group to participate in the fission activities. Most of the community fission activities directly tag new people and remind them what they can get based on how many people they bring in. Even for a single party being pulled in, this is not very user-friendly, and they may not even know what the group is for. As a result, many times the pulled parties in the group ask questions in the group such as "What is this group for?", which is very embarrassing.

After the seed users joined the group, we did not immediately start the fission circle, because we are not familiar with these users yet, and the parents do not know whether this group has any useful information; if we start the fission directly at this time, we can only rely on the temptation of the fission bait.

So on the first day, we only interacted with the parents in the group and sent some regular learning materials in it, so that parents could clearly understand what this group is for, whether it has value, and establish basic trust with them; on the second day, we started this fission activity. Of course, launching it does not mean suddenly throwing an announcement in and leaving it alone. The result of doing so would probably be a drop in the ocean.

I believe that all community actions can only play their greatest value when carried out in an active community: first, it allows everyone to see the information, and second, it creates an active atmosphere.

On the second day, we created some small topics in the beginning, and then cooperated with the water army to carry out the discussion and attract other parents to join in; at this time, the group owner will send out a round of small red envelope rain. The amount of the red envelope does not have to be large, but the number can be set to be larger, so that everyone can grab it and push the atmosphere of the group to the critical point; then the fission activity will be announced to maximize the coverage effect of the activity.

At this time, if there are resources internally, you can ask the Internet to attract Internet users to join the group, so that new people will join the group immediately, create an atmosphere that the activity benefits are in high demand, and use the herd mentality to encourage other parents to participate.

Of course, in the process of inviting people, the group owner must also take certain actions to incite more parents to participate in the invitation activity, such as:

• Screenshot of a parent receiving information after completing a task;
• When the group reaches a certain number of people, some additional benefits can be given, such as small red envelopes, online courses, etc.

When we were operating the group, we used a virtual person as the group owner. Of course, when a certain number of new members joined the group, the group owner would come out and manually send a welcome message and an introduction to the open lecture, and then give a small red envelope.

There are two purposes for sending red envelopes:

• Encourage parents to continue inviting others and create a community atmosphere.
• Establish the personal IP of the group owner, and create an effect that once the group owner appears, there will be a welfare red envelope. This will also be helpful for warming up before the start of the later lectures.

At that time, we set the promotion period to three days. The first day was used to maintain seed users, and the next two days were used for comprehensive promotion and invitations. In the end, the WeChat group was full of nearly 500 people before the lecture started, and the lecture participation rate reached 60% of the community.

It is recommended here that operators should stock up on some community baits in the process of operating the community, in case they need to adjust the direction, which can also help maintain the community after the lectures are over. For example, the transcript of the lecture, PPT, playback links, and attached learning materials, etc., can all be used as tools for maintaining the community in the future.

What we just talked about above is just a cold start method for setting up lecture groups in the education industry. Of course, the ultimate goal of this event itself is to enable old customers to bring in new customers, and all operational actions are paved with this purpose.

Every company basically has a primary purpose for establishing a community. For example, some are for attracting people and acquiring customers, while others are just for service conversion.

Each community with different attributes will have different operating methods:

1) For customer acquisition, we need to make certain preparations when attracting people on the front end, so that every user can participate in the attraction activities; in addition to attracting people ourselves, we also need to help users attract people, such as providing them with promotional materials, scripts, posters, etc.; because only when users feel that they have really received the benefits will they spread the word by word of mouth and attract more people to join the group.

2) As for service conversion, I think more energy can be put into the warm-up before the lecture and the enrollment after the lecture. The warm-up before the lecture determines the number of people watching the lecture, and the lecture process and the guidance after the lecture determine the enrollment effect of this event.

Therefore, regarding the core goal of the community, I personally think that operators can do a good job of community operation by doing corresponding community actions and stabilizing its output.

Author: Liu Zhixing

Source: LZX's study notes