Community is an area that almost all Internet products want to get involved in, whether it is e-commerce (JD.com, Taobao), game distribution (Taptap), news information (Hupu), or tools (Moji Weather, NetEase Cloud Music). As long as there is any opportunity to try, they all want to achieve the gathering of a certain type of people by building a community and build cultural barriers for their own products.

This widespread phenomenon of product communityization has also put forward new necessary skills requirements for all Internet operators: community operation capabilities

Now, we will use 11 Internet product cases to analyze for you how community operations should be done.

1. What is community operation?

First, we need to understand what a community is. The community of Internet products refers to an online platform that brings together users with certain common attributes and provides interactive services. Based on such a definition, we have three basic elements that need to be clarified. These three basic elements determine whether your product has the talent to build a community.

2. 3 basic elements

1. The market is big enough

The user group you serve, is the market big enough? There are two aspects that need to be evaluated in the market. One is whether the population base is large enough. Only with a large enough population can it be possible to establish a community and continuously expand it. The other is whether there is a business closed loop that can be formed within the group, and even if there is not one at present, whether it can be expected in the future.

2. The demand is real

Whether the user needs really exist is definitely not the result that the boss imagined after bragging to others at the dinner table one day. Based on our definition of Internet community, common attributes, interaction and platform are indispensable. If there is no need for interaction, then how can there be a community?

3. Good at output

Not everyone in your community is necessarily good at producing UGC content, but there must be a group of core users who meet the target conditions. If your community consists of a group of old men, I believe this community will eventually fail.

Case 1: Yhouse

It focuses on the high-end user market, initially entering the market with food, and is now expanding its T-shaped field. Its service area is similar to that of Meituan. You can think of it as a high-end version of Meituan. The community is a feature that was added later to this product. Although it has been online for several months, the popularity of the community is only superficial. Let’s now review the three basic elements of the community. Why is this the case?

First of all, the market for life services is definitely large enough, no doubt about it, whether in terms of population base or the commercial closed loop of the population. And taking food and travel as examples, there is no shortage of content producers. It seems that people always like to share some insights with others before tasting food and after traveling.

The most common place for content sharing is WeChat Moments. Do you know why? With the acquaintance relationship on WeChat, you are more likely to interact with others, but Yhouse can't do that!

In a community, interaction is a criterion for judging the intensity of demand. If content production and consumption do not form a closed loop, then we have to prove whether this demand really exists. What is the problem with Yhouse? There are only likes and almost no comments!

Those who are familiar with community products know that the interactive value of likes is much lower than that of comments. If, under the waterfall display, you scroll through more than ten screens of highly recommended community content but do not see any posts with comments, then this shallow, low-value interaction is not enough to support the closed loop of community content production and consumption.

This is also relatively easy to understand. The same content will receive replies when posted on WeChat Moments, but no one will respond when posted on Yhouse. In the long run, the community will become a one-way blood supply platform, with the loss of old people with continuous content production and a large number of posters being newcomers. As long as the market is thoroughly reshuffled once, or the traffic cost is higher, such an unhealthy community model will be difficult to operate.

3. 3 Advanced Rhythms

Part A – Cold Start

This is the most troublesome part of all community operations. We will first tell everyone the core idea of ​​cold start, and then start to implement it after everyone understands it, which will achieve twice the result with half the effort.

1. The core idea of ​​community cold start

(1) Building community expectations

Usually it is in line with the overall product or company plan, but if your boss himself doesn’t know what he wants, you need to give him an answer and make the effect clear. Otherwise, if you just do it blindly, you will be the most miserable one, because you will never get it right, and there will always be endless details to criticize.

(2) Identify key groups in the community

Taking stranger social networking as an example, women are the key group. Taking content-oriented communities as an example, content producers are the key group.

(3) Accurately introduce key groups

The quantity doesn't have to be large, but it must be high quality. Jack Ma once said: There are billions of people in the world, and I don't believe that I can't find a group of people who share the same aspirations as me. As the saying goes, this group of key people must be very active and very suitable for the product.

Case 2: One-week CP

When it comes to stranger social networking, especially products that focus on pairing people up with each other, women are in an absolutely scarce position within the products. This type of stranger social interaction has a relatively common cold-start strategy, which is to identify women as the key group in the early stage, actively introduce them through various means, and give the platform enough protection and recognition, so that the long-term retention of female users will be much higher.

In the early days, they found girls outside who had good dynamic posting behavior and high-quality content, introduced them into the product, and provided enough recommendation positions and interactive effects in the product, even if it was interaction from official personnel. This experience is very good, and girls have the desire to post.

For every post, there are many people praising themselves, forming a positive feedback experience and motivating girls to continue posting, and those are high-quality posts. Gradually, real users also began to join in the interaction, and the official could fade out of this kind of manual intervention.

In this age where there are more wolves than meat, as long as you serve a girl well, boys will naturally flock to you.

2. How to get seed users

(1) Clarify product positioning

You need to understand 4 questions: what form, what user, what scenario, what demand

Case 3: Blue Rhino Moving

What form → Product form | Call moving service with your mobile phone

What users → Target users | Users to be moved

What scenario → Demand scenario | Too much cargo, too heavy

What are the needs? → User needs | One-stop solution to moving problems

(2) Target group selection

As an old-school Internet operator, I strongly recommend not to use data to select your users during the cold start phase. The product track that can be used to draw conclusions from data has long been run by others. In the end, the data can only support your ideas, but cannot dominate the direction you want.

So what should we do? Find a few types of target users that you think may be yours, have a cup of coffee with them one afternoon, explore their characteristics during the communication, keep meeting up with people of the same type, and eventually you will have a rough outline of your user portrait.

(3) Analyze their needs

List all their needs and determine the core needs among them. Remember! There is only one core demand, which is consistent with the value delivered by the product.

Case 4: Baidu Takeaway/Xingxuan

I always feel sorry for the outside world of Baidu. Why? Let’s analyze what the core needs of users of food delivery apps are. It definitely isn’t low prices! It must not be a red envelope! This does not conform to basic business logic. It should be a high-quality takeout catering service, which is in line with the most real needs of users and platforms.

From this perspective, Baidu Takeout, which focuses on mid-to-high-end products, should be able to meet user needs, right? The quality and control of the platform's takeaway food can be directly reflected in the unit price of the food. This is also what I regret.

Products of basic necessities such as food, clothing, housing and transportation must quickly occupy the market on a first-come, first-served basis, and eventually form a monopoly situation with 1-2 companies. Spending money to gain market share is a very necessary means. Meituan’s increase in merchant commissions and reduction in red envelope subsidies are also things it does when its market share is large enough.

So sometimes "saving money/making money" seems to be the need of all users, but it must be a superficial phenomenon at a certain stage and not the foundation of the product, although it does exist and is in line with human nature. (Unless you are a financial product)

(4) Confirm the way to meet the needs

This is the most core part, the soul of the entire product, and requires specific functions to carry it.

Case 5: NetEase Cloud Music

The best feature of NetEase Cloud Music is music recommendation, which satisfies users' need to listen to good songs.

The most outstanding work is music reviews, which transform the emotional need of listening to music into words and form a product barrier.

Need: Listen to good songs → Function: Daily recommendation/Private FM

Requirement: Share your thoughts → Function: Post updates/comments

Demand: Listen to high-quality music → Function: Vinyl VIP privileges

Requirement: Forgot the song title → Function: Identify the song by listening to it

(5) Selecting seed users

The choices of seed users influence the tone of the product. They play a role in driving the community, contributing content, and disseminating the product externally. It requires a group of people with high contribution ability, high activity, love of communication, leadership, and willingness to accept new things.

Case 6: Xiaokaxiu

As one of the earliest pioneers of short videos, a product that was once a phenomenal level, they made a very correct decision in selecting the seed users of their product. Early on, we invited big names like Wang Luodan, Jiang Xin, and Jin Xing to participate, and the message spread quickly through obvious effects. Later, we cooperated with MCN agencies to introduce more celebrities and influencers, rapidly expanding the influence in a short period of time.

Although this model began to weaken in the later period, it must be said that the introduction of seed users of Xiaokaxiu is already a textbook example.

(6) Introducing users, active groups, and imported products

This is a set of execution-oriented actions, and its core purpose is to attract users first and then introduce them into the product after the product is launched.

Case 7: Poisonous Tongue Film and Television

Before the product was launched, they invited and recruited a group of people who loved movies and liked to write film reviews. They were added to a QQ group, where members shared their movie-watching experiences and discussed together. The group distributed small gifts from time to time and held some film review activities to liven up the atmosphere within the group.

There are movie-related topics to talk about every day, and people are given corresponding titles based on the level of activity within the group, such as experience officer.

After the product is launched, import them into the product and fulfill some promises. At this point, they have become your core target users. Cultural identity and the existence of relationship chains make them the backbone of the entire community atmosphere.

3. Content filling

This is the most boring but also necessary step, and believe me, it is the most terrifying without a human community.

(1) Operate and produce high-quality content

The dumbest way is to operate and produce content, pre-embed content, and provide continuous supply in the early stages, and even replies need to be configured in advance.

Case 8: Burning Rabbit

A product that has already been abandoned, focusing on the game community, during the cold start-up phase, at least 3 comments were produced for each game through manual operations. It took about 3 months to produce 100,000 comments, covering more than 30,000 games.

Even with 6 to 7 full-time operators involved in production, it would be difficult for even the best game review experts to achieve full coverage and authenticity. In the final review, this inefficient content filling work has affected the content direction of the product. After all, the content of the game community focuses on comments, and the comments of real games are the barriers. Artificially mass-produced content cannot set the tone.

(2) User participation in production

Mobilizing real users to participate in the early content filling of the product is challenging, but it is the most effective.

Case 9: Live Well

For a community product that provides home decoration guides, there was no content to fill in the cold start phase, so we hired a group of designers to produce content and promised to help attract customers. For this potential business cooperation, there was still a group of relatively young designers who paid for it, forming a positive cycle of content production in the initial stage. Even after the transition to the platform content filling phase was completed, this model could continue to run.

Part B – Exploration Mode

After the entire community completes the cold start, we need to explore the operation mode of the community. The main work here is divided into: demand justification, incentive closure, and tone confirmation.

1. Demand justification: Are the user’s real needs met? Is there room for optimization?

2. Incentive closed loop: You need to understand why your users want to output content, what they can get after posting, and what supports them to continue posting?

3. Confirm the tonality: Does the tonality you guessed before going online meet your expectations? If the expected tonality deviates from the actual situation, do you need to change the budget, or how to narrow the tonality deviation?

We can get the answers to the above questions through data performance and user feedback.

Case 10: Momo

Momo also encountered the above problem during the cold start phase. Why did their users post in the community section? After analysis and research, we found that this proactive form of self-presentation can increase the success rate of stranger social interaction.

As long as you post a photo of a cute girl in the Momo community, you will be favored by the opposite sex. The positive feedback effect of this content is also in line with the tonality of the product for opposite-sex friendships, and ultimately formed a model that can run in the long run.

Part C – Quick Copy

Just as described in the above case, if users take the initiative to show themselves, it will be easier for users to meet their needs for making friends with the opposite sex. Therefore, similar functions will be continuously added to the product to increase multi-dimensional exposure scenarios.

Even so, during the period of rapid replication of product community models, some problems are prone to arise, such as too rapid user growth, which can dilute the community atmosphere, or too slow user growth, which can make the community deserted.

Case 11: Zhihu

In the early days, Zhihu was an invitation-based system, and its users were mainly industry bigwigs and users with a certain level of communication and influence. It took 1-2 years to establish the product atmosphere, and it has maintained a relatively stable growth rate since then, so no major problems have occurred.

However, since 2018, Zhihu has become another Weibo in the eyes of some people. As the user scale continues to expand, Zhihu has become more and more entertaining and popular, and long articles are no longer as popular as short sentences.

The content of Zhihu's hot list began to be filled with celebrity gossip, love between men and women, etc. This is an issue that cannot be avoided for community products that are growing every month.

Finally, I would like to add that most operators who take over a community product are in the cold start-up phase, or are in the middle of operation but with poor results. If you don't agree with this direction at the beginning, trust your own judgment. Some roads that are destined to fail don't have to be taken again.

If it's a mess you have to take over, complete your goals in stages and give yourself visible positive feedback in the short term. The above are just some of my personal experiences. I hope they can be helpful to you, and then my needs will be met.

Author: Professor of Operations

Source: Operations Professor (ESxiaowang)