Bilibili Operation: How to improve community interaction?

Compared with other content platforms, Bilibili is a "magical pure land". Bilibili’s commercialization is relatively “Buddhist”, so the community atmosphere experience is also excellent. Whether you are a UP host or an ordinary passerby, you have to admit that among all the mainstream content communities in China, Bilibili’s community atmosphere is the healthiest. A good community atmosphere is also one of the reasons why Bilibili has many loyal users. So is there room for improvement in community interaction at Bilibili?

Bilibili's Q2 2020 financial report shows that its formal members reached 89 million, a year-on-year increase of 65%; the 12-month member retention rate exceeded 80%; the average monthly submission volume was 6 million, a year-on-year increase of 148%; and the average monthly interaction number was 5.2 billion, a year-on-year increase of 190%.

How can Bilibili maintain such a high user retention rate while the number of users is growing rapidly?

This is inseparable from a good community interaction atmosphere, which encourages creators to continue to produce and audience interaction also increases accordingly.

However, from the data on the video details page below, we can see that the number of "likes", which accounts for the highest proportion of interactions, only accounts for 1/10 of the latter compared to the number of views. For example, next time when the barrage of comments is flooding the screen, there will definitely still be freeloaders among the users (except for those who are playing with memes).

So is there room for improvement in the interaction among Bilibili users?

First, we need to answer a question: Does Bilibili need more user interaction?

The answer is yes.

• First of all: by participating in the interactive process, the audience can gain a sense of psychological participation and satisfaction, strengthen their identification with the circle, and their dependence on the platform.
• Secondly: In addition to gaining a sense of satisfaction through interaction with the audience, creators can also collect preference information and provide feedback on content, indirectly strengthening the relationship chain, which is beneficial to the healthy development of the entire platform ecosystem.

User interaction is related to the continuous optimization of the product, so how to improve the interaction of community users?

First, we need to understand how users currently interact and how the community guides interaction.

1. Interactive Method

1. The first type: creators and audiences

Audience feedback inspires creators to produce more content on the platform and attract more like-minded users.

2. The second type: creators and creators

The mutual communication and influence among creators further promoted the development and prosperity of Bilibili’s content.

3. The third type: audience and audience

Interactive communication allows users from different circles to find a sense of belonging and identity, and also increases the user stickiness of the platform.

These three types of interactions ensure that both the content updates and user experience of the Bilibili platform are well satisfied. After laying the foundation for interaction, it is necessary to provide users with all-round interactive guidance, support and maintenance.

2. Interactive Guidance

This can be done from four aspects: raising the priority of interaction, reducing the cost of participation, stimulating the desire to express, and maintaining the community atmosphere.

1. Increase interaction priority

As the soul of a community, interaction must enjoy a higher functional priority.

1) The interactive functions are all next to the video content, so users can easily participate in the interaction while watching the content

2) Live broadcast, private messages, activities and other interactive functions have a higher priority in layout

2. Reduce participation costs

1) Users can interact instantly when watching videos in full screen

3. Stimulate the desire to express

1) Product features

By guiding attention and generating relationship chains, users can more easily obtain content of interest and thus generate interaction.

2) Community atmosphere

Why has Bilibili been able to create such a positive and good atmosphere? I think the most crucial point is that it started out as an 2D comic. Japanese comics are different from animations such as Boonie Bears and Pleasant Goat, which are simply lively and interesting.

The diversified development of Japanese comics and the deep thinking about people and society in the content can help form personal thinking habits. Therefore, due to the positive influence brought by anime, combined with the fact that most of its users come from first- and second-tier cities, Bilibili has formed a positive, inclusive and optimistic community atmosphere that is rare in the Internet community.

Once a good exclusive atmosphere is formed, users will have strong stickiness, actively participate in interactions, and take the initiative to maintain the interactive atmosphere.

3) Creators are inspired to form a virtuous cycle

The connection between creators and audiences is the most important relationship chain that Bilibili focuses on cultivating. Most users interact because they resonate with the content.

There are three main types of interactions:

1. High-quality content: guide users to like, add coins, collect, forward, follow, comment, and post comments;
2. Interactions initiated by creators in the content (e.g., click 1 if you like it, click 2 if you don’t like it): guide users to enter comments;
3. Live broadcast: The instant interactive experience brought by live broadcast is definitely better, and it also has a more direct impact on revenue.

4. Maintaining a community atmosphere

1) Establish interaction rules and inform users through various means

Answering questions to become a formal member will, to a certain extent, screen out users who agree with Bilibili's ideas.

2) Remind users of interaction etiquette

3) Strict control of interaction permissions. Low-level users have lower interaction permissions to avoid negative impacts caused by low-level users’ lack of knowledge of the community.

4) Small dark room

Establish a reasonable punishment system for users who affect the community atmosphere.

5) Intelligent review of barrage comments

Through feature library matching, machine learning and other methods for shielding, relevant algorithms can be continuously iterated and optimized.

6) Manual review

Operational review, reporting function, and discipline committee member.

From the above, we can see that Bilibili provides all-round support, guidance, and maintenance for interaction; it has formed the best community atmosphere recognized by the entire network, but there is still room for improvement. The following will optimize the three stages before, during and after the interaction, aiming to get more on-the-spot users involved.

3. Interaction Optimization

1. Lack of a “cultural guide” to record and spread meme culture

The memes of Bilibili are the unique language and culture of the Bilibili community and are a major cultural feature of Bilibili.

Memes are extremely entertaining, and users who use different memes can instantly understand whether the other person is their own. When memes spread to other communities or groups, they become a bond connecting the cultures of different circles. But for users to understand the meaning of a new meme, it must lag behind the creation of the meme.

This causes many users to be confused about the concepts of many jokes and memes, unable to understand the meaning of the creators or the audience, and find it difficult to integrate into the community. In order to understand the meaning of the meme, new users can only search on Baidu, which not only provides a bad experience but also causes loss of users.

2. Although the interactive atmosphere of barrage is very good, its proportion relative to the number of views is not high

Barrage is not only very popular on Bilibili, but is also a must-have screenshot for many popular articles.

This gives people an illusion: it seems that a standard and qualified Bilibili user will definitely use barrage. But in fact, it is completely the opposite. Through the data of Bilibili, we can find that the barrage volume of most videos on Bilibili accounts for less than 1% of the playback volume, and most of the non-popular videos even account for less than 1‰.

It can be seen from this that although barrage is the soul function of Bilibili, the number of users who use this interactive function is still small. As the most mainstream barrage culture of Bilibili, it has become a behavior participated by a niche group, so there is still much room for improvement in cultivating users' interactive habits.

3. The value of historical commentary is weakened

For viewers, likes and replies to comments are one of the most important positive feedbacks.

As the timeline lengthens, popular comments will usually sink due to the content, and new feedback will gradually approach 0. Therefore, the value of historical popular comments to the commenting users will gradually decrease, and it will be difficult for them to continue to play their value.

4. Solution

In view of the above three situations, the following solutions can be adopted in the product:

1) Added the "Stalk Encyclopedia" feature

The Encyclopedia of Slangs brings together the slangs and their meanings from different periods. It is initially edited by operations managers and is open to high-level users to form an independent Wikipedia-like function.

Whether new or old users, they can enter the homepage of "Geng Encyclopedia" and the secondary pages of its subordinate memes by clicking on "Geng Encyclopedia" or searching for a specific meme.

As a result, users can quickly understand the meaning of various memes and integrate into the community more easily, solving the embarrassing situation of not being able to quickly understand the meaning of memes.

The various memes and meme culture that are constantly being innovated are settled through this function. It is not only valuable to users who are not familiar with the meaning of memes, but also meaningful to senior users who are familiar with various memes. They can use it to feel the return of their youth.

At the same time, it is very helpful in creating more popular memes, strengthening the influence of Bilibili, and improving the community atmosphere.

2) Optimize the barrage function and add interactive barrage selection

Creators can add interactive options when submitting their works (as shown below), and in the next stage, they can add buttons such as likes, coins, and favorites.

When the user clicks to select while watching a video, the barrage will display the selection results, creating interaction and enriching the content of the barrage area. Creators can statistically analyze user feedback in "Interaction Management" and understand feedback information such as audience preferences through data analysis and comparison, and optimize and adjust the content accordingly.

The benefits are manifold:

First, by allowing creators to manage themselves, the cost of participating in interactive barrage can be reduced, leading to more audience participation; second, it can strengthen communication between creators and audiences, bringing a smooth video interactive experience; finally, by collecting and analyzing user feedback, it can help creators better optimize the content of their works.

In order to prevent too many users from interrupting video viewing, the rules can limit the adding permissions and number of times different creators can be added.

3) Optimize like feedback and add comment series medals

Add interactive achievement series medals, which can be divided into several levels such as young critic, commentator, opinion leader, etc.

The reference standards are as follows:

• Small critic: the lowest number of likes among the users who have posted comments, six months later, by the top 60% of users;
• Comment Master: The lowest number of likes by the top 40% of users who have posted comments one year later;
• Opinion leaders: Among users who have posted comments, the lowest number of likes by the top 20% of users three years later.

The logic behind the above standards is to allow high-quality reviews to have a longer life cycle and allow publishers of high-quality reviews to gain more satisfaction.

The value that can be brought about by this is: first, it gives commentators a sense of honor for obtaining medals; second, it precipitates the value of popular comments and guides users to post more high-quality comments; finally, it can also improve the overall comment quality of the platform.

It is worth noting that there cannot be medals for the number of comment replies, as this may lead users to post controversial or provocative comments.

IV. Summary and Review

For new users of Bilibili, they can understand the platform's unique concept and culture of memes more quickly; those who do not participate in the interaction can start with barrage and likes to get the fun brought by the interaction; creators can add more interactive elements to the content, guide the audience to interact, form more barrage, and thus enhance the content consumption experience.

The combination of these three methods creates a more intense interactive atmosphere and a stronger community atmosphere barrier, increases the user's migration cost, and further strengthens user stickiness.

Creating a better community interaction atmosphere is one option to give Bilibili more lasting vitality.

Author:Ray

Source: Ray