Community operation is a very long process that requires long-term and serious management to retain users and make them more active. A topic that can arouse everyone's desire to discuss is also the key to making users active. How should the community become lively? The author of this article has conducted a detailed analysis of this, let’s learn together.

In the first half of the year, I completed my boss’s KPI of posting volume by 220%. Here I would like to share some of my own operational experience. This article will analyze methods to increase postings from the perspective of UGC community topic operations.

1. Disassembly of community releases

If you have actually operated the UGC community, you will find that the daily statistical chart of released data usually looks like this:

The height of this broken line often represents the main value of content operation, but if you want to raise the entire line with one action, it is undoubtedly difficult; it becomes very important to disassemble this line and play the operation cards in hand in a targeted manner in combination with business goals.

The analysis of this line can be divided into three areas: base, fluctuation, and peak as shown in the figure:

1) The basic area corresponds to the basic natural traffic release, which is often jointly influenced by permanent topics with a long life cycle and the UGC incentive system, and its value is relatively stable; the expansion of the fundamentals will make the release work more worry-free, and it is also the cornerstone for determining whether the release KPI can be achieved within a longer period.

2) The fluctuation zone corresponds to regular increases and decreases in data, which is affected by multiple factors, including the addition and silence of short-life cycle topics, fluctuations in entrance and promotion traffic, social hot spots, periodic small-scale activities, etc.; among these factors, short-term speculation to earn more profits is the daily core work of operations and a key part of the overall release momentum.

3) The peak zone corresponds to large-scale community activities and hot spots, and is an important tool for leveraging force to reach peak levels. In addition, it is also an opportunity to show up in the office and determine whether your work can be seen by the boss.

The increase in any area will bring about overall release volume benefits. The broken down goals will make our strategies more focused and pure, and the quantification of benefits will be clearer and more precise.

2. Basic Release Accumulation - Basic Area

1. Selection of permanent topics

The significance of topics in promoting releases lies in anticipating scenarios for users, lowering the threshold for thinking, and controlling the direction of mainstream content.

The long life cycle of permanent topics determines that they will inevitably occupy certain promotional resource positions in the community for a long time, such as the recommended position for adding topic tags on the release page, the ranking in the topic list, etc.; the resource positions are limited, so the total amount of permanent topics must maintain a delicate balance - it can fully cover the user's main publishing scenarios, but not make users at a loss due to too many categories or numbers.

It usually needs to comply with the following principles:

1) Low threshold

Whether users can understand and participate in topics at low cost often depends on two thresholds:

• Knowledge threshold: Topics that are too professional will scare ordinary users away. Even if they want to post something, they don’t have enough knowledge, even in highly vertical communities.
• The creation threshold determines whether users can effectively convert their creative intention into action.

Just like topics such as seaweed dance and standing broom, ordinary users can easily produce similar content; on the contrary, for example, the ice bucket challenge a few years ago, even though it was popular for a while, not everyone can participate in the creation.

First you need to find a bucket of ice, some courage, a change of clothes, and a willing photographer or tripod.

2) Reification

The proposition must be specific enough to help users reduce their thinking costs. The trick is to focus the topic on a specific behavior or object.

For example, Douban’s topic: “The moment autumn begins”.

Such copywriting will guide users' thinking to a certain object or a photo in the album, rather than a broad and empty proposition like "show off the scenery", which will make people lose interest.

3) In line with community positioning

Promoting publication cannot be at the expense of content orientation. If a large number of funny videos of non-workplace scenes are produced and distributed on Maimai, it may boost data for a while, but it will confuse users about the positioning and value of the community, and they will lose more in the long run.

4) Targeting the main groups

You must consider whether your topic can hit the main groups in the community. For example, the topic of "Mistakes that expectant mothers must not make" is aimed at new and expectant parents and maternal and child knowledge practitioners.

If it is in women's communities such as Mayu and Mamabang, it will be a standard and permanent topic; but if it is in other vertical communities, or large-scale communities such as Weibo, the limitations of the crowd mean that it is destined to achieve half the result with twice the effort.

Example: Weibo’s permanent topics (below)

2. How to build a UGC incentive system

The incentive mechanisms of the UGC community include traffic (exposure, clicks, comments, and attention), honors (various lists, medals), and material. It is old-fashioned but effective, and users buy into it. The core of human nature will not change.

It is necessary to mention separately the traffic incentives, which are divided into real traffic and fake traffic.

There is no need to say much about real traffic. Fake traffic is usually completed by the cooperation of fake data and vested accounts. In small communities or communities where consumption cannot cover production, it is very common to use fake traffic incentives. For example, the picture community "TuChong" and the anonymous social software "soul". After you publish your works and updates, several vested accounts will come to perform the task of liking you.

In addition, different incentive methods focus on different incentive directions. The corresponding relationship here can be roughly summarized as follows:

The corresponding relationship may be different in different products, but most of them can be planned according to their own business goals and follow this idea.

3. Short-life cycle topic operation - fluctuation zone

1. How to choose topics with short life cycle

Topics with short life cycles generally correspond to mainstream content in promotional positions and recommendation frames. They are the face of a community and a great opportunity to convert users who have only dabbled in the community into posting.

When users participate in these topics, compared to the regular topics where content is first thought of and topics are chosen later, topics with short life cycles often come up with topics first and content is later thought of.

Therefore, in addition to following the principles for selecting permanent topics, the selection of topics in the volatility zone also needs to be more eye-catching, with the addition of timeliness, fun, controversy, and sociability.

1) Keep up with current events

Compared with professional ones, ordinary users prefer fresh things, and combining topics with current affairs is one of the most labor-saving operation methods.

The most popular current affairs are social news hotspots such as "epidemic" and "flood fighting", and popular memes such as "Chicken, you are so beautiful" and "Take you to climb the mountain", but this kind of topics are often hard to come by, and it's a bit like relying on luck - operators need to seize the golden 8 hours, pay attention to social media and competitors at all times, and maintain news sensitivity.

The second is cyclical current events, which are mainly composed of major festivals and seasonal changes throughout the year, supplemented by large-scale social behaviors such as college entrance examinations, civil service examinations, graduation season, Double Eleven, and Spring Festival travel. This type of current events often have fixed time nodes, and the data feedback has precedents to refer to, giving operators the opportunity to plan calmly and allocate resources reasonably - so they must be firmly grasped and not let it go.

2) Controversy

People's desire to refute is far stronger than their desire to speak.

A controversial topic will make people eager to express their stance and refute heresy in order to verify the legitimacy of their own views and gain a sense of superiority, which is one of the things people desire most after they have had enough food and drink.

For example:

• Should there be a dowry for marriage?
• Will the real estate market collapse?
• Should a wife do housework?
• Should you work hard in the workplace or reject “blessings”?
• 985 provides jobs for junior college graduates. What is the meaning of studying?

This type of controversial topic is long-lasting. Although it will not always be on the recommendation frame, it will pop up in a community under a different name every once in a while; because behind the conflicting topics are often conflicts between groups of people, and groups of people will not suddenly disappear.

This is true for conflicts between men and women, between bosses and employees, between rich and poor, and so on. As long as you understand the contradictory relationships between groups of people, you can continuously discover controversial topics.

3) Create resonance

Only by arousing users' resonance can we induce their desire to talk; arousing resonance is an extension of the topic selection principle of "targeting the main population" in the previous article. By finding the common pain points among the main population in the community, we can find topics that are easy to resonate with.

For example, in the workplace community Maimai, "interviews", "unemployment", "996", and "Ali and ByteDance work badges" are all common pain points for users:

In Soul, "being single", "broken heart" and "being cheated" have become the topics that are most likely to resonate with people.

4) Social

The core of social topics is that the content generated under such topics will become the user's social currency, thereby greatly stimulating the user's desire to share.

There are two types of social currency in community content: identity recognition and emotional catharsis. These topics provide an excuse for users to post content that they are embarrassed to post; and these contents can help them shape their personalities in social networks or express their needs and desires.

For example:

• A4 waist and right-angle shoulder challenge
• What's the most depressing experience you've had?

The former gives users an excuse to show off their bodies, and the latter gives users a reason to seek comfort. In addition, there are also reasons to show off wealth, seek a mate, criticize, etc.; you only need to combine the characteristics of the crowd and find scenes around identity recognition and emotional catharsis.

2. Operational skills for topics with short life cycles

Permanent topics can be left alone for a while, but short-life cycle topics must be supported by operational means to unleash their potential.

These operational methods can be arranged in a logical order as follows: pre-embedding, promotion, content distribution, and secondary packaging.

1) Pre-embedded

It refers to the pre-embedding of content and comments before a topic goes online, which aims to stimulate users' herd mentality or desire to discuss.

There are also some tips for pre-embedding content, such as pre-setting an obvious error to attract other users to refute the content.

A common one is like “Jack Ma has 2 billion yuan, and he gave 100 million yuan to each of the 1.4 billion people in China, so he still has several hundred million left.” This kind of simple math or trial and error will attract a large number of users who are “angry that you are so stupid.”

2) Promotion

Push, banner, pop-up, opening screen, KOL forwarding... the more available resources, the better. However, when resources are limited, it is a long-term science to consider the copy and design to improve conversion.

3) Distribution

The distribution here refers to the traffic support for the topic content, distributing high-quality content, using content to bring traffic, and feeding back to the topic.

The gameplay of the Jike Circle is well aware of this. Apart from a small collection page entrance, there are no resources to directly promote the circle. All of it relies on the distribution of high-quality content in the recommendation frame to feed back traffic.

This involves a set of content standard formulation, screening and distribution promotion strategies, which are not introduced in this article.

4) Secondary packaging

The secondary packaging and redistribution of content is to extend the life of short-life cycle topics. The most common one is the push of voting results for voting topics. In addition, there is also the packaging of high-quality content of the topic into special columns, lists, etc.

The operation of topics in the volatility zone is a relatively laborious part of the work, but it is also the part that is easiest to achieve results.

Because most of its methods are traceable and easy to replicate, nearly half of the growth in UGC releases in the first half of the year was brought about by improvements in this area. We must not take it lightly just because it is cumbersome.

4. Promotional Activities Planning - Peak Area

1. General formula for event planning

The planning of an event generally consists of five stages: goal confirmation, program planning, event launch, monitoring and adjustment, and event review; the promotion and release of events also follows this principle.

1) Target confirmation

After the direction is determined to promote release, what needs to be done is to quantify and break down the goals.

Quantification is extremely digital, replacing promotion with 10,000 releases, or a 15% month-on-month increase in average daily releases. In the process of quantification, you can refer to the traffic of similar hot spots in the past statistical period, combined with the current product daily activity changes and conversion rate to calculate a rough number; at the same time, we must consider the actual social situation. For example, there will definitely be a big gap in traffic between this year's National Day and last year's National Day military parade.

Decomposition means splitting the result goal into process goals according to the conversion path of the activity.

For example:

Release PV = Activity Page Exposure * Release Button CTR * Production Completion Rate

Breaking down one goal into three will help you apply strategies more accurately during the planning phase.

2) Program planning

After clarifying the goal, you can use 5W1H to help sort out your ideas during the planning stage:

• WHY——Why plan the event and what is the background of the event?
• WHEN——When is the event, how much time do we have, and how to allocate the schedule?
• WHO——Who are the target users and what are their characteristics?
• WHERE——What are the user's publishing scenarios?
• WHAT——What are the psychological needs of users?
• HOW——What is the gameplay?

The release scenario is usually concluded by the background and target users, and then the gameplay is conceived in combination with the user's psychological needs, and the complexity of the gameplay is determined by scheduling and resources.

3) Activity launch

Before the activity goes online, be sure to confirm the R&D schedule, resource scheduling and material preparation to ensure that everything goes well.

4) Monitoring and adjustment

I have not yet experienced a bug-free event. Once an event is launched, it is not the end of the story. There will always be strange problems waiting for you to deal with. At the same time, you must always pay attention to the data. If the performance is not good, you need to consider whether alternative plans can be implemented or the possibility of making temporary adjustments.

5) Activity review

Activity review mainly includes three parts: result data, process data and existing problems:

• The result data is the release PV and UV, which directly determines whether the release promotion activity is successful;
• Process data is an important support for us to analyze why the result data is good or bad, including traffic data of each entrance, click conversion, page exposure and bounce rate, publish button click rate, production completion rate, etc.
• Only by combing through the data can we discover the problem and optimize it in the next event planning.

2. Principle of simplification of promotion activities

Another important point to note about activities that promote publication is that the path to participation must be extremely simplified, the shorter the better while ensuring feasibility.

No matter how good the copywriting is, it is difficult to recover the loss caused by one more step of conversion. Our goal is to get users to click the button to confirm the release. Any unnecessary pre-steps and distracting points should be excluded or put aside.

V. Conclusion

This article analyzes how to increase the number of releases through topic operations by breaking down community topic releases into three modules: basic area, fluctuation area, and peak area. Many of the methods and techniques are not new, and the main purpose is to provide a new way of thinking about sorting out work goals and resource allocation.

The growth of a community is a slow and long process, and being too eager for quick success will not be worth the effort; long-term layout, reasonable planning, and mobilizing various modules to move forward in tandem are the most challenging issues for community operation capabilities.

Author: Plum Soup

Source: Sour Plum Soup