To operate a community well, the key is to find the value positioning of the community, mainly through activities, content and user reach. The author of this article starts from the current status of community operations and combines cases to share 7 important principles of his own community operations with everyone.

This article is a verbatim transcript I wrote when a shareholder invited me to share how to build a community. I share it here for a record.

1. Let me first answer this question: What is the essence and value of community as a business model?

The commercial essence of the community is a way to monetize traffic, or more fundamentally, it is a way to monetize influence. This is my understanding, which can only be supported by evidence.

When you want to build a community, you must have some resources. This resource is most likely your influence in this category. What can that influence be?

It can be that an IP continuously creates content, and then creates a knowledge planet for everyone to buy; as a die-hard reader of an IP, they consume the differentiated content that the IP may provide in the community, as well as the social value of the reader community, which is the case with Caoz and Feng Dahui.

Caoz said that in 2019, the revenue of Knowledge Planet was higher than the advertising fee, with about 300,000 fans and revenue exceeding 3 million.

Of course, the two can also be combined. In fact, the start-up of many communities requires the founder to have strong appeal capabilities, and there is a high probability that the founder will be an operator with strong content capabilities.

What is the value of a community?

Answer: Resources, circles, and information .

Therefore, the corresponding community operation actions are:

• Circle operation: create a circle in the corresponding category that is most suitable for users to socialize;
• Information delivery: continuously delivering the most valuable information that the community's target users need;
• Resource matching, matching everyone in the community to effectively connect and maximize the perception of resources that the community can provide.

Second, let’s take a look at the current situation of the community

Today we can see many WeChat communities and knowledge planets. We can see almost 10,000 of them.

There are already communities with a turnover of over 1 million, but what about their renewal rate in the second year? Their rate of addition? How about it?

It is pessimistic. This is a business with a very high closure rate. The renewal rate of most communities today is very low. 35% is probably very high.

Students who want to use the community for user delivery and bonding, please discuss first why it is not sustainable?

(1) The traffic itself is not running smoothly, and the traffic that continues to be washed is the KOL’s traffic.

The traffic logic of KOL may be to operate its own content, attract fans on various platforms, become a KOL, and then continue to wash out members. There will be several outcomes:

One is that the KOL does not have a continuously growing traffic, or the growing traffic cannot keep up with the increase required for the continuous operation of the community, GG (this is a high probability situation);

One is that KOLs use the community as a traffic pool. The threshold of the community is relatively low, and it is used to wash loyal fans and then further sell courses.

(2) The sustainability of community services: What exactly are community services?

I think it is generally information services and matchmaking services. The latter did not last because there were no new resources coming in, and then it became annoying to keep matching.

The former is unsustainable because it requires a lot of effort to operate. You need to plan activities, negotiate with guests, and change the content.

You need to constantly fine-tune and adapt the content to the original standards of your community. This is a process of resisting " increases " and it is very difficult.

(3) Issues with the product attribute of community

Community is not a standard product, it is a non-standard product. Non-standard products mean that it is actually very difficult to build a traffic community.

Basically, people use this community based on different needs, so it is actually difficult for you to always compete with other standard products for public traffic and then convert more users.

(4) The boundaries of a community are the boundaries of a group of people

If high-quality people are a core asset of a community, then we believe that for a community like "Qun Xiang" ,

Our upper limit may be 10,000 people. If it exceeds 10,000 people, even if we divide them into different groups very well,

In fact, there will also be a systemic risk of maximizing the dilution of community value, which will ultimately lead to the collapse of the community.

3. How do we operate the “Quan Xiang” community?

1. Continue to carry out activities to ensure that they are new, practical and complete

Since May 2019, we have held 50 offline closed-door salons, each of which has 50 people present.

This is the scale of every time, we tour the country, this is our first event.

The second activity is our weekly online traders’ practical case sharing, which is a structured sharing on specific topics with detailed analysis, called Night Talk.

For the elite groups, voice sharing and live broadcast sharing are both very inefficient.

Therefore, we forcibly explored a form of transcript plus PPT to provide services.

The third activity is that we have a resource connection based on a specific theme once a week. We officially provide 10 high-quality resources for everyone to connect with, and then everyone sends their business introduction and needs and directly discusses cooperation.

The fourth type of activity is offline conferences with thousands of people. In early August, we held a sales party with 2,000 people, inviting top traders from Douyin, WeChat, and Taobao to share case reviews.

There are also thousands of offline resource docking and cooperation. There will be more explosions in September! 3,000 people at the Double Eleven conference, haha.

There is an operational value in this area of ​​activities, which is to be wary of anything that makes users feel complicated, not to bring your own perspective into the user, and to pay attention to the user's feelings.

2. PGC driven content

The core difficulty of the community lies in the continuous output of valuable content, which places high demands on the service supply chain. If this cannot be met, all communities are essentially just a way to make money. If this point cannot be met, all communities are essentially just a place to make money.

We have about two events every week, and we need to schedule these two events a month in advance.

But we currently don't have a very organized way of locking down what we must share in a certain week or month. The core reason is: if we do, there will be no way to respond to the timely sharing of various traffic hotspots. Secondly, we don't have so many, so deep, so broad, and so well-analyzed topics to use in our daily activities.

This is how we ensure the quality of user sharing:

First of all, we will invite guests to prepare the script three weeks in advance. Then the first step is to ask the guests to prepare the framework for us to confirm. We will work out the framework with the guests and then ask the guests to prepare for crazy output, because our verbatim scripts are about 10,000 words;

Secondly, after we receive the guest's transcript two weeks later, we will invite other guests to work together to determine whether this sharing is qualified and of high quality and share it in our community.

The third is that after we finish sharing, we will collect something called the NPS indicator. We will collect it for every show, so for the 30 shows so far, our own NPS indicator can have an average number, and then through continuous adjustment, we will have a group response standard line.

3. Rely on the people and the ant army!

(1) Come from the masses, go to the masses, and stand on the shoulders of giants

Our group does not have any content or original production capabilities. The reason is that the original content of this industry must come from the real front-line traders themselves.

We in Qunxiang don’t operate the group ourselves, so we can only invite guests and observe the output.

All our content, including some of our sharing and forwarding in the industry community, our own event planning, and our own event copywriting, are obtained through our own interviews with experts.

This is due to some inquiries to experts and some invitations to experts, so this lever is a very big lever, and it is also the most basic core for the continuous production of content by Qun Xiang.

We call this coming from the masses and going to the masses.

(2) Fan lock mechanism + friends and family votes: Let the people bring the people to generate traffic and respond to the group

This product has a mechanism. For every high-frequency online sharing event, we will allow a member to have three free tickets. The market value of the tickets is 399, which can be given free of charge to potential members, that is, his colleagues, partners, relatives and friends.

The rules of this product are very tricky. We ourselves stipulate that the friends and family tickets can only be given to those who have not participated in the event.

Therefore, if you have attended once, you will not be able to enjoy the Friends and Family Ticket. In addition to a product setting, we have our own regulation that when a member brings a non-member to participate in an event and the member is converted into a member because of this event, we can give him automatic cash back, which is our fan locking mechanism.

This gives us a lot of room for maneuver in operations. For example:

For example, if an event is particularly suitable for the traffic of a certain KOC, we will specifically invite this KOC to let all of his traffic enter the traffic pool of this event, which is the private traffic pool we sell.

Let me give you another operational scenario. If we were to hold our own conference online, we should be able to mobilize 10,000 people to participate.

The reason is that as long as your content is good enough, every member should want to not waste the votes of his relatives and friends, so every member should be able to invite three people, so our own 10,000 people is a very guaranteed number.

To give another example, if you are holding an offline conference, then our offline conference may stipulate that members who have registered can invite one person for free, and that can easily exceed 1,000 people.

This innovation allows us to continue to get members to help us attract new members without making them feel particularly disgusted. It will also make our own activity room bigger, so it can be said to kill three birds with one stone.

4. Group Mechanism: Positive, Funny, Real, and Sincere

I will lead the operation team to forward the opinions and debates of members of one of the 14 member groups every day on a hot topic that everyone is concerned about. We think this is very meaningful.

The reason is that the community needs to be filled with such high-quality information that is worth reading, even if a group does not have any response.

In fact, many members have sent me private messages. Although they did not reply, they are actually watching us silently. I think it is valuable for them to watch us and send these messages.

We also believe that real community operation is actually the same as selling things on our personal WeChat account. The core requirements are authenticity and sincerity, and the amount of information. So this is one of our principles for operating our own community.

5. CPS friend circle promotion mechanism: Don’t waste every transaction opportunity

When we operate the community ourselves, in addition to tagging everyone in the group, or directly sending a lot of group messages in the group, a tool we often use is human private messaging.

Private messaging on WeChat is actually a very inefficient thing, but why am I willing to do it?

Because we feel that the average order value of 1,699 yuan is enough to make us very tired but very sincere in communicating with users through private messages.

We hope to connect members with many resources through private messages on a 1:1 basis. We also hope to get feedback from members on each event. If there are positive comments and if it really helps members, we will shamelessly ask members to help us post a CPS poster that will also benefit them, because the CPS poster is an recommendation and exposure for our group. But if there is a transaction, they can also get some benefits, which is our rebate.

This is one of our own operating principles, which is, don't waste any transaction opportunities.

6. Reach users in all directions: make good use of ticket circles, private stamps, communities, PDFs, and physical books

When we operate our own membership, we actually have several channels to reach members, and we use these channels almost every day:

The first one is the Moments. Each member service officer may post about 15 messages in the Moments. We believe that as long as what you post in the Moments is useful to them, it is not called screen swiping. They will find it annoying. But as long as it is valuable, I think they should tolerate it because it is like a subscribed column.

The second one is private messaging. We will privately message the activities and feedback from the activities, and we will also privately message some resources that are useful to this member or to a certain type of members.

The third one is community. In fact, it is the channel that is easiest to silence. We will use it crazily. Everyone uses it almost once a day. We will also use the stupider WeChat groups and to-do events.

The fourth one is PDF. We use PDF to reach users once a week, which is the group internal reference that we update once a week.

The fifth and last one is the physical book. Here I want to emphasize why we spend nearly 500,000 to print a total of 4 quarters of the Yellow Book every quarter?

This is because we believe that Huang Baoshu is a concentrated and high-quality delivery to members. There are many silent members, and even many busy CEOs, who do not have time to participate in group activities frequently. But when they get the book, as long as they feel warm in their hearts, I think our cost is worth it.

We need to reach our valuable members in an all-round way through various offline and online media. The key is that if you can reach them and make them feel warm, your renewal rate will actually be not bad.

When a community product does not have much growth, but its renewal rate is not bad, it can still serve as a very important cash flow business for the company!

7. The assessment criteria for team members must be clarified.

We evaluate 3 indicators: activity participation rate, service praise rate, activity praise rate

Just look at these three indicators, don't pursue community activity, activity participation and content consumption, the silence of the community is inevitable.

A very detailed review of the "Qun Xiang" community operations. It feels like the company's most core secrets have been written out, haha.

But I think the above-mentioned operating methods and all the community operation rules on the market are just a "means" that can help better operate a community.

When building a community, the people are the ones in the community, and the core business is about people. Sincerity between people is the most important thing. Sincerity, trust and value are the foundation for the long-term sustainability of a community.

The working principle of our member operation product is as follows: "We are doing people's business, making people gain something, making people feel comfortable, making people like us, making people feel that we are valuable, and treating people as human beings."

Author: Liu Siyi

Source: Liu Siyi (siyiqunxiang)