How to operate a community in 2020!

“No one speaks in the group, it’s not active at all”, “The group is full of marketing content”, “The group is full of boring and useless information”, “People are constantly leaving the group”. If you have worked in community operations , do you often face the above problems?

The concept of WeChat community has been around for many years. From 2016 to now, apart from family groups, which groups have survived to this day? What is the value of the community to us operators? What is the value to users?

Is it conversion? So how much of Perfect Diary’s GMV is converted through marketing information in the social community?

Is it about user retention and activity? There are dozens or even hundreds of groups in the user’s mobile phone. How can you ensure that he gets your push message as soon as possible? And do your push messages seem to users to be disturbing or useful?

We have spent a lot of time, manpower, material resources and money to build groups and create content. But how much benefit and ROI can the group bring us? How to do community operation?

My idea is to treat group operation as a vertical content platform, rely on content for retention, rely on activities for activation, establish incentive policies and mechanisms, and create a systematic closed loop of operations.

1. Find the right positioning for your community

Let’s go back to a common saying: what kind of value can your community provide to users?

For users (or for the target group): What kind of value and solutions to their needs can our community provide? What reasons do users have to stay in your community?

Core question: What values and benefits do you rely on to keep users in your community? In the PC era and the mobile Internet era, what values do we rely on to retain and activate users?

A certain function of the APP must solve some needs of the users, so that users will stay here for a long time.

Taobao: As an online shopping tool, it can solve users' needs for online shopping anytime and anywhere. eg: Toutiao - As a news and information content platform, it can provide users with information from all over the world in the first time.
Tik Tok & Kuaishou: As a PUGC content entertainment consumption platform. It can help users pass the time for entertainment and leisure.
Get&Chaos: As a knowledge-based paid content platform, it can help users improve their work skills and share their learning.

Then there is Baidu—information retrieval, Weibo—entertainment interaction

We have listed some core values and demand solutions that APP can provide to users. Let's imagine if we migrate these core values and demand solutions to the community, can we extract the core value of our community:

Can we build the community into a tool community that allows users to buy cheap and good products (similar to Taobao)?
Can we build a community into an information distribution community that allows users to get first-hand information anytime and anywhere (similar to Toutiao)?
Can we build the community into a pan-entertainment content entertainment community, so that users can spend their time in entertainment?
Is it possible to build the community into a knowledge payment platform so that users can learn and grow throughout their lives on our platform?

But the facts have proved that sales communities and learning communities will gradually die out. Why is this?

The reason is, have you formed differentiation? Do I still have to go to Tmall to place an order directly, or can I get a lower discount from you? All you can give me is some content that will encourage me to buy something and some tips on how to save money.

The community is not a scenario that can be used to convert transactions. It still needs to rely on content to retain users. It is impossible for community users who sell goods to have consumption needs all the time. When they don’t have purchasing needs, they will not speak in your community.

Unless you plan enough content that can be used to promote your products, topics that your target users care about, and community activities related to your products to activate the community, the community will soon become unpopular.

Of course, content planting, topic setting, and event planning also require operations personnel to spend a lot of time and energy. If I put this energy elsewhere, will I get better results and a higher ROI? So you need to calculate it.

Because I think that if we treat a community as a product, if it wants users to open it every day, it can only rely on content to get users to consume, because content consumption is very high-frequency and easy to produce quickly. Think about how often you call Douyin and Xiaohongshu, and how often you open Taobao?

But it is impossible to have a diverse enough content type like Xiaohongshu and Douyin when running a community. You can only be very vertical and segmented, so as to attract people who are interested in the content to come and consume it.

Of course, there also needs to be KOLs with a certain degree of influence in the group to ensure a certain quality of content output. For example, Uncle Qiuye’s community is about PPT and video accounts, Qun Xiang’s community is about traffic, and Sister Dao’s community is about marketing and private domains.

So I think it is meaningless to create a community without KOL, IP, threshold, content, and incentive system. Such a community will die out sooner or later.

2. How to operate a social content platform

Now that you have thought about the positioning of the community, how can you ensure content production, content reach, and user consumption?

That is to ensure that the community is active, that there are users who can open my community every day, that KOLs can produce content, that platform operators can distribute content, that consumers can comment, like, and forward content to consume it, and that more and more amateurs can start producing UGC content.

A content consumption platform. Regarding a content consumption platform, the most core role is the content consumer. Content producers and platforms are analogous to communities. Users in the community are content consumers, the platform is the community, and content producers are KOLs, KOCs, and amateurs.

In fact, content-based communities can also be divided into different stages:

The first stage: rely on KOLs with a certain number of fans to produce PGC content to attract fans. In the earliest stage, it should rely on KOLs who have established communities to create content to attract fans;
The second stage: rely on official operators to generate P/UGC to do content positioning to ensure basic daily updates. Official operators other than KOLs are needed to produce corresponding content to provide content consumers to consume the content;
The third stage, which is the current stage, is to drive UGC and amateurs to produce content by designing community activities and institutional incentive mechanisms to produce UGC content and ensure daily community activity.

The definition of active users is different for each community app at different stages:

1. Phase 1

A user may open the APP and browse the market for more than 5 minutes, in which case he is defined as active. Or he may complete likes, comments and shares, in which case he is defined as active. Or he may generate UGC content, in which case he is active.

But for the community, we define user activity based on user speech. No matter what the user speaks, even if it is just an answer of “1”, we will think that the user is consuming our content.

Content communities rely on content to retain users. Among the three roles of content producer, content consumer, and platform, the most important role is the platform, which is the role of officially operating the community.

The operational actions he needs to take in the three stages I mentioned above are different. My understanding is:

In the early days of a content platform, there is a need for big KOLs with fans to produce content on this platform.

For example, in the early days of Douyin, there was a need for such content producers to produce content. Perhaps in the beginning, this role was played by the KOL himself and some other bigwigs, because in the early stage a large number of fans were needed to be attracted and seed users were identified, and users needed to be able to understand the value of the platform and the value of the content.

At the same time, it is also necessary to quickly run PMF and find users with needs. It seems that the user retention in the first stage has been done very well.

Therefore, the main task in the first stage is to retain more users by relying on the influence of KOLs, and the secondary task is to let users understand the value of the product.

2. Second stage

The main task is to occupy the mind and cultivate user habits. The secondary task is to establish a UGC incentive mechanism and tap more KOCs.

In the second stage, the main core task is to cultivate user habits, that is, to make opening the community a daily habit for users, and let users know that they must come to our community to find relevant content. Gradually cultivate users to form such a habit, so that users will open the community every day to consume content.

Of course, the number of KOL speeches needs to be reduced appropriately during this period, and more PGC and UGC content is needed.

Therefore, there needs to be official operators to publish content in the community every day. It can be topics or industry information. If the operators are capable enough, it would be great if they can produce the content themselves.

3. Phase 3

In the secondary task of the second stage - to establish a UGC incentive mechanism to encourage more users to speak up and let more users develop the habit of speaking in the community, it is necessary to be able to discover a certain number of KOCs in the second stage. These KOCs need to become templates and role models to motivate those users who dare not speak up.

So at this stage, what kind of user incentive mechanism should be in the community?

When setting up an incentive mechanism, we need to think clearly about what user behaviors need to be incentivized.

If necessary, we should not only incentivize content producers, but also content consumers. The behaviors that can be incentivized in the community are user speeches, user speeches with useful information, and user "pats" can be used as likes.

How do we set up incentive policies?

If a high-quality speech is patted more than 5 times, you will get XX reward;
If a high-quality speech is patted more than 10 times, you will receive XX reward;
If a high-quality speech is patted more than 19 times, you will receive XX reward;

This is a weekly selection for all users.

Useful Information Star - Share the most useful information and get XX rewards;
Active Star - speak and participate in activities the most, get XX rewards;
Community leader - if you speak of high quality, you will receive XX reward;

Top users are selected every week or half month.

With the incentive mechanism in place, the number and frequency of users' speeches, as well as the quality of content, will be improved.

Finally, what you need to think about is what kind of data you need to determine which stage of operation you are currently in. Without wetool, you have no way to export daily active data and can only count it manually, which is also very time-consuming and energy-consuming. Another way is to conduct questionnaire surveys.

3. What do I do in my daily community operations?

One thing I have been doing recently is to break down the operational goals for the second half of the year. Friends who are in operations have more or less had a headache about breaking down this goal.

Generally speaking, goals are divided into two types: process indicators and result indicators. Process indicators and result indicators must have a causal relationship, and the result can be deduced from the process.

For example, due to the addition of an incentive mechanism this month, user activity increased by 10%, and the proportion of UGC content increased by 10%, which in turn led to an increase of 1,000 daily active users of the app. The process indicators are a 10% increase in user activity and a 10% increase in the proportion of UGC, and the result indicator is an increase of 1,000+ active users.

The incentive mechanism is your operational action and handle.

If I use this method of goal decomposition, and if I want to increase the activity of my community and increase the number of people speaking per month in my community of 500 people from only 10 to 200, how do I break down the community operation goals?

What we can imagine here is that the community cannot be updated in a timely manner like Toutiao and Zhihu, and you cannot see the news you want to see at the first time. Also, there is no way to separate UGC content from PGC content. All the content in the group is mixed together and it is difficult to separate them.

At this time, you need to design the content you put on the community every day in a column-based way, similar to a program schedule:

9:00am – Morning News;
12:00pm – Midday News;
14:00 – Afternoon Theatre;
17:00pm – Entertainment news (topic discussion);
19:00 – News Broadcast (daily summary);
20:00 pm – Variety show.

With such a column list, will users form a habit to get the content and activities they want at a fixed time?

Therefore, the above column operation is your grasp and strategy in community operation. Of course, your column may need to set different content themes based on your target user groups.

But if you are active in the early stages, you need to be able to guide discussions in the community. For example, in the morning news segment, you can guide users to discuss their views on a certain hot topic. In the variety show segment, can I set up a "round table" to discuss a certain topic?

To guide users to speak and discuss. Each column can also be set up according to different user groups, and the columns in the community can be adjusted every three months.

My boss, my boss, and my boss all have roughly the same views on community operations. My boss and I view it as a TV program, while my boss operates it as an "amusement park."

4. Thoughts on Community

When I was looking at job requirements on a recruitment platform some time ago, I was surprised to find that the HC for community operations had more than doubled year-on-year compared to the same period in 2019. Moreover, under the influence of the epidemic, there are still a lot of HCs.

I won’t talk about the general environment or the private domain trends. What I want to say is that the community operation position is actually a job with a very low threshold for young people who have just entered the workplace.

He does not require high abilities from you. As long as you can chat on WeChat and use WeChat tools, it can be regarded as a "stepping stone" to enter the Internet industry. Of course, many people will look down on this position, thinking that it requires no work ability or skills.

It may also be what I said above. Simply operating a community consumes huge time, manpower, and material costs. You need to calculate your ROI, which is why so many companies define community operation as a sales position.

In fact, I think it depends on how you treat this job. 80% of community operation positions are indeed sales-oriented.

But so what? In this job, you can understand user needs and gain insights into user behavior and needs. Then, it will be much easier to switch to event operations.

If you can write selling point copywriting with super high conversion rates and circle of friends copywriting with high interaction rates in this job, wouldn’t it be much easier to switch to content operation later? If you can plan fission activities by yourself in this job, wouldn’t it be much easier to switch to user growth later?

There is no distinction between high and low positions. There is not much difference between user operation on the APP side and community operation on the WeChat side. It’s just that the carrier has changed.

One is to use APP to attract users, and the other is to use communities and private domains as carriers to attract users and establish relationships with users; one is to use flowcharts and activity demos to plan activities, which requires user paths, hooks, interest points and scripts to fill your entire path.

As time goes by, you will want to take a social media job that involves sales, but it’s actually nothing.

So if we operate the community as I wrote, will the community really survive for a long time? In a community of 500 people, with no data monitoring, is there no way to judge whether my decision is correct? So think about it, is community & private domain a false proposition? Maybe I am not in a position to judge right now.

In my understanding, there are three types of communities:

Private domain community : is used for user retention, maintenance, and fission (targeting loyal users). What community operators need to do is to continuously output content and operate SOP. Maintain good relationships with users so that these old users can continue to repurchase. You don’t need too much marketing content. Old users will feel your service and be willing to refer you or place orders silently on their own. (Suitable for large brands to maintain their old customers and members, and also suitable for knowledge-based payment companies that rely on community communities)
Sales-oriented : Community operators need to use their mobile phones to convert and sell users, who may be fan users or loyal users. Use your own sales tactics and sales techniques to identify people who can be converted in your personal account or community based on their life cycle, tag attributes, habits and hobbies.
Empowerment communities : Community operators are needed to empower small Bs and shopping guides, provide tools and courses, or material activities, to help them sell better.

But it is really difficult to judge whether these communities can survive in the long run.

Well, the above is my work summary and thoughts on the project in recent time. I want to express it through words, and everyone is welcome to communicate and discuss with me.

Being a trader requires you to think about all aspects, which can be difficult, but you must first do it, and then continuously optimize it, so that you can do better and better.

As a rookie, I am still on the road of killing monsters and upgrading step by step. As I said before, when you feel pain, it proves that you are growing, so let yourself grow wildly!

Author: ZS__Fang

Source: ZS__Fang