3 points of analysis on community operation

Community is a concept that is familiar to all friends in the Internet circle. Many students will be exposed to community operation to a greater or lesser extent in their work. This is one of the essential operational capabilities for user operation. It can enable you to quickly gather high-value users and efficiently deliver key information.

I have met many classmates who sneer at community operations, thinking that it is just about creating a group, making an announcement when there is something, and sending out red envelopes when there is nothing. But if they really try it, they can't get the feeling or grasp the pulse.

In this article, I will break down the basic core of community operations. I hope you can correctly understand the community and make rational use of it.

1. Community Value

Before understanding the value of community, we must first clarify three concepts: social, community, and community.

Social: Social is easy to understand. For various purposes, social interaction is based on point-to-point value exchange and relationship building. Based on social relationships, we may form WeChat or QQ groups. For example: friend groups, relative groups, and freshman groups, these do not belong to communities, so groups are not necessarily communities.

Community: A bounded collection of social relationships and diverse communities. The most common ones are: (Zhongguancun Community) physical life community, Zhihu (including peer-to-peer social interaction and question-and-answer communities of various interests).

Community: A network formed by a group of people who are related to each other, which is a product based on relationship chains. For example: Beijing Hikers Club and Huilongguan Reading Group. This kind of gathering can bring together like-minded people, and there are cross-relationships and deep emotional connections between people, and this connection can be maintained for a certain period of time.

The composition of a community needs to contain five major elements:

1. Like-minded people: This is the prerequisite for the establishment of a community. Everyone in this community has a common value recognition and behavioral direction for something;
2. Structure: This determines the stability of the community. There must be a reliable organization, communication platform, entry threshold and management standards;
3. Output: This determines the value of the community: there must be valuable content output in the direction of interest, such as reading notes in the reading community and finished homework sharing in the PPT learning community;
4. Operations: This determines the sustainability of the community. To bring a sense of ceremony, participation, organization and honor to community members through operational means;
5. Replication: This determines the size of the community. Replicability determines that we can continue to expand rapidly and increase our influence.

Now that we have a clear understanding of what a community is, what value can it bring to us?

There are four points of value to the company's business:

1. Maintain seed users in the early stage of the product, face users directly and quickly collect user feedback, understand users' most direct needs, and accelerate product iteration;
2. During the product growth phase, we reserve precise user groups for growth marketing projects and provide convenient access channels to quickly trigger communication activities;
3. Obtain low-cost traffic channels, accumulate high-quality user word-of-mouth, and guide users to promote products through social relationships;
4. An efficient and convenient user service channel can provide high-value users with efficient problem-solving methods and improve the loyalty of key users.

There are three points of value to personal growth:

1. User insight: Face users directly, understand their needs, and improve your sensitivity to user needs and the industry;
2. Coordination ability: It’s a bit sad to talk about coordination ability. Friends who have been involved in community operations should know that this job is sometimes really no different from customer service. Especially in the early stage when there is no automatic mechanism built, it is very difficult to communicate various information efficiently every day;
3. Resource accumulation: Through the community, you can really get in touch with many industry experts, especially some KOL communities, which are high-value resources.

2. Community Building

To build a community from 0 to 1, we need to focus on the five major elements of the community mentioned above and break through them one by one. They are explained below.

Find like-minded people and establish the core of the community.

• The purpose of establishing a community: Here you should pay attention to your purpose, which must not be for the company or for yourself, but for the users. Is your purpose consistent with the needs of users? For example, the general purpose of a reading community is to allow book lovers to exchange reading experiences and recommend good books to each other at any time.
• The value provided by the community: Taking the reading community as an example, can it provide book coupons, regular reading club activities, a good communication atmosphere, meet-ups with experts in the field, etc.?
• Packaging of the community: If it has a clear purpose and attractive value, then how to get the target users to join the group requires a story that can impress everyone and be packaged into a product to promote to users.

Establish the structure and rules of the community.

• Member structure and division of labor: There must be multiple roles in the community. Some are responsible for managing the community order, some are responsible for regularly livening up the atmosphere, and some are responsible for sharing high-quality content. In short, the management team must be selected from the users and each of them will work with you to manage the community.
• Daily operating rules: There is no order without rules. We must formulate rules in the early stage of community establishment, including how to obtain rewards, what is considered a violation, and what the penalties are based on the severity, and ensure that users are aware of the detailed rules.

Operate cleverly, continuously attract traffic, and have both inflow and outflow.

• Ensure liquidity: As time goes by, some people will definitely leave the community. We need to continue to attract new members through various methods to ensure a continuous supply of new blood. Usually, this can be done through channel promotion, recommendations from acquaintances, offline activities, etc.
• Establish spiritual stimulation: If you want the life cycle of the community to be long enough, you need continuous stimulation. Usually in the early stage, this is done through red envelopes or gift activities, but such long-term investment is huge, so you can try to establish 5 spiritual feelings for users to achieve the purpose of continuous stimulation: sense of organization, sense of ritual, sense of participation, sense of honor, and sense of belonging.

High output, strengthening brand and value.

• Output good content: Good content refers to aggregating and precipitating high-quality content produced by users in the product to set the tone for the community, while also continuously providing consumable high-value content for consumer-oriented users in the community who don’t like to speak.
• Establish a character: Every community needs a spiritual leader, who may not be an administrator but is highly respected. After establishing a leader, we can use the leader effect to effectively guide the direction of user behavior.

Can be replicated and the scale of the community can be expanded.

• Process template: From the establishment of the first community, we should start to organize and optimize the standardized process and documents for community establishment. Standardized processes can greatly improve replicability. With the formulation of rules and structures, we can gradually become the middle office role.
• Brand culture invasion: The significant advantage of large-scale expansion is the growth of industry influence. When more and more users recognize your products, you need to occupy the minds of users through continuous brand culture transmission to increase influence and attention.

Of course, in addition to the above five elements, we must also pay attention to details when building a community, and we can try to appropriately raise the community entry threshold to screen out high-quality initial users, while also making those who join the group cherish it more.

You can find some common points among community members in the early stage and create some topics. If resources allow, you can invite talented people to join the community, or provide some benefits and surprises in advance to give the community its own aura.

3. Active Community

If you have completed the community building and established complete rules and self-operation system, then you will need to use some daily operation methods to activate the community from time to time and extend its life cycle.

There are usually 5 methods that are more commonly used:

1. Regular online activities: Just like a small festival every month, we regularly organize online sharing by experts, topic discussions, flash sale privileges, etc., so that group members can form a rhythm and look forward to the happiest day every month;
2. Daily community check-in: The simplest way to get points by checking in can help most users develop a habit of checking in every day. They can come to the community every day to take a look, earn points and redeem gifts.
3. Give a red envelope: The red envelope is an ultimate announcement in the community, which can activate most users. Of course, the amount cannot be too small each time, otherwise users will quickly lose interest.
4. Community culture cultivation: We can establish label characters, cultivate community memes, and create some community-specific emoticons to subtly influence user loyalty;
5. Offline activities: If conditions permit, regularly organizing offline gatherings can greatly enhance the sense of belonging among group members.

IV. Conclusion

The five most important spiritual feelings: sense of organization, sense of ritual, sense of participation, sense of honor, and sense of belonging.

The five major elements of a community are: finding like-minded people, determining the structure, smart operation, high output, and the ability to replicate.

Communities are not just WeChat groups. Douban groups, Knowledge Planet, Car Friends Circle, etc. are all community products. The carriers are different but the key points are the same.

The above is all the content, I hope it will be helpful to you.

Author: Wu Jiahao

Source: Wu Jiahao

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