Community operation: How to build a highly active user community?

Social media is an important means of attracting new users. It has low customer acquisition costs, accurate users and high conversion rates. However, community operation is not as simple as attracting people and sending red envelopes. Maintaining the activity of the community and promoting user conversion is a big deal. If community operations are not done properly, enthusiasm will quickly fade away.

The author will share several experiences on building user communities based on previous work experience.

1. Community positioning: single purpose, focused topics

The essence of a community is that a group of people with the same purpose communicate within a group for the same thing. Users join the community based on a certain purpose. For example, the "PPT learning group" is to learn PPT skills, and the "Qiandama internal purchase group" is to receive Qiandama coupons every day.

When we operate a community, we will first position the community, and then plan topics and content based on the community positioning. However, many people tend to position the community in a broad and unfocused manner, which results in the community topics being too broad and unclear, and ultimately making it impossible to keep the community active.

I once joined an "operation exchange group" created by a third-party marketing platform. The group consisted of operation managers of this platform's customers, and there were several hundred people in the group. At the beginning, the group owner would initiate some topics for discussion every day, and some group members would participate in the discussion. However, half a year later, due to low activity and the group owner's waning enthusiasm for initiating discussions, the group almost disappeared.

Why are communities like "Operation Exchange Group" and "Operation Learning Group" not active?

I think the most important thing is that the positioning of this group is too broad and unfocused. It does not focus on specific business. The group owner does not know what content to output every day, and users do not know what to get in the community. The concept of operation is very broad. Although everyone in the group is engaged in operation, each person may focus on different operations. If the topic discussed in the group is not what you are concerned about, you will soon lose interest in the group.

If the "operation exchange group" is split into several communities with specific business topics such as "new media operation group" and "short video operation group", and these communities are operated based on these topics, I believe the effect may be better.

Therefore, the community’s positioning must focus on a single purpose and concentrated topics so as to bring together people with the same needs and purposes to form a discussion atmosphere.

I have had this experience in my work. We have successively created the "Hong Kong Stock Connect Exchange Group" and the "AiPO-Data Exchange Group". The former is aimed at exchanging investment experiences and insights on the Hong Kong Stock Connect market, while the latter is for sharing data and information on new Hong Kong stocks.

From the perspective of topic scope, "Hong Kong Stock Connect Investment" is much broader than "Hong Kong Stock New Stock Data". The scope is so wide that people don't know what to talk about. As a result, this group has no continuous topics and low activity. The number of users has been maintained at more than 100 and cannot go up. Moreover, the content of the chat is mainly small talk, without much valuable content.

On the contrary, the topic of "AiPO-Data Exchange Group" is concentrated on new Hong Kong stocks. The purpose of users is to buy new stocks. Everyone analyzes and exchanges ideas around specific new stock targets, forming a good community atmosphere. In addition, the issuance of new Hong Kong stocks is very intensive and there are constant topics. Therefore, this group is very active, and the number of users quickly reached 500, and it has grown from 1 group to 5 groups.

2. Continuous content output is the driving force for attracting new members to the community

After clarifying the community positioning, we will start to acquire community users, including the screening of seed users and the continuous growth of users.

1. Screening of seed users

When a community is first created, it needs to have the first batch of seed users, and then obtain the second batch of users through the invitation of seed users. Generally speaking, the first batch of seed users come from colleagues and old users, with a number of about 20-50. The seed users then invite 20-50 friends to join the group, thus ensuring that the new community has a user base of 50-100 people.

What we need to pay attention to is that the quality of seed users must be guaranteed, and we cannot recruit people without making any selection just to meet the number of people.

1. It must be consistent with the positioning of the community and have relevant needs. For example, we cannot pull a friend who trades A-shares into a community that trades Hong Kong stocks.
2. The selection of old users needs to meet two points: first, there must be a relationship between them, such as providing feedback and participating in platform activities; second, they recognize the product and company and can generate positive word-of-mouth communication.
3. Inform the community of your positioning before inviting them and gain their approval. This is very important for seed users, because only with their recognition can they truly participate in the community and help you invite more people.

2. Attract new customers through activities

There are many ways to attract new customers through activities. Let me give you two typical examples of how to attract new customers.

① Community recruitment activities

Community recruitment activities are the most direct way to attract new members to a community. They get straight to the point and announce the community’s positioning, entry standards, etc. to the public to openly recruit community members. The advantage of open recruitment is that it is efficient and can recruit a large number of members in a short period of time. The disadvantage is that the quality is difficult to control.

How to ensure the quality of people joining the group?

• The entry threshold can be appropriately raised. One method is to pay to join the group. The payment amount can be set to 0.1 yuan or 1 yuan. This can block those who join the group out of curiosity, while those who really need it or think the community is valuable will not give up joining the group because of the money.
• The second method is to require some professional small tests before joining the group, just like members of Bilibili need to pass a 200-question exam before they can purchase, to ensure that users who purchase membership are truly in line with Bilibili's temperament.

②Course recruitment activities

Course recruitment activities are a common new user acquisition activity for knowledge payment platforms. Through limited-time free or limited-time special price discounts, target users with needs are attracted to join the group, and course learning and interaction are carried out within the group. This group of users is maintained over a long period of time, ultimately making them loyal users of the platform and increasing user output.

In addition to knowledge payment platforms, other industries can also use course recruitment to attract new members to the community, such as education, finance and other highly professional industries. We can package professional content in a certain field into a course and recruit students by offering it for free for a limited time or at a super low price. However, the condition for obtaining limited-time free or super low-price offers is to forward the offer to your friends, and the way to receive the offer is to join a group. In this way, more new users can be attracted to join the group through existing old users.

3. Continuous content output

As mentioned earlier, every user who joins the community comes with a purpose. As the creator and manager of the community, we must continue to create valuable content for users in order to keep the community active.

From my experience, the value of content is not limited to active users, but can also play an important role in attracting new users. Continuous content output is the driving force behind attracting new users to the community.

In the process of operating the "Aipo-Data Sharing Group", we will regularly share some fixed content to the group. After each sharing, new friends will join the group, and these new members are the old users in the group who are attracted to the group after sharing content.

Why does our content have such a good effect in attracting new customers?

① Strong professional content

We have professional content operations colleagues who deeply explore new stock data and refine the core content into easy-to-understand content templates, which not only maintains professionalism but also ensures that everyone can understand it. Because of this, group members are happy to share it in their circles.

② Good content format

The easiest content to read and share in WeChat groups is pictures, so we make each content template into a picture instead of an information article, so that it is easier for users to share.

③Iterative innovation

We maintain continuous iterative innovation to avoid user fatigue and maintain our market leadership. Not only does it keep iterating on the UI effects, but it also keeps iterating on new content templates and professionalism.

④Group entry guidance

We have added a group QR code to each content template image to facilitate new users to join the group.

3. Build a user hierarchy to put the community on a self-operated track

Every user who joins a community hopes to gain something from the community rather than just chatting to kill time. If the user level of the community is single, users will not be able to gain much. Therefore, we must pay attention to the construction of the community user level. In addition to ordinary users, we must also invite experts in the field and other people who can be helpful to users into the group. Although users at each level have different interests, users at each level also have different functions for users at other levels, and everyone complements each other.

For example, in the "AiPO-Data Sharing Group" mentioned in the previous article, in addition to the platform (group management), there are three levels of users in the group:

• The first layer is securities firms, whose interest is to acquire customers and whose function is to provide investment information and investment channels.
• The second layer is KOL, whose interest is to gain fans and influence, and whose function is to provide investment advice and professional analysis.
• The third layer is ordinary investors, whose interest is to obtain investment information and professional advice, and their function is to become clients of brokerage firms and fans of KOLs.

Although the third tier accounts for the largest proportion in terms of user numbers, users in the first and second tiers are equally important. If there are only third-tier ordinary investors in the group, everyone’s professional level is not high and not many valuable interactions will be generated, and the group will eventually become a chat group. Only when KOLs and securities firms enter the group will they lead the discussion of the topic and the interaction in this group will generate value. Precisely because this group has many KOLs and securities firms, we as group administrators do not need to deliberately initiate topics to "strengthen operations", because many topics have been generated by group members asking each other for advice and communicating, and the group's activity is already very high.

Therefore, in the process of operating the community, we must pay attention to the construction of user levels. We cannot just bring users and potential users who we think are valuable to us into the group. We should also bring those who are valuable to our users into the group, so that the users of this community can depend on each other and build a community ecosystem. Only in this way can the community be self-operated, rather than relying on the "strong operation" of the group owner to maintain its activity.

4. Activity operation promotes user conversion

The purpose of our community operation is to obtain more potential users through the community and further convert them into registered users and paying users.

The method of converting community users is relatively simple. The first method is to continuously provide content services to users within the group, and connect users with products through content. The second method is to provide users with real discounts through activities and convert users into paying users. Activities include free raffles, group purchases, etc. You can flexibly create activities within the WeChat group through Fanke interaction or the raffle mini program.