3 pitfalls of community operation

Community products have natural advantages in user retention and stickiness. For example, Douban, which was founded in 2005, still maintains a high level of activity even in the mobile Internet era. However, many games, social networking and other software from the same period have long disappeared, so that many apps, such as WeChat Reading and Get, want to improve retention, and the first strategy that comes to mind is to create a community module within the app.

You should know that the success rate of communities is very low, especially for trading software communities. Even strong companies like Taobao and JD have been doing this for several years, but have not yet explored a successful community model.

In this regard, I will analyze the three pitfalls I encountered when building a community, hoping to give some guidance to those who are also building a community, so that they can avoid taking detours.

1. The community is not centered around the core business of the app

In the past year and a half, I have been doing community operations for a second-hand digital e-commerce APP. Its sales model is similar to JD.com’s self-operated business. It integrates suppliers’ products for sale to users and then provides corresponding after-sales services.

In order to improve the retention of the APP, the company's senior management decided to set up a community module, but due to some reasons, after half a year of PGC, we transformed to UGC.

When the APP draws traffic from outside the site, the marketing is a bit exaggerated, and even some unfulfilled promises are inserted, resulting in a mixed crowd. When the community transforms into UGC, the director believes that 1% of these people are the target users of the APP's core business, while 99% are idle users.

If we want to significantly improve APP retention, then we must give priority to serving idle users. According to data estimates, as long as 50% of idle users stay, APP retention can be doubled.

In this regard, when planning community content, he also focused on pan-entertainment content such as funny, emotional, etc., and required 50 pan-entertainment content to be provided every day, accounting for 50% of the total content.

However, the reality went against our wishes. After half a year of continuous injection, the community retention rate was still very low, and the proportion of new users was very high. That is to say, the users who came every day were basically new users. This shows that the content we provided could not attract users to stay.

Maybe when you see this, you will burst out laughing, thinking that my director does not understand the so-called Internet thinking such as user research and positioning.

But this phenomenon is not uncommon. For example, Baidu Netdisk is a personal cloud storage service launched by Baidu that supports mutual file sharing. However, it has provided services with very low relevance, such as paper duplication checking, junk file cleaning, games, novels, shopping malls, and mini-programs, so that Baidu Netdisk has not yet reported any news of profitability and is still considered a loss-making business. Dropbox or Box, which focus on the cloud storage field, both had revenues of more than US$1.5 billion in 2021 and achieved phased profitability.

In this regard, my suggestion is: for apps belonging to vertical fields, all modules, including community, information, etc., should be closely centered around the core business . For example, Futu Securities, which focuses on Hong Kong and US stocks, has established the Niu Niu Circle community within the Futu app. Whether it is topics, live broadcasts or classes, they basically provide content related to Hong Kong and US stocks.

If the company has other exploratory businesses that have a low correlation with the core business, it is recommended to create a new APP for the exploratory business, and then the original APP with the core business can provide a certain amount of advertising exposure to attract traffic to the new APP.

Even if these exploratory businesses fail, it will not affect the existing core businesses. For example, when Sina’s new social APP Oasis was first launched, the Weibo APP gave it enough traffic exposure, such as splash pages, hot topics, etc. Although Oasis has been developed for 2 years and is still in a tepid state, it has no impact on Weibo.

2. Thinking that content is everything

In the past, we have always emphasized that "content is king", believing that with high-quality content we can build a community and form community barriers. As a result, the community I was previously responsible for (referred to as my community), whether it was doing PGC or UGC, was constantly copying the so-called high-quality content from communities such as Kuaik and What’s Worth Buying, and even produced more than 200 articles a day by plagiarizing (and the number of active people in my community is up to 50,000 per day). As a result, the interaction rate and retention of my community have been hovering at a certain value.

Coincidentally, another APP that made a similar mistake was Wukong Q&A, a product that ByteDance had high hopes for. It was designed to be a high-quality Q&A community comparable to Zhihu, and at the beginning of its establishment it used its financial power to poach 300 big Vs from Zhihu, offering a high price of 500 yuan for a single answer. The big V Wang Ruien even said that he earned his first car on Wukong Q&A. But in just 4 years, Wukong Q&A completed the cycle from birth to death and ceased operations in early 2021.

On the surface, this phenomenon can be explained by the different user groups and their different preferences for content. However, a core point is ignored behind this: whether it is a community or social networking, it is essentially about finding similar people, looking for people who you recognize or who are recognized by you .

In other words, when users recognize content, such as likes and comments, they are actually recognizing people who share the same values ​​or ideas as them, including the creators. For example, when I’m browsing TikTok, I’ll like the short videos that I like, and then look at the comment section, hoping to find comments that are similar to my own. If you see someone expressing his or her own thoughts on a movie in the comment section, you will instantly feel like you are birds of a feather and can’t help but smile knowingly and can’t help but like or comment.

The same goes for creators. They hope that their works will be recognized by more people, and underlying this is the hope that their values ​​or propositions will be understood and recognized.

For example, my community recruited several big Vs from Kuaik and paid them a few hundred yuan a month to post content, but within a few months, they didn't want to do it anymore. The reason was that when they posted the same content, there were hundreds of thousands of users interacting with them on Kuaik, making them feel respected, but in my community basically no one interacted with them, making them feel unrecognized.

Therefore, for the community, content is a bridge that connects people, allowing people to feel the ideas of the community itself or the people active in the community, and then screen out similar people to create an interactive space for them as friends.

Here we can extend an active indicator of the community: interaction rate. This metric can also be applied to each piece of content.

Interaction rate = number of interactions / number of exposures; number of interactions = number of likes + number of comments (need to remove duplicates)

But having too much or too little content is not good either. Either the content will not be adequately exposed, or users will run out of new content to read. This is about balancing supply and demand , and I used a simple formula to calculate the amount of content my community needs every day:

1. Total community exposure: The maximum number of people exposed to the community is 100,000 (80,000 people clicked on the community to enter the default homepage, and 20,000 people clicked on the other three channels), and one screen can fully expose 2 pieces of content at the same time, so the total community exposure is 200,000.
2. The exposure required for a single piece of content: Since my community data system is incomplete, I learned from the Jingdong Community, a competitor, and found that the content of Jingdong Community needs to achieve an interaction rate of 0.3% (15 likes), and the average exposure of the video is 0.5w.
3. Number of content provided per day: total exposure of the community / exposure required for a single piece of content. From the first two steps, we can preliminarily know that the number of content provided per day in our community is controlled at around 40.

Note: My community is completely inspired by Toutiao APP. The UI layout has channels at the top as content classification, and content lists below, showing content summaries. If the summary of the content is fully displayed, it is considered that the content is fully exposed.

3. Planning is always big and comprehensive

When we do community planning, we hope to be big and comprehensive, from the direction of the community to a small project in the community, especially when planning content types (such as emotions, music), we want to have as much as possible, trying to include all the interests of all users.

We have to mention Evernote here. It has all the functions that are popular in note-taking software, as follows:

1. Notion-like functions: Block modularization, a word can be a small module. In response to this, Evernote launched Super Note, which turns notes into modules that can be easily dragged and dropped to establish knowledge links.
2. Similar to Roam Research: Dual-link function, linking between notes. Evernote has also added additional features such as smart tags to allow more dual links between notes.
3. Xmind-like functions: Evernote also launched mind mapping, allowing users to freely expand their thinking;
4. Flomo-like functions: Flomo is a note-taking tool similar to Weibo updates. Evernote borrowed from it pixel by pixel and launched the light note function.
5. Features that everyone is currently working on: Collaborative work & space.

Then, Evernote integrates these features into a modular workbench, allowing us to make schedule lists, draw mind maps, and take reading notes.

Doesn’t it sound awesome? But the actual experience is that Evernote is very bloated, and it freezes from time to time after opening, and you need to wait for more than ten seconds. Sometimes an idea pops up in my head, but when I open Evernote, the idea has disappeared without a trace... You know, the most important thing about taking notes is to remember the ideas that suddenly pop up in your mind, and organizing notes is to expand or link these ideas.

What’s worse is that every new feature of Evernote scores 60 points compared to its competitors. For example, in terms of mind mapping, Xmind can support inserting pictures, building connections between nodes, summaries and frames, etc., allowing me to quickly gather my divergent thoughts, and also create concise and beautiful knowledge maps. However, Evernote's mind mapping only supports basic functions such as building nodes and inserting icons, which is useless and tasteless.

In this regard, I strongly agree with what Zhou Hongyi mentioned in "Zhou Hongyi: Twenty Years of Entrepreneurship, Sharing Some of My Thoughts", that no matter how great a product is, it all starts with solving a specific problem .

For example, when Facebook started, it was a tool used by Harvard boys to date Harvard girls. So, it became something that Harvard students liked to use, and then gradually extended to more universities in the United States, and later extended from universities to society. Finally, what is known today as the "great dream of connecting humanity" was realized. But the starting point of this great dream started from a dating app.

For example, WeChat, the social networking giant in China, has 1.1 billion daily active users, which means that every Chinese has one WeChat account. Through WeChat, we can meet most of our daily needs, such as chatting, reading articles and short videos, shopping and paying. However, when WeChat was first created, its official introduction was "Tencent WeChat service, bringing you a brand new messaging experience". Its main functions were: quick messaging, photo sharing, and setting avatars.

At this time, Zhang Xiaolong's focus was naturally on "communication" which was more closely related to messages. It was not until version 5.0 added payment functions such as binding bank cards that WeChat became today's mobile life scene and linked to more business fields.

Therefore, I suggest that you carefully consider three points when making plans: the product, for whom, and what problems it solves/what services it provides . To do this, we need to be very familiar with the main user groups of the product and have a very good understanding of the product's service path.

This theory can be applied to adjusting content types. We can extract content published by real users in the past two months, and then extract keywords to summarize the content patterns: what is the content type, what do they care about, and whether these concerns are met?

For example, when I was adjusting the content plan before, I found that among the 500 pieces of content posted by users, more than 40% were asking what to buy (what brand of digital products is good for 2,000 yuan). Therefore, I reduced or even directly cancelled content types such as emotions, games, beauties, photography, and movie commentary.

Finally, the most profound feeling I have gained from my time working in the community is that users should not be treated as numbers .

The operations around me are too focused on data, treating users as data and worshipping KPI. As long as the KPI indicators are achieved and the bonuses are received, the task is considered completed. This leads to products and operations blindly pursuing so-called growth. They do not dig deep into the deep needs of mainstream users and directly add functions that are not very relevant, making the product functions complicated and chaotic.

Users can actually feel the changes we make to our products. For example, when we transformed our community, streamlined the content types, and redesigned the UI, some fans immediately posted their comments on the community changes in the group.

Author: Mao Xiaodoudou

Official account: Maoxiaodoudou