Advanced community operations: How to operate hundreds of groups at the same time?

When you become the executor of a community and have dozens or even hundreds of groups under your control, how do you, as the leader, manage so many groups at the same time? How can we avoid losing sight of one thing while focusing on another?

Let me ask you two questions first:

• How many groups have you run at the same time?
• What will you do when the number of groups you operate exceeds 10 or even dozens?

01

For friends who are working in the community, if you have been doing it for more than a year, as the number of users of your company's products grows, you will inevitably encounter the problems we just mentioned above. When you encounter this, how do you solve it?

Personally, I think that if you transition from operating a few groups to operating dozens or even hundreds of groups at the same time, this may also be a change in your position and abilities.

When operating a single group, most people may still be a community executor. They only need to do some basic operations within the community every day and do not have to think too much, because there are only a few people and they are all in the same ecological group; but when you operate multiple groups at the same time, you have to consider a problem, that is, your time and energy as well as the overall operational ideas .

Let’s make an assumption: when you are operating 50 groups at the same time, the company needs to send an announcement to remind each group when it organizes an event. If you are the only one operating at this time, how long will it take for you to manually send group announcements one by one?

Some people may use some tools to automatically send group announcements, but because of WeChat anti-blocking issues, your interval cannot be set too short.

To put it more directly, when you operate multiple groups at the same time, you will not be able to take into account the content or questions generated by each group, and you will often miss information.

The community has been around for several years, and this year is more like its first year. Due to the epidemic, many large physical stores and traditional franchise stores are unable to operate offline and are forced to sell and operate online.

So some of the ways of online operations are nothing more than WeChat, online stores and short video platforms.

Most people on WeChat still choose to use social media as a medium because it can reach users faster and easier and conduct rapid marketing.

Back to the question we are discussing in this article, how to operate multiple groups at the same time?

My suggestions are:

Establish a community command center group and select sub-group leaders from each group. The leaders can be customers (must be loyal customers) or internal staff. All community instructions are issued from the main group, and then distributed to each group by the person in charge of each group for hierarchical operations.

You only need to operate this one group well, and leave the other groups to the group leaders to operate and then check!

After many companies have completed some large-scale online activities, they will leave behind many communities, such as registered users attracted through fission activities and live broadcast users attracted by online course live broadcasts. Due to some factors in the fission gameplay, the front end will use some pre-registration methods to attract people and achieve a snowball effect.

Because these communities are established once through activities, they are deemed to have no exploitable value after the activities are over. In addition, internal companies do not want to spend more manpower costs on them, resulting in these groups becoming advertising groups and junk groups.

In fact, this kind of residual group can also be operated through the method of later cluster management, delegating power to allow users to help with the later management, and it can also serve as the basis for a group of seed user channels for the next event.

For example, I once encountered a company that, after every large-scale event, because the group was divided according to cities, after the event, they would screen the group management seed users based on the active status of the group members before the event, and then have private chats with them to ask whether they were interested in playing this role.

If the group manager performs well, he or she can become the helmsman of a city in a peripheral area. Later, he or she can directly participate in the registration for the next event at a discount or for free, and is more likely to be invited to participate in offline activities.

After the group management members are determined, a branch group will be established. Normally, these group managers are only required to supervise the ecology within the group, let group members abide by the group rules, and when there are activities, they will be posted to the main group and let the group management distribute them, and then cooperate with the warm-up atmosphere in the group.

02

Let's take an education and training institution as an example:

Offline training institutions are generally divided by grade or large or small classes. If this is transferred online, each offline classroom can be regarded as a WeChat group, and different WeChat groups represent customer groups at different stages. It also involves checking homework every day and answering some questions from students.

For some medium and large institutions, there will definitely be a large number of WeChat class groups. If they want to take care of the UGC ecology in each group, they will definitely not have enough energy.

At this time, we adopted the online "class teacher" model to manage, and let the teachers who originally taught offline be responsible for managing their respective WeChat class groups.

Then establish a general group for class teachers, and only invite the "class teachers" of each group into the general group.

As the general operator of the community, you only need to publish the community actions and instructions that need to be operated in the general group, and then make an announcement reminder. After the class teachers in the general group see it, they can send it to the groups they are responsible for.

There are a few points that need to be noted. Teachers definitely have no experience in this area, so you need to give them a simple community training before the activity starts, including group announcements, group rule settings, group usernames, and other training information.

Then, for the instructions issued in the general group, all the scripts need to be prepared, and each "class teacher" only needs to copy and paste them into their own group, so that all group activities can be carried out in a more timely manner.

Another point is that it is recommended that group owners of all groups do not transfer the group. If the group has 40 or more people, a "class teacher" can be appointed to manage the group. This is because there is a fear that the "class teacher" of the individual group may not receive information from the main group in time, resulting in no activity in his group. At this time, the general person in charge of the community is also required to check the situation of all groups at regular intervals to ensure timely control.

As we just said above, it is mostly managed by internal employees. Because of company management and performance appraisal, there is no need to worry about the establishment of group leaders or execution.

So if the company does not have manpower support and needs to develop customers to manage the group, how should it find and persuade them to play the role of "group management"?

I have seen an educational enterprise that recruits candidates in the form of teaching assistants. Those who are selected will have all course fees refunded, thereby motivating customers to run for the position.

In addition, if the course is suitable, you can also use the distribution form to collect data. Each group of distributors can operate in their own group, and all the distribution amounts within their group will be divided among their "group managers".

If it is other APP products, such as APP product user groups, we can give these group managers some separate permissions, or some highly recognizable things to demonstrate their identity and meet their social needs.

The permissions and identities mentioned here can be, for example, the badges in the APP. The company can develop this function and open some permissions to those with badges separately.

As for how to find users, we can use the following dimensions to judge which users are more willing to take on this role. As we said before, for example, the speeches in the group. Those who are more active in the group before the activity starts are definitely more accurate and loyal users, and they often have greater intentions.

Then you can also evaluate based on the user's level of product usage or activity interest. Die-hard fans are usually less likely to reject.

What has been said above are my personal views on the arguments described in this article and the experiences summarized from my operations. Of course, there will definitely be other ways of playing. Each product and customer group is different, and the ways of playing will change, but the overall operational ideas and logic will not be too different.

Recently, I heard that many people in the industry regard community operations as "group customer service". Every day they just answer questions in the group, and then invite people, send notifications and other very mechanical actions.

I think this view lies more in the community operator himself.

There are also many people in the industry who have achieved income freedom and started businesses by building communities. It depends on how you treat and understand the position of the community.

Due to the impact of the epidemic this year, many traditional retailers are unable to conduct offline operations and can only move all businesses online. The core of most companies has tilted the balance towards the online end, which is also a trend for online communities.

All community practitioners will face a common problem, which is how to continuously help companies generate revenue and user growth through the community.

Author: Liu Zhixing

Source: LZX's study notes