The failure of community fission, my three lessons

Looking back at 2019, a new concept has become popular in the Internet operation industry: “private domain traffic”, which means independent ownership, free control, free and stable, multiple use and repeated reach, etc. Peel off the gorgeous outer shell and you will find it is nothing more than old wine in new bottles. To put it bluntly, aren’t these logical manifestations the community? It is estimated that private domain traffic has existed since the day online social networking was born. Now that it has been packaged and emphasized again, it is probably here to collect IQ tax again.

In the past two years, the Internet industry has been undergoing a great upheaval, and overnight, new players at the table have become old players. There are many new entrants, but even more are eliminated. Investors are becoming more and more rational, and traffic costs are getting higher and higher, which has made the once glorious low-cost community operation popular again. In fact, community operation has been very popular in recent years, but it is no longer at the center of the storm, has few followers, and seems rather lonely. For example, group chats in various living communities, group chats at express delivery receiving points, group chats at fruit shops... I believe that everyone has more or less joined such WeChat groups. Offline communities that serve specific areas are very active.

Recently, I have also used community fission to attract new users for the app. I thought that as long as the policies were favorable, such a low-tech promotion method would not worry about lack of users. However, after the activity was launched, I was slapped in the face. After careful reflection, I summarized the following three experiences of failure, and I hope they will be helpful to everyone.

First: Target change during fission execution

Let me first talk about the background of our fission activity. In order to avoid suspicion of advertising, I will not talk about the product.

Promotion area: Beijing;

Crowd: People who like to watch theaters;

Offer: Free theater tickets (talk show, crosstalk).

Because the product had just been launched, we were quite generous in terms of promotion, offering free theater tickets worth over 100 yuan. This was the source of our confidence that our community fission activities could be easily successful, but the results were not as we wished. Let me briefly explain it below.

The fission methods are similar, and ultimately they all involve inviting friends. We can look at the flowchart below.

After users join the group, all actions that take place, including asking questions, sharing, and collecting tickets, have been planned in detail. In this regard, it can be said that they have passed the test without any major problems.

Let me add a comment here about the source of users. When building a community, of course you should make use of all the resources available around you, including your employees’ own circle of friends and WeChat groups. Because this activity gives away real money and there are not many tricks, many employees are still happy to share. Then it is applied through other channels, including QQ groups, Tieba, Zhihu, etc.

We posted an event in the same city on Douban, which was approved within one day. We could leave relevant WeChat account information and other information about the event. It is a very good promotion channel because the accuracy of Douban’s audience is very high. In addition, on Zhihu, you can also attract some people by posting information with local keywords. It’s just that these methods of attracting people through content are a little slow.

Through the above methods, we basically accumulated a community of nearly 100 people on that day, and then carried out fission promotion through event copywriting and posters. In the early stage, we required sharing the event on WeChat Moments and inviting three friends to join the group to download our app, and then you could get the tickets. Relatively speaking, it is still very simple, and new people are constantly joining in the early stages.

But after a period of time, basic growth has stagnated, and most of the people who were invited in have no intention of sharing. This may be what the big guys call circle limitations. The natural growth of the product will stagnate after reaching a certain stage. Recalling that WeChat’s daily active users exceeded 500 million, such a natural product as WeChat red envelopes could only grow to 4.58 million and then maintain this data for 7 months. It finally became popular after it placed an advertisement on the Spring Festival Gala. Social marketing probably has the same attribute, and at this time more external forces are needed to promote fission.

To this end, community operators have stepped up publicity for preferential policies, subtly turning the event into a ticket-giving event. Of course, it cannot be ruled out that the operators have KPI assessment reasons and focus too much on the means while ignoring the goals. Ultimately, the event was turned into a way to give away tickets and attract new users to the app, which was putting the cart before the horse.

I believe that many people who have organized events can relate to this mistake. To put it bluntly, from top to bottom, the top-level design has weakened the requirements for core goals, and the leaders of relevant operations personnel have not continued to instill this concept to their subordinates, causing the event to change.

Second: Underestimation of the complexity of the event site

It is absolutely true that no event goes according to plan. Although various preparations were made on site with the user at the center, including instructions, guidance, ticket collection and so on. But various situations still occur frequently. For example, if users gather together to pick up tickets, it will take a relatively long time because the staff issuing tickets need to verify the identity phone number and whether the mobile phone has installed and registered our product. In order to deal with the anxious emotions of the crowd entering the venue, we need to assign an independent staff member.

Another point is that Chinese people really like to gather in groups. Seeing people queuing, more and more people gathered around and asked why. In this way, we needed independent personnel to explain our activities in order to attract new customers. The scene was very lively for a while. However, because there was only one display board and no corresponding event brochures were printed, our on-site staff were a little flustered. Insufficient estimation of on-site conditions results in a poor user experience. Looking back, there are many points that can be optimized to improve efficiency. For example, we can print a simple process leaflet on site to remind users to install our app in advance. In addition, when users who have picked up their tickets are notified in advance, corresponding reminders will be given so that they can arrange time to arrive early, etc.

The most fatal point was that when users entered the venue with tickets, because they were cooperative tickets with the theater, the theater staff treated them differently when they were letting us in, and allowed our users to enter later. This operation is extremely harmful to our users. Although we are a new product and it is absolutely nonsense to talk about brand effect, from the user's perspective, this small difference may cause users to permanently put us aside and no longer use us. Fortunately, timely communication was carried out on site and the problem was resolved. This problem is caused by imperfect communication in the early stages, but the user's first experience with us is unsatisfactory, and it will be even more difficult to get the user to continue using our app or participate in our activities in the future.

Third: Hastily promote the product before it is perfect

The event was very lively, and all the event staff were busy and put in a lot of effort. Everyone was very happy, but when we did the final KPT review, we found that the daily active data growth of the product was far lower than expected. In addition to the activity goal-oriented problem mentioned above, there are two other points worth reflecting on.

1) Accurate user channels. Sometimes the tone of a product is not determined by the product, but by the users it attracts. By spreading out and attracting people on a large scale to carry out community fission, you can definitely screen out accurate users, but most users are still coming for the benefits and activity policies, and they are basically one-time transactions. These users are not the so-called accurate users.

Therefore, user fission and the tone of seed users are very important. Product fission is not like hot spot fission. Hot spots have natural spreading properties, but products do not. Therefore, accurate seed user screening is the key task that must be clarified first. For example, through our operations, we found that the quality of Douban users and the quality of invitations from some big names in the circle of friends are relatively high, and these channels can be expanded in the future. In addition, accurate KOLs are very capable of bringing in volume, and we can focus on maintaining such users in the future to help attract new products.

2) The product is not perfect enough. After the event is over, the first thing to consider is how to retain event users. For us, it is impossible to keep retaining users by giving away tickets all the time, the cost is too high. The key lies in the attractiveness of the product. Just as Mr. Liang Ning said, making products is like planting grass. How to make a sheep come and not leave, but also bring more sheep, slowly forming a flock, with a leader, wolves, etc., to form an ecosystem. Compared to us, our product is not perfect. For example, after the event is over, we can give new users a simple questionnaire on the app to conduct simple evaluation and classification of users, and push columns of interest to users based on their interests, etc., to attract user retention.

It is actually very difficult to achieve product explosion through a single fission activity. The way to play in the community is also a process of continuous improvement. Users are actually getting smarter and smarter. It is true that preferential policies with real money can make a product popular in the short term, but this method has no barriers at all. If you can afford it, others can also afford it. Your users can be taken away by others in the same way. Fission is just a small branch in the operation system. If you want the product to continue to grow, you need the support of a multi-faceted operation system. I hope everyone has gained something from it.

Author: Tong Liyu

Source: Tongliyu