Elements create a healthy and growing community of survivors

Last time we talked about fast gathering and fast dispersing, short survival period and high efficiency of pulling new groups. Today we're going to focus on retention groups.

This is one of the best portrayals of the company's typical customer base, the pool of paying customers who are willing to follow the brand. The purpose of building a group is to give people a sense of belonging, to keep users around and prolong their life cycle through the continuous value output of the brand side and the interaction between community members.

I've created a community of my own called the Operational Circle Project, which is a paid community, and it's doing pretty well, it's a re-retention group. She'll have a lot of new ones in front of her to guide her. Most of our efforts are focused on retention. It has now entered a phase of benign development.

In more than a year of operation practice, I have summed up six elements for the healthy development of a community. When you want to make a community or there are problems in the community, you can take it as a self-check list, let's go through them one by one.

(1) Value output

In the construction of community, the value output of community must be clearly defined. The value output includes the value that the group owner gives to the members and the value that they link to each other. Be aware that you need to maximize the number of people you link to, not your superior one-to-many posts. Otherwise, you'll be tired, and the value you can generate will quickly run out.

For example, in my operation circle group, the value that group leaders and volunteers can provide helps to link people's network resources, make people in the group with cooperation opportunities know each other, and connect them with first-tier Internet companies in first-tier cities. The value generated by linking members to each other, including topic discussion and cooperative connection.

The value of a community is not written in a cold way, but is felt by its members through a series of actions. Maria, an experienced user who has been working in the "Operation Circle Project" for one and a half years, said: "Every day when I go home from work, I will read all the news of the circle group, afraid of missing useful information. This group gives me different perspectives, resources and layers. Among the many groups, she has her own unique value and deserves my top spot.

Some people may ask, I also want the group members to create value links with each other, but they don't talk to each other, they don't understand each other's needs, which brings us to our next key element -- like people. Probably because the people in the group have no intersection with each other, have no common ground, unscreened put together, it is difficult to produce sparks naturally.

(2) Like people

Be clear about what your users look like and where they are, and then convey your values to engage them.

For the user portraits of my circle group, I have observed and extracted them from the users I have served, the fans of my official account and the friends in my circle. I found that there are three main types of people:

A college student who is about to graduate or just graduated wants to enter the operation post, but does not know where to start. There are also many puzzles about the future. In the group, you can consult predecessors and see the career paths of different operators.

B has been engaged in operation for 1-5 years, but he is anxious. He hopes to have a circle to grow together and discuss some popular games. Many of them also have the need for job transfer and job-hopping, so they can get multiple information within the group.

C Freelancers, small and micro entrepreneurs. They may not have done operations before, but after leaving the platform, they realize how necessary this skill is, so they are willing to join in and learn it. They can also recruit A or B students in the group to become part-time partners.

If we compare the same kind of people to the small fish in the fish pond, the next step is to select a few big fish to become the core people to help us maintain the group.

(3) Core personnel

Recently reading the book "The Small Group Effect", the author mentioned an interesting point that users prefer to be big fish in a small pond. The big fish here are the core people.

Value of core people: on the one hand, they can help you share the workload, on the other hand, they have certain influence and value output ability, can solidifying and attracting a small number of users.

What are the criteria for selecting key people?

· Identify core community values

· Have certain qualifications, be willing to share, answer questions actively, and often get praise from group members

· The development direction of the core members is consistent with the direction of the community, and they can draw on each other. For example, if a core person has the need to create a personal IP, or collect seed users within the group to do a project cold start, the community can satisfy him without hurting the feelings of other users.

Ok, above, the fish pond is established, big fish and small fish have, then what do you want them to do in the group? How can they enrich their time in the group and make it interesting and worthwhile for the members? I have observed that some group owners or core people will be conscientious to watch over the group, to answer questions at the first time, to act as a nanny and chat with the role. I think if we can design content with product thinking and make content productized, the efficiency will be greatly improved.

(4) Content design

So how do you design content with product thinking? If you think about the user coming into the community, what do you use to grab the user's attention? That's what's in the community. Usually divided into online and offline. Some people will be extensive design for morning newspaper, afternoon newspaper, online sharing meeting, offline sharing meeting, I think it lacks the unique tone of the community, it is easy to coincide with other groups, not high identification.

The goal of content design is to start from the user's needs and avoid self-indulgence. Take my community as an example, I think it is too common to post morning news every day, and I can't do anything new. It will become a "tip of the day", which introduces small skills that an operator will use, such as hidden functions of wechat or fresh apps. Again, I observed that everyone has the needs of accurate fan fan moments, on a monthly wechat moments to push each other, exchange each other's friends, each time the exposure amount of more than 20,000, nearly 100 fan. And are two endorsements of the high degree of trust of friends oh, brokered a lot of cooperation.

I observed that ordinary offline activities made people a little tired, so I held a "Brain Storm meeting". Every time, I convened a group of operation experts to do brain storms on the operation problems of a donor, so that what we learned could be put to use. The donor would provide afternoon tea and prizes for everyone. This kind of activity design, everyone's enthusiasm is very high, the group of 200 people each offline activity has 40 or 50 people.

If you want to use the fish pond as a metaphor, I think the content design is water grass, let the fish pond more vitality, let the fish can enjoy playing.

(5) humanized rules

State law, group has group rules. Rules exist to let people know what the group encourages and what it does not. One thing to note is, humanize the rules. Every group has people who want to advertise, and you can guide them to do so, rather than making them feel uncomfortable.

For example, in our operation group, some people want to increase the amount of public number reading, throw an article link in the group there is no figure, is not compliant. But if you turn it into an operational discussion, like "Help me with this title," you're in. There are also people who want to sell goods, so we set up a period in the group on the day of Double 11 to encourage people to sell goods. Water to clear, there is no fish, the existence of selfish is reasonable, the need for group master clever guidance.

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(6) Profit model

Last but not last. You have to design ahead of time, how to make money. One way is to earn money from people in the group, such as group entry fees, in-group e-commerce, and knowledge payment. Online paid activities, etc.

Another way is to use the community as an asset to make money from outside donors. For example, after our circle becomes more influential, some party A will want to sponsor, or do paid soft promotion and distribution for them, or take key people in the circle to do consulting for Party A and so on.

The first community that wants to make money can't even get started;

A community that has never wanted to make money, but can't sustain it.

Those are the five essential elements of a thriving community. Let's review:

1. Find the value of the community to your users

2. Find people like you

3. Find the core people in your community

4. Productize the content in the community

5. Make the rules human

6. Design a sustainable profit model

Finally, I would like to say that a community must have ecological thinking, a deep understanding of the law of altruism first, and then benefit from it. This is a kind of training for life.