Facing the metaphysics of community atmosphere, what preparations

What is a community? If we understand the concept of community from the scope of social sciences, we can know that sociologists have given more than 140 definitions to community; we cannot make a simple generalization from various definitions, but There is basically the same understanding of the basic elements that constitute a (real life) community - it is generally believed that a community should include a certain number of people, a certain area, a certain scale of facilities, a certain culture, and a certain type of organization. A community of social life composed of people living together in a certain geographical area.

The "community" mentioned in the title of this article is actually a narrow Internet content UGC platform. The online community has developed from the early BBS forums and post bars to more complex and complete community structures such as Douban and Xiaohongshu.

The reason why we can't avoid the "community atmosphere" when we mention the community is: the atmosphere is the soul of the community, and it is an extremely important existence in the community. Atmosphere is often referred to as metaphysics, a metaphysical abstract concept that means it cannot be simply created.

Next, we try to decompose several important stages of community construction to analyze what work is related to the community atmosphere under each stage:

1. Community planning period

1. Verify user requirements

Before building a community, you need to think about a few questions:

Why build this community?

Who are you building for?

What problems can it solve for users?

That is, product vision, positioning and goals, which help to form principles, help products make accurate, on-the-go decisions in actual development, and country email list are the cornerstone of products.

Among them, "what problems can be solved for users" is the top priority, which can prevent the product from becoming a product of pure obscenity, so it is necessary to verify the user's needs first.

Remember that you are looking for needs, not creating them. Delusions of creating needs are often detached from reality. How to find it? You can try to compare and understand through related competing products (whether directly or indirectly). If there are products with similar solutions on the market, it means that the demand is established, which is the first step to success.

2. Evaluate product opportunities

Then ask yourself why there are similar products on the market, what is our unique competitive advantage, what is the chance of success in creating differentiated products, and how much efficiency can we help users improve so that users are willing to accept the cost of migration.

In the face of an environment where more and more products can only be cut in from more subdivided needs or fields, how big is the target user scale to be set up? How big is the corresponding market size, how is the follow-up scalability, and will it affect user growth?

Since we are a UGC community, we should reflect on the product planning period. What is our target user content production capability? Does the target user have natural creative attributes? If the answer is yes, it will make you a lot easier in the future.

Whether it is to verify and evaluate product opportunities by comparing competing products, or implementing MVP or logical derivation, first of all, it is necessary to ensure that the demand exists and that the users have a certain scale, which is the basis of all conditions.

2. Community cold start

1. Building a community environment

Product positioning and target user characteristics need to be taken into account during the product design stage. Product UI and interaction design are important first impressions.

For example, WeChat was initially positioned as a tool-type product, so it adopted a simple design style and focused on basic functions. The “Island” App mentioned in my last product analysis is positioned as a youth cultural interest community, focusing on street, fashion and art content , targeting young users of Generation Z; therefore, a high degree of freedom is boldly adopted in the product design style. The high degree and personalized design language can attract the attention of the target group at the first time to the greatest extent.

2. Pick torrent users

After the hotel is built, it is necessary to invite testers to experience, that is, early seed users in the community. These users play an important role as an important source of early feedback on products and future word-of-mouth dissemination. Therefore, in the selection of seed users, it is necessary to Pay extra attention.

First of all, it is necessary to create user portraits based on product positioning and goals, and find user types that meet typical goals.

In the initial official operation and guidance, it is necessary to avoid standardizing content, restricting and affecting users’ performance, and giving users more freedom on the basis of meeting the product goals; early grasping the tonality of high-quality content is extremely important. It can be said that a certain aspect of the product The atmosphere is given by core users, of course, early seed users are not necessarily long-term core users.

3. Community beta period

1. Raise the registration threshold

There are two ways to raise the registration threshold:

The first is to maintain the invitation registration system before the community content has formed a certain scale, reduce the participation of "idlers and others", and interfere with the preliminary preparation work. Under normal circumstances, the threshold will be canceled when the product is officially tested.

Zhihu maintained an invitation registration system for the first two years, which could only be done through official invitations or friend invitations. The former is theoretically easier to invite target users, while the latter is not controlled but can simulate the real environment in a limited way; the community as the Internet A special kind of existence in the product requires a steady and restrained rhythm in the early stage in order to be firmly in the hands of the operation.

The second is station B, which always maintains the mechanism that registered members need to answer questions to turn positive (it takes half an hour to answer the questions). The advantages and disadvantages of setting up a high threshold are very obvious, but due to the special attributes of community products, its advantages can make the product go. go further.