Are online communities and forums still popular?

How does the community start to operate?

Just two days ago, I wrote a related thing in the company. I think it's more practical and specific. Let's share it and applaud.

For the sake of understanding, I will take myself as an example to create a simple community or group. Such a community has grown from scratch to maturity. I think there are several key nodes in its growth path:

1: create;

2. Trust and value building;

3. Decentralize and build a network of relationships among community members;

4. "Self-growth" of the community

One by one.

First, the creation and acquisition of initial users.

About the creation, the information to be filled in and the drawings to be made are not much to say. Maybe the only thing worth talking about is the name For the group, a good name should make users have clear expectations, which can not only bring some special feelings (such as fun and * * *), but also bring clear value cognition, that is, let users know what they can get here.

For example, when you see a group called "LeBron James" and a group called "One LBJ HD Cool Picture Every Day", try to understand the difference between them. Try to understand the difference between a group called "Sina employee exchange" and a group called "once you enter Sina, it is as deep as the sea, and you are passers-by from now on".

Another point that needs to be emphasized is that any good community must have some universal values, which are generally altruistic and can be widely recognized, and finally reflected in some rules. For example, many pornographic websites and forums that have been active for decades will require users to seriously reply and thank others through rules.

The acquisition of initial users is usually to attract acquaintances around them, or to do some more accurate promotion on the channel based on the positioning of the community. There are many people in this part, so we won't expand it.

Second, trust and value building.

This is a link that almost all group and community operators need to break through.

At the beginning of joining a group, unless the leader himself has great influence (such as Kenny Lin), almost all users' mentality at the beginning of joining the group is "Let's see what's here first". Whether this wait-and-see mentality can be broken, whether trust can be established between the community and users, and whether users have clear value demands and dependence on the community determines whether the community can be active.

Trust usually occurs when the community provides services and rewards that exceed users' expectations. For example, Kenny Lin League fans originally just wanted to come in and have a look, but they really saw Kenny Lin coming and interacted with them.

For example, friends who join the morning group just want to see it. As a result, all kinds of dry goods I send in the group every day make them very useful, and even one day they can really get up early; For example, joining a group was originally just an unknown calendar, but it turned out that there were really many awesome people spraying in the group every day, which was dazzling and eye-opening.

Frankly speaking, this process is from "not sure what I can get here" to "what value I can get here". After this step, users who just wait and see will begin to be willing to do more behaviors in the community, such as speaking, asking questions and spitting.

Of course, everything has advantages and disadvantages. With trust and value, users will begin to expect something from the community. As the saying goes, if their expectations are not met continuously, these users may get angry or even defect.

Third, decentralization.

Until the second step, the interpersonal network of this community should be highly centered on the founders, administrators or star users of the community, which means that the survival and development of the community will depend on those people. Once these people are overwhelmed, or star users leave, the community is likely to be destroyed. In fact, such scenes have appeared repeatedly in the development history of many communities.

To solve this problem, it is necessary to decentralize and turn a highly centralized network into an almost decentralized network. The following two pictures illustrate the difference between the two-

Figure a

Figure b

As can be clearly seen from the above two figures, the network in Figure A depends entirely on A. If A disappears or collapses, the whole network will disappear completely. In Figure B, even though A is still an important central node, the connections between other nodes have been completely established. Even if A is removed from the network, the whole network can still maintain a high degree of compactness and continue to exist. Even if multiple nodes crash, the network can still exist.

Basically, this is why the community must be "decentralized" at this time.

There are two common routines of decentralization.

The first is to cultivate and explore followers. Suppose your community has a universal value that everyone can recognize and has established trust with the user community. Usually during this period, many activists will emerge gradually. They have strong enthusiasm and dedication to the community. You need to observe, encourage and explore them to help you do many things in the community. Even some important roles in the past (such as spiritual leaders and topic initiators). ) It was originally played by the founders and needs to be boldly replaced by these followers.

The second is to help users in the community build relationships through guidance. The essence of community is an information relationship network composed of many individuals, as well as QQ groups, douban groups, forums and so on. It is just the carrier of this network, as shown in figures A and B above. Only when many individuals in a new organization are connected with each other can a community really form. If you observe, you will find that the relationship between users in all active QQ groups will be very diversified, and this relationship will precipitate into the product over time.

Generally speaking, there are two ways to promote users to establish relationships, one is by discussion and interaction, and the other is by peers, so I won't describe them too much here.

Fourth, the "self-growth" of the community.

When the diversified relationship chain in the community is established, a community has the ability of "self-growth" At this time, you will find that you can't completely control the community, and many events, topics and relationships will naturally happen in the community. This is also the state that operators most want to see in the community.

At this stage, the only thing operators have to do is to draw a boundary for the behavior and speech of the community based on the values of the community, or to formulate some rules of the game. Within the rules, everyone can discuss and interact completely freely, but once the rules are touched, they must be resolutely banned. The community that has entered this stage has basically entered a mature state. Then the test of operation is how long the mature and active state of the community can last. Perhaps what needs to be considered here is how to screen out high-quality content for secondary dissemination and more accurate push after a large number of UGC are produced, and

How to sort out a set of content framework and system based on UGC to help and guide those scattered UGC content to be more integrated, structured and sticky; Second, when the community enters into recession and recession, how to slow down its decline? There are many dimensions that can be done here, so I won't expand them one by one.

Compared with the first three stages, the last stage of community growth may be less challenging for operators.

But the reality that needs to be faced up to is that all communities and products must have their own life cycle, which cannot be changed.

People's demand for community use will always exist, but their enthusiasm for a certain product form may be cyclical, and many new usage habits will also emerge with the development of the Internet (for example, the social question-and-answer website was born in the web2.0 era), so we will repeatedly see many different types of community-based products emerging, and even the iteration of this product form may be cyclical.