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The products I like to make most are those that highlight "content, interaction and user relationships", such as communities.
There are two types of communities: public forums as information nodes, such as forums; or personal spaces as information nodes, such as Douban. Naturally, I prefer the latter because there is more room for product design. By comparison, forums are as dull and devoid of personality as an amoeba.
But I have never made a successful community, and I haven’t even made it “eye-catching”. The subjective and objective reasons are explained like Mrs. Xianglin's. So don’t talk about the past, just talk about the future. From a user's perspective, how can one fall in love with and be willing to stay in a newly discovered community? To sum up, there are three major steps in the process.
Step One: Create an Impression
This first impression can be divided into four points: order, temperament, resources and innovation.
Order means “the basic quality of content and interaction.” To be more specific, most communities have their own public browsing areas that aggregate various UGC content. And it is inevitable that users will be mixed. How to filter out low-quality content and highlight high-quality content? How to establish trusted user levels (if user levels are necessary)? How to deal with conflicts within the community? These tasks belong to the maintenance of order and are the basis of the community's image.
But order alone is not enough. Order is just the underlying structure. The charm of a product is more reflected in its temperament and resources. Temperament means "the attraction of content that is similar to the smell exuded by the community", such as an exquisite and lively homepage, a series of professional and authoritative databases, a column of extremely reliable user rankings, etc. wait. Through the gorgeous aggregation of content and users, it shows a sense of quality and a certain smell, attracting the target audience.
As a traditional method, aggregate display is mainly presented on the homepage or main content columns. However, it is easy to homogenize the form in this way, it is not easy to clearly reflect the personality, and the characteristics are not distinctive enough for new users. To this end, I made some attempts to use concise single-page columns to establish the brand image. For example, for daily topics, there is one topic every day; for photographers, one user is recommended every day; for homework, one topic is promoted every week; for photographer interviews, one issue is promoted every week, etc. A single page (or a concise list page) that pays attention to the sense of form has been conceptually packaged to enhance the delivery of information, and currently has a good reputation.
By next year's Spring Festival, there will be 7 operation-driven columns and 5 algorithm-driven columns. Use a rich column group to create product temperament and leave a unique and intuitive good impression on new users.
More important than temperament are resources, that is, "something helpful to users." The most typical one is Sina Weibo’s celebrity resources, which are unrivaled in the world. The women's community needs cosmetics trials, the game community needs trial account distribution, the beauty and space community needs business transaction opportunities, and the photography community needs outdoor shooting organizations, model recommendations, equipment shopping guides, and second-hand transactions. Resources come from the background of the operator. What kind of community you have is suitable for you based on your background resources.
We had an internal dispute before, whether to focus on "temperament" or "resources"? There was a lot of fighting. One party proposed that outdoor shooting organizations and model recommendations should be the breakthrough point in operations, because users need these things. I think it is true that users have needs, but the company does not have the background advantage to obtain resources, and the regional operation cycle is long and risky, so I determined to make a breakthrough from the "column". After all, content work is my old profession, and at least I have management advantages.
It can be seen that in addition to the basic order, it may be difficult to have both temperament and resources in the early stage. It is better to use strengths and avoid weaknesses.
The last point is "innovation", that is, the design innovation felt when using the product. My slogan for the next edition of the photography community is: conservative frames, innovative details. The conservative framework reduces the user's learning cost, but you can't be too Tencent, and you always have to be a little innovative in small functions, small modules, and small details. A unique design will improve brand recognition and make users feel that you are outstanding in everything from content to products. They will be more willing to spend more patience to experience and integrate into this community.
Of course, innovation for innovation's sake is also boring.
Step 2: Build a relationship
If there is a good first impression, it is easy to convince users to open a space, and then it is time to establish preliminary community relationships. I talked about this topic in "Miscellaneous Thoughts 1017", and I have been thinking about it throughout the third quarter: How to help users find reliable friends and reduce the cost of the process for them to get to know each other?
This is difficult to do. The premise of user matching is rich and effective user tags, which rely on attribute tags in various dimensions, such as gender, age, constellation, city, company, IP identification, hobbies, nature of published content, professional level, and community activity. , such as friend relationships, etc. Most of these tags are preset when building the entire community structure. If there is no planning in the early stage and they cannot be inserted in the later stage, complex semantic recognition and numerical algorithms will have to be developed.
I saw two Twitter news recently. First of all, it changed the "People" entry on the navigation bar and integrated friend recommendations and content recommendations. Secondly, Williams revealed that every Twitter user has a secret "reputation index", which naturally has a lot of origins in matching users. But Twitter, like Amazon, hired a bunch of math PhDs to tinker with the screening rules. Can you do that?
If the match is not accurate, users usually have two channels to establish a relationship.
1. Post some reliable content yourself first, and then follow other people everywhere. The other person may come and visit you out of curiosity, and if they think you are a good person, they will follow you instead.
2. Be active in the public browsing area and attract others’ attention. The premise is that the system allows content posted by new users to enter the public area, and the public area also has a lot of traffic.
The former is more reliable.
Tell me about my approach. When building the architecture, a variety of user tags are reserved. Read the gender/age/city from the blog, fill in the shooting preferences and equipment when opening the space; when publishing the work, you must fill in the shooting city and category, and optionally fill in the shooting equipment (or automatically extract it from exif); then scan the past works, Accurately mark shooting preferences; in addition, algorithm screening and operational review are used to assign user levels. So many tags are enough to match active users with the same preferences as you, or in the same city, with average level or above.
In the personal center, there are two pages with prominent entrances. One recommends friends based on the same shooting preferences, and the other recommends friends based on the same city. The public page also has a column that displays all senior photographers. After entering, not only the basic personal information is displayed, but also 4 sets of works covers of each person are displayed according to a special algorithm (the works with the same preferences as your own are given priority), so you can understand the other person at a glance and increase the hit rate of clicking to view.
In order to achieve such an effect, you must sacrifice a little lightness in process and architecture, but I think it is worth it. Since the photo group format has been chosen, the photography community is definitely not a product whose selling point is lightness. The focus is not on the interaction process, but on the final content effect. This is a design direction choice.
Step 3: Get the rewards
After the first and second steps, new users who joined the community with a good impression and followed several friends were eager to give it a try, and it was time for the most important publication. What will he gain? This is the final hurdle of whether the community can absorb him.
There is nothing to analyze in theory about this proposition. The more clicks on published content, the more comments, the higher the quality of comments, and of course the better the effect. But for a new user who lives alone, even if he is an advanced photographer, how can he attract the attention of many people when he first arrives?
The most fashionable solution to this old problem is to bind social accounts. For example, Instagram binds Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Tumblr, and FourSquare in one go, allowing information to be responded to in your mature relationship network. Although it is possible to bind Renren, Kaixin, and Sina Weibo in China, they have not yet become popular on a large scale. After all, domestic social networks are not as developed as Fanbang, and users are all reposters, so original content can easily be drowned. Besides, the domestic groups are not decent, probably only Douban and Time are better. It is difficult to use small-scale public browsing areas to digest problems (large areas are difficult to manage, information is refreshed quickly, and the community atmosphere is not friendly enough).
What to do? I have a few more tricks. The first is to add a new dimension to information browsing. In the personal center, users can subscribe to works according to shooting preferences, shooting cities, and shooting equipment, with three separate entrances. These three dimensions also have corresponding public browsing areas, which can be viewed by category. This can increase the exposure opportunities of information and bring more communication topics, such as "Hey, this set of pictures was actually taken in Hangzhou, it's pretty good."
Second, the first five sets of pictures of new users must be reviewed by the operation staff. Only after passing the review can they enter the public browsing area. After 5 groups, if the user reaches level 3, no review will be required for posting pictures. Then a reliable new user who posts reliable and good pictures will most likely be set as a "good shot" by the operator, and will be recommended at least in the first 5 sets of pictures. After level 3, it will appear in the personalized friend recommendation system.
Third, users are strongly guided to participate in the weekly "hand in homework" activity. Reliable new users may be noticed by classmates who hand in homework together.
The second and third tricks may fail in the middle and later stages of the community, but they will definitely work in the early stages. In the middle and later stages, I believe that the dynamic circulation network has been very complete. Through social recommendation dynamics, the communication effect of each group of high-quality works should be enhanced, provided that there is a reasonable social recommendation interaction design. The so-called reasonable means that the design is based on the content characteristics and click feedback, and is in line with the user's instinctive reaction, "I can't help but want to click on it", instead of just throwing "share", "recommend" and "like" on the content. under.
In addition, the natural advantage of being from the same school also helps community works be embedded as widgets in your own blog, bringing some additional traffic.
According to the above sandbox, after one, two or three steps, I guess, you can successfully get a new user in the community. But when you go to the photo album and take a look, damn, that’s not the case. Don't be surprised, I'm working on it and will release a 60% complete test version before the Spring Festival.
In the past four years, I have thought too much about most of the products I have dealt with, but have done too little, leaving a lot of ideas rotten in my stomach. No need to explain, a self-deprecating smile appeared on the corner of his mouth.
Author: sterling silver
Author's blog: http://firecacada.blog.163.com/blog/static/707437620101120183975/