To increase the activity of a community, we must first increase the value of the community. As the number of members increases, a worthless community will have all kinds of spam and meaningless chats. At this time, the community’s veterans and valuable members gradually find that this place has become meaningless, so they choose to remain silent or leave the group. As more and more meaningless chats occur, members with aspirations gradually leave; the departure of members with aspirations leads to the community’s influence becoming increasingly mediocre, thus forming a vicious cycle.
The methods to improve the value of a community include screening community members, sharing community resources, and continuously providing content.
(1) Screening community members
A community is a group of “equal” people gathered together. The so-called “equal” means that their own values are basically the same, at least at the same level. Therefore, the quality of community members must also be screened. While the community provides value, community members themselves must also have certain values, such as possessing certain resources, being experts in a certain field, and other attributes. The self-value of community members can also improve the overall value of the community, and the two are mutually reinforcing. As the value of a community increases, it will be more likely to attract high-quality members, forming a virtuous cycle.
A community has some high-quality members. However, in order to expand its scale, members join indiscriminately. Then, these members will lower the value of the entire community, and those high-quality members may be lost due to the decline in community value. Therefore, the screening of community members is very important and is the basis for ensuring the value of the community. Strict screening of community members and high-value community members can make the community very healthy.
(2) Community resource sharing
Here we need to introduce a term “sharing economy”. The so-called “community economy” is actually “sharing economy”. Sharing economy generally refers to a new economic model based on strangers and the temporary transfer of the right to use items with the main purpose of obtaining a certain amount of compensation. Its essence is to integrate offline idle items, labor, education and medical resources. Some people also say that sharing economy is that people share social resources fairly, each pays and benefits in different ways, and jointly obtain economic dividends. Sharing economy is to share your idle resources with others, improve resource utilization, and get rewards from it. Therefore, the community should pay attention to the following two points during operation, so that a highly cohesive and active community can be formed.
① Between community members: members contribute to the community, and the community benefits members.
② Between community members: community members exchange and share their idle resources and make profits together.
(3) Continuously provide content
Communities without content are somewhat empty. Different types of communities (including product, interest, knowledge, resource, project collaboration, and mixed) can provide content in different ways. Content provision can be divided into the following two forms.
Sharing by experts in the field: invite big names and experts in the same industry to share knowledge and experience, so that community members can improve their knowledge and skills.
UGC (User Generated Content) of community members: encourage group members to provide high-quality content for sharing.
The advantages of community members spontaneously providing content are: on the one hand, other community members in the community can benefit from it; on the other hand, it can enhance the sense of honor of the members who provide content and increase their stickiness to the community.