Since the core of a community is emotional belonging and value identification, the larger the community, the greater the possibility of emotional division. Therefore, at the level of “replication”, there are two issues to consider.
(1) Is it really necessary to expand the scale of a community through replication?
People sometimes have a misunderstanding that if there are not tens of thousands of people, it is embarrassing to call it a community. In fact, a group that has passed the test of the previous four dimensions can be called a community. “Small but beautiful” is also a kind of community, and most of them survive for a long time. Nowadays, many people join a group with a large number of people. The cost of screening information is high, and the cost of mutual recognition between people is also high. On the contrary, in a small circle, there are fewer people and everyone’s topics are relatively concentrated, so everyone in the small circle is easy to become active. From the big data of WeChat groups, QQ groups and other communities, it is found that 90% of users are active in small groups with less than 20 people. Everyone wants to form a large community with many people, but many large communities are not active. The relationship between the number of community members and the amount of information is shown in Figure 7-3.
So the scale of a community depends on the growth stage of the community. Each community has a certain growth cycle, and different stages are controlled at different paces. Generally speaking, the larger the community, the more likely it is that it will only provide services to new users, and it will be very difficult to filter high-quality information. If such a group does not control its activity, it will see a lot of information every day, but the value of the information is too small. This will also cause high-value members to remain silent or leave, and the value of the community cannot be reflected. So we need to clarify why the expansion is for? What bottlenecks can be solved after the expansion? Is the community positioning suitable for expansion? These questions must be considered first, and blindly copying will have a counterproductive effect.
(2) Do you really have the ability to maintain a large-scale community?
Copying is not an impromptu thing, but the result of comprehensive consideration of human, financial, material and energy resources. For example, the Chinese Internet community catering brand Funiutang Bama Society, which claims to have a community of 200,000 young people, once tried to hold an online press conference with 500,000 people. In the end, only 70,000 people came to the WeChat group press conference. However, with only 70,000 people, the situation got out of control, which had a very bad impact on the brand. After that, the management team of Funiutang reviewed and began to strictly control the scale and quality of Bama Society.
Therefore, the expansion of scale means more investment, so whether the corresponding input-output ratio can support the maintenance of the community is something that community operators need to consider clearly.