5 Graphs of network online community user growth

of Internet Society

The internet's tribalism is the main trend in the future, and Internet sociology will flourish, and traditional programmers cannot control the Internet kingdom, which has 1 billion people like Facebook. The author has been concerned about Internet sociology recently, the construction, evolution and decline of internet society, there are many ways of thinking at home and abroad. If we analyze "network residents" from the angle of membership of the network community and the composition of the tribe, we can use the law in the community operation and product promotion. The author for a number of group enterprises to develop 2.0, brand Community strategy and implementation, far-sighted enterprises have embarked on this area of strategy. Global consultation in this field is also emerging, there are few professional consulting companies at home and abroad, look forward to discussing with you.

The network community has become the communication between the line of people and support. With the development of social networks, the popularity of the network community, the traditional sense of QQ group, chat room, BBS and other Internet products belonging to the 1.0 era of the network community. The network community is more and more like the Internet home, the tribe, has the stable living crowd, the communication mechanism, the social scene, the commercial transaction. As the author 2 years ago to Mercedes-Benz and many other brands to make a speech mentioned "Every dream enterprise, the Internet has to build a home." In fact, Sina Weibo's official account, micro-letter public accounts is essentially a form of the enterprise's network community, the user settlement together, participate in discussions, maintain stability.

The growth trajectory of a typical community member is: found to register as a member of the network community, diving for a period of time to learn, to learn the style of community, habits began to actively participate in community activities, after a period of participation and dedication, the network community life into normality; Gain a place on the web; time, interest, or other reasons are gradually moving away from a community, "migrating" to other community tribes.

According to the participation and changes of residents in the network community, Lave and Wenger divide the community into the following 5 kinds of people:

Peripheral (diving) (Lurker) – peripheral, loosely engaged;

Getting Started (Novice) (Novice) – Invited new users to participate actively in the sharing effort;

Familiar (frequent) (Regular) – very determined community practitioner;

Growth (Leadership) (Leader) – Leadership, support user participation, interactive management;

Runaway (qualified old person) outbound (Elder) – gradually leaving the network community for new relationships, positioning or other reasons;

In fact, every Internet product, brand community membership growth has a similar trajectory, you can recall, you are how to start BBS Forum, blog community changes. We can also use him to analyze the micro-letter, Weibo tribal growth and change trends.

If the backbone, leadership, and opinion-leader groups of a community collapse and migrate, then the community also means to decline. No community will ever prosper, it has a life cycle. The author Tangchingtong that: In the early days of community migration, perhaps we can curb, do some efforts to allow the ecology to recuperate, rather than rapid disintegration.

Thinking: That year's happy net, Renren, in the face of the rise of micro-blogging, Community tribal scale migration, ecological changes; then the impact of micro-trust, Sina Weibo weak, the platform of the community at what stage?

Forrester, an overseas consulting firm, classifies communities by their actions, dividing them into: creators, reviewers, collectors, participants, viewers, inactive molecules.

Creator: Refers to often write microblog, blog, upload video and other netizens. In the United States, the number of creators accounted for 18% of all netizens, South Korea's highest percentage of 38%.

Reviewer: refers to people who respond to other content on the web, such as blogs or forum messages, or comment, edit Baidu Encyclopedia, reply to Weibo.

Collector: Refers to the use of RSS, social bookmarking tools to collect information, they are responsible for collecting information on the relevant network, for editing.

Participants: Those who participate in social media Maintenance Personal homepage, maintain personal information update.

Viewer: Refers to the information of the consumer, they generally watch blog posts, online video, forum, Forum message reply. The threshold for being a viewer is so low that it does not have much to offer as a creator or commentator, so the team is bigger.

Inactive: Those involved in a particularly low level of participation.

Thinking: To this point, we do internet marketing, product promotion, for different users need to be treated differently. 1. Have we prepared some dry goods knowledge for the collector? 2. Do we have enough topics for reviewers? 3. Do we give excitement to people who are watching? 4. Do we provide resources and think stimuli for creators? Interesting topic that can be carried out along this line of thought

Nancy White and Elliot Volkman from another perspective to dismantle different types of users in the network community, which are grouped into the following 7 categories:

Community architects ——— set goals for the network community, they plan the future of the network community and the direction of influence.

Community Managers ——— They oversee the entire tribe, a bit like the general manager of the store.

Paying users ——— contribute to the community by contributing to the Community's development, as well as a barometer of community building.

Core participants ——— they regularly visit communities and participate in community activities, representing most of the community's dedicated netizens. They are one of the most important people in the online community.

Divers ——— This group is relatively quiet, do not actively share their views, only to see no comment, do not stand. In fact they are activated is also close at hand.

The rulers ——— are often called super users, who have great influence in the community, and have big words and followers in the social proceedings.

The Association ——— they will participate in various groups of discussions, and actively communicate. They are the link centers of the community, connecting different groups together.

The classification of the community can learn from the traditional sociology of the population classification, how to classify different types of residents, its core does not care about a title, it is important to master the habits of this group of people, in the actual marketing, operations can be applied. The author combines the social classification of traditional sociology to comb as follows:

1. Geographical constituencies (geographic communities): From local neighbours, suburbs, villages, towns, cities to regions, countries

2. Cultural community (communities of Culture): from local circles, factions, subculture, ethnic, religious, cross-cultural, and even global communities. They contain the needs and identities of the community. For example Islamic symbols.

3. Social organization (Community organizations): From Common family, kinship, corporate organization, political group, professional institution or global community.

The trend of community development on the Internet is getting closer to the interest map. The social network's interest map (acquires graph) supplements the social graph (Social graph) becomes more and more important. Facebook, Twitter, and Google have started to push relevance content. This field will be more popular in the future. The following figure shows the evolution of online information acquisition (search-driven-personalized push-personalized windfall)

From the age structure can be divided into: the elderly community, children's community, youth community, middle-aged community;

From the gender structure can be divided into: Men's community, women's community;

From the interest structure can be divided into: Basketball community, auto community, shopping community, cosmetics community;

From the way of life can be divided into: small fresh plate, AIDS community, military community, etc.

From the geographical location can be divided into: Jiangsu, Beijing, Shanghai, etc.

What other dimensions can be used to build community classifications?

Summary: The future of the internet will be more "tribal", corporate marketing communications, how to pinpoint key users, to find the target customers in the network community, will be an effective way.