Community Public Relations

Enterprise WeChat really built up its community features this year. I started piloting it across three projects I manage in March, and it's been almost a year now.

Previously, we used a self-built resident mini-program, developed by an outsourced team for ¥120,000, with annual maintenance fees of ¥24,000. The features were basic: service requests, property fee payments, notifications and announcements. Residents didn't like using it, and the installation rate never went up. In a community of over 3,000 households, we had fewer than 400 active users.

The advantage of Enterprise WeChat is that residents don't need to install another app. They already use WeChat daily, and once Enterprise WeChat is connected, push notifications are basically guaranteed to be seen. In our projects, the information reach rate went from 12% to 67%. I calculated this myself by randomly calling back 100 households after each notification to confirm receipt.

There are downsides too. Enterprise WeChat's community features are still too simple. Service request work order routing, follow-up reminders, timeout alerts—these essential property management features are very rough. Our current approach is to use Enterprise WeChat for reach, while keeping the original work order system for the backend. That means running two systems in parallel, with data requiring manual synchronization. It's troublesome.

I switched public opinion monitoring vendors twice this year. At the beginning of the year, we used Qingbo Intelligence, with an annual fee of ¥36,000, covering Weibo, WeChat public accounts, local forums, and Douyin comment sections. After four months, I discovered a major problem: the delay was too long. Once we had an elevator entrapment incident at our project. A resident posted about it on a local forum, and the system didn't alert us until two hours later. Two hours! The post already had over 300 replies, and the golden window for response had long passed.

In May, I switched to Xinbang's public opinion service. The price was similar, with an annual fee of ¥39,800. The delay issue improved somewhat—basically able to alert within twenty minutes. But their local forum coverage is incomplete. We have a very active local forum here called "Linli Bang" (Neighborhood Help), and Xinbang has never been able to capture it. I reported this three times, and they said it was in the pipeline, but it still hasn't been resolved.

Eventually, I just assigned an intern specifically to monitor this forum, checking it three times a day—morning, noon, and evening. Manual plus machine—it's an old-school method, but it works.

I hesitated about whether to write about this topic. Writing about it might offend people. But let me be honest anyway.

The most headache-inducing thing I encountered this year wasn't resident complaints—it was HOA elections. One of our projects had the old HOA and the new HOA in a lawsuit, and both sides wanted us, the property management company, to take their side. Could we? No. We couldn't afford to offend either side, and we ended up offending both.

This year I helped my company screen crisis PR partners. The quotes from first-tier cities really opened my eyes.

One of our residential projects has total annual property fee income of only six to seven million yuan. Spending one million on a single crisis PR event? Would the residents' association approve that?

Later, I found a local small team—a three-person studio, led by someone who used to cover social news at a newspaper and has been doing PR for five years. Their quote: ¥30,000 per incident, including public opinion analysis, talking points drafting, and mainstream media communication. We used them twice this year, and the results were decent. Negative posts were basically able to die down by the same day.

I won't mention the specific team name—they have limited capacity, and if I say it, I probably won't be able to book them anymore.

Community PR isn't just about putting out fires—you also need to create positive content. This year, we were under a lot of pressure on resident events.

Previously, we had four fixed major events each year: Spring Festival fair, Children's Day, Mid-Autumn Festival gala, and Christmas lighting ceremony. Each event budget was between ¥80,000 to ¥150,000, with an annual event budget of about ¥400,000. This year, the company cut the budget, giving us only ¥250,000 for the whole year.

Less money, but the work still needs to be done. My approach this year was to break up big events into small ones—one per month, smaller scale, with each event budget kept under ¥20,000. The results were actually better than before. Previously, with four events a year, residents might remember one or two. Now, with twelve events a year, even though each one is smaller, residents' perception is that "the property management company is always organizing activities." Participation rates actually went up.

I switched suppliers for props procurement. We used to use a local event company that had inflated prices. They quoted ¥800 per day to rent a 3-meter inflatable arch. I later looked it up on 1688, and the same inflatable arch only costs ¥650 to buy outright. This year, we just bought a batch of commonly used props ourselves—inflatable arches, tents, truss backdrops, portable speakers. The upfront investment was ¥18,000, and we've already used them for eight events. Long since paid for itself.

Let me also touch on property management software. This sector has been hot this year, with a lot of capital flowing in, but products are severely homogenized.

We're currently using Jizhi Property Management, with an annual fee of ¥24,000, covering basic functions like fee collection, work orders, inspections, and equipment management. We've used it for three years, and stability is decent. There are occasional bugs, but response speed is acceptable.

This year, four or five competitors came to pitch to us—Diandou Property, Siyuan Property, Property Home—all of which I tried out. To be honest, the features are largely the same, just different interface styles with similar underlying logic. The migration cost of switching systems is too high: importing historical data, employee training, process reconstruction—at least a three-month adjustment period. If the new system doesn't have obvious advantages, I don't recommend switching.

Everyone in the industry is talking about private traffic this year. Property management naturally has private traffic advantages—residents live right in your community. Is there a more precise traffic pool than this?

The logic makes sense, but when you actually try to do it, it's not that simple. We tried running community group-buying in resident groups, selling fresh produce and daily necessities. Did it for three months, with margins around 8%-12% per order. After deducting labor costs and losses, basically no profit. What's more troublesome is that residents feel the property management is not doing its job. "The elevator's been broken for three days with no fix, but they sure are diligent about sending advertisements"—I've seen comments like this in complaints more than once.

Later, we pulled back. Property management's core job is still service. Do the service well, resident satisfaction goes up, and property fee collection rates naturally go up. Messing around with all those fancy monetization schemes—the losses outweigh the gains.

Should property management do social media? My answer: yes, but don't have high expectations.

Our company's Douyin account gained 20,000 followers this year, posting mainly project event highlights, convenience service reminders, and employee work daily life content. The highest-viewed video was of a security guard helping a resident find their lost cat—over 300,000 views. But viral hits like that are rare. Most videos hover around two to three thousand views.

For Douyin operations, we assigned half a person's time—meaning one employee spends half their time on this. Editing and posting eight to ten videos per month, plus replying to comments and messages, comes to about five to six hours of work per week. Honestly, the input-output ratio isn't high. But not doing it isn't an option either. Nowadays, residents, especially younger residents, learn about property management through these channels. Just do it steadily, don't expect to go viral, and treat it as brand presence maintenance.

The WeChat public account actually has practical use. Our project's public account has over 7,000 followers, with an open rate stable at around 8%. For water or power outage notices, major announcements, the public account is more formal than group messages, and residents take it more seriously.

Let me briefly cover offline communication.

We hold a resident reception day once a month, fixed on the second Saturday morning of each month. Attendance has gone from forty to fifty people at the beginning to now stabilizing at around fifteen people. Fewer people is actually a good thing—it means there are fewer systemic issues, and what's left are individual cases.

I now personally oversee the reception day venue setup. Getting these details right—table and chair arrangement, drinking water, sign-in sheet, feedback collection form—makes a difference in how residents feel. We used to just set up shop in some random property office, and residents would come and not even have enough places to sit. The experience was terrible.