Getting Endless Content for Your Community

by Mary Green | Feb 3, 2020 | Community, Content

Community Blog

Getting Endless Content for Your Community

A community consumes a lot of content, and if you are just starting it might seem difficult to create enough content for your community.

But, content planning is important when starting a community and it doesn’t have to be hard. You can make sure you have relevant/fun content your members will appreciate without breaking the bank, while also making plans for additional content efforts for the future.

Content Curation for Community

One of my favorite aspects of content is curation, bringing content together for your audience. This is an important skill because people want to save time by finding all of the content they need in one place when possible.

This is why an author can have a blog they write on everyday, and bring it all together in a book that sells. No one wants to spend the time to bring it together, organize it, and present it. But, if you have the time, you can do it for you community, without spending money on creating content.

Curation includes bringing together blog posts, articles, tweets, images, webinars, podcasts, videos, downloads, presentations, themes, and any other form of content you can find.

Where do you find content for curation?

Archives of blog posts on popular websites in your industry. – Every influencer in your industry likely puts out some kind of content, visit their archives, whether it’s a blog, Youtube channel, or Slack group, and start saving it for future shares in your community.

Hashtags – look at industry tweets and posts on Instagram, some of the hashtags are very interesting and can help you come up with creative ideas for the community to use for discussion.
Feedly – add the top industry blogs and check in daily to see what the new content is. You can also look at all of the old content on these blogs and see what’s been the most popular (great topics for hot discussions).
News – Top news is always good for discussion.
Course sites – I’ve recently started looking at course sites like Teachable, Udemy, Skillshare, etc for ideas to discuss in community.
Books – look at the table of contents for ideas for discussions (do not steal content, just ideaize from this).
Reddit – look at topics in similar communities, you can look at Facebook Groups as well.
Competitor’s Social – Watching your competitors and related businesses on social media should also give you ideas for content.

Reusable content

If you or your company has content in any form, you can reuse it for the community. Look at high traffic pages on the site to see what was popular and take parts of it for the members to read. You can also look at your most popular social media posts. All of your best content can be re-used to help the people in your forums.

Think of different types of content, not just different mediums, for instance:

How to’s – how do experts and influencers do difficult tasks in your industry?
Debates – what do your members take different sides on? ex: Apple or Android, Cats or Dogs, City or Country Living, Books or Device Reading, etc.
Polls
Pictures
GIFs
Videos – Youtube is a great place to look for your industry, influencers, and experts on your topics.
Recommendations
Jokes
Contests
Competitions
Challenges
Demos – specifically from related companies and tools/software.

Content That Involves Little to No Prep

Another subsection of content I use for communities is content that involves little to no prep. This is content that can quickly increase engagement and help a community grow without my own efforts.

For instance, this could be an AMA with an influencer – most of the work you do is getting them to say yes, show up, and promoting it to your community. The content then comes from the questions being asked and answered.

Debates work for this as well. Come up with a list of topics your industry is either undecided on or has solid arguments on both side. Once you’ve got it posted, ask members from either side to share their opinion and reasoning, then share to social media.

Recommendations – communities love to share their expertise in choosing the best tools, methods, and services with each other. Posting a question asking for recommendations or even reviews/feedback will quickly get a community to talk openly about their preferences.

Accepting Blog Posts – Let the community know that they are welcome to submit content for publication on the site. You should take the time to edit and promote this content when it’s ready, by making sure you distribute the content, you’ll help the author gain exposure.

Content for the Community’s Future

I use content curation to quickly bring in content for a community with out having to create it myself or with the use of company resources. The first goal is to get the community active.

As the community is active, you can start looking at your data to see what the community likes to read and engage with. You’ll want to create more of this content.

Now that you have more time to plan you can get this content professionally created in the form of videos, podcasts, and lengthy articles. Since you know the community appreciates these topics, you’ll be sure to have their interest when it is published.

Content Calendar

The important thing to keep in mind with content is to create a content calendar. While I’ll use a future post to go further in depth on this topic, I’ve found a spreadsheet or Trello board to work well for this purpose.

Your calendar should list out topics for discussion, specific topic copy, and curated content pieces to use in your community. By keeping a calendar of this content, you’ll always be sure to have content to share and engage with your community.

7 Common Causes of Community Churn & Preventing It

by Mary Green | Feb 2, 2020 | Churn, Community

Community Blog

7 Common Causes of Community Churn & Preventing It

With communities, or any fanbase/list, you’ll have people who lose interest, or never get engaged enough, and move on. There will always be a certain level of acceptable churn but that will depend on your industry and business model. In this post we will address how to fix or prevent community churn.

Churn Tends To Happen Early In Membership

While you can look at your CRM to see where in your member cycle members are leaving or stop participating, it’s usually safe to assume that a lot of churn happens early after joining the community, somewhere between minutes to weeks after first signing up.

This usually indicates your onboarding process is the culprit.

For instance any of the following elements can cause issues:

Lack of content and activity – It’s very disappointing to sign up for a community, to be approved, and then find out that the community has no recent activity or content. This happens a lot with Slack or Facebook communities, but I’ve seen it with bbforums and other older forum versions.

When it happens with a community that died for one reason or another that’s one thing, but to join a community that is supposed to be active and it doesn’t have commenting, new posts, likes, etc, it’s very disappointing to the member and you’ll likely lose them quickly.

To fix this, post new content regularly, have at least a small group of people you can easily ask to help you with new content by commenting, liking, etc. I would suggest a small group of 8-12 people so that the community seems a good handful of active members other than themselves.

Long application process – unless this is immediate, members may start to lose interest. The application process can sometimes get prospects to think it’s an exclusive opportunity, but when it takes someone days to weeks to approve new members, you are significantly impacting the chances they will return and become active members.

No established relationships – Early in the onboarding process it’s nice to get members connected with someone in the community. For early communities this means the Community Manager should be connecting with everyone possible. For later communities, I always focus on building relationships with active members (those who are commenting on the content, or posting content). You’ll see in my article on Things That Don’t Scale how this helps with growth.

Lack of interesting activity/content – Depending on the size of your community you’ll have people that range from new to the topics to more experienced experts.

Sometimes, there will be too much content for one the cohorts (sections of your members) and the other will be disinterested, so you have to find a happy medium for both, making sure all members are interested. One way to do this is to design events or curate content that will address interesting topics for all member cohorts.

Not keeping members notified of top content – One of the most useful assets you can create is an interesting weekly newsletter covering all of the great information from your community during the week.

It should include top comments, images, member spotlights, industry news, and opinion threads that will draw readers to come back to the community to participate.

Lack of Fun – Sometimes communities are too technical or professional and members need to have a little fun. There’s always room for an interesting debate, a thread that let’s members share pictures of their pets, or other personal aspects.

This also helps members open up and connect with each other. Read more about including fun in this post by Erica Kuhl a community expert with several years of experience with the Salesforce community.

Asking for too much information – when members are signing up, you want to collect enough information that you can accurately target the member in the future. You might want to offer a personal experience so you need to understand their favorite topics, or you want to understand what their job role is so that you can offer relatable ad offers.

The more data you have, the more you can work with technology to give a unique experience, however members do not want to spend a lot of time entering information before jumping into the community.

Instead, onboarding (on your site) can be a process that takes time over many days. This keeps the member engaged while also collecting the information you need for business purposes.

A community onboarding example:

Get the immediate information you need to allow members to join – name, email, username, password.
Ask them to upload an image (statistically members who do this are more likely to be active future members).
Lead them to post, ask a question, or answer a question in your community. Getting them active as soon as possible helps them to immediately get the connection and information that are considered wins for new members.
Share related posts in an email the next day.
When they revisit the site share a pop up about finishing their profile or ask Which of these are your favorite topics? with easy to choose buttons (design and accessibility affect your success rate of getting answers).
As they continue to visit, ask more questions until they click through to finish the profile or they’ve answered all of your questions.
Keep sending them emails with related content – every couple of days until you role them into your weekly newsletter.
Test this process to see where you are getting the results you need, and making adjustments to improve churn results.

Another cause of churn is when members lose interest over time. This does happen, peoples’ hobbies evolve, jobs change (important for business communities), and they stop having time when life changes (having a baby, getting married, moving).

This is a normal part of dealing with any community/email list/fanbase. But it still helps to prevent churn as much as possible because when your members are leaving, your growth methods have to make up the difference.

Conclusion

Community churn can be frustrating, but it’s a safe bet to start with your onboarding process and early member cycle. You can also refer to your CRM and database to see when you are losing members, or conduct community member interviews to understand where people might not be satisfied with the community.

If you struggle with member churn, contact me and I’ll give you some advice based on your community specifics.

Community Growth Tactics You Should Try

by Mary Green | Jan 30, 2020 | Community, Growth

Community Blog

Community Growth Tactics You Should Try

Young communities that do not have a lot of members or activity need to put a focus on growth. This is often the case for startup communities who need large numbers to get to the point where the community produces an ROI.

What I like to do, and what has shown to be effective, is to tap into already existing fanbases or followings. I do this by working with existing expert influencers and related businesses, who are NOT competitors.

You can use this strategy alone or along with others, I’ve seen a lot of communities work with social media ads or cold emailing. If you’ve got the skills to pull that off, it will only increase your growth.

Here are the tactics that have worked for me and the communities I’ve run.

Invite Experts to Host AMAs

Experts who have their own practices, or clientele, often like to get exposure to even small communities to discuss their expertise and help them get more followers, email subscribers, even sales or consulting clients.

Featuring these experts or influencers on your site for an interview will help you get more activity out of your own members, as well as attract new members to your community.

The trick for making this work is to find an influencer with a similar size following. Email list size is usually a better comparison than social media profiles, but Facebook Groups and Slack work well too.

Approach them asking if they would be interested in doing an AMA in your community. You’ll want to point out your community size, the marketing methods you’ll use to attract people to participate, and the results you’ve gotten with other AMA’s.

Specifically, they may want to know how they can promote their own services/websites/products to your community, and those are terms you’ll have to discuss.

The clincher though is to get them to agree to market the event as well. You’ll want them to either post in their own groups, email their lists, and post on social media. Since you are already marketing them, they should be open to doing this.

The secret to getting people on board is to start with similar size audiences, if you immediately jump in to get the biggest fish in the industry, chances are they won’t participate, but if you work up to it, you’ll have more to offer that big fish later on and they’ll be interested in making the event work for you as well.

Related Businesses Ideas (Events)

As you build up your community by working with influencers, you’ll undoubtedly rack up a list of dream companies to do events with. Then, when you have at least 10,000 members in your community you can start approaching companies to put together online events for your members.

For instance, at Inbound.org we had an SEO Day where search tool companies participated in multiple AMA’s, promotions, demos, and topic threads all about search engine optimization. We also held a similar event with Unbounce for Conversion Day.

In exchange for having access to sharing their products and promotions with our community they participated in answering questions, sharing content articles, and promoting the event on social media and in emails. Both the community and the companies involved benefited.

Here are some ideas for your events:

AMA’s with experts on various topics the company is related to, for instance the CEO, Founder, VP, etc.
New demo videos to share, with all questions answered during that day.
Sign up promotion exclusive to community members.
Twitter chat with company influencer with predetermined topic questions.
Facebook Live event with giveaways – free subscriptions, free books, web courses, etc.
How to tutorials from experts.
Swag giveaways to members who are present during live drawings.

Don’t Overwhelm Your Community

One thing you want to watch out for here is overwhelming your community with events. Give them time in between the events to build up interest for the next one. It’s a good idea to start with one event a month or even one a week and measure and track attendance and participation.

Which brings me to another point, for these events to work for your community you’ll need a few things:

1) participation from your audience, so make sure you can offer that before you schedule an event with someone

2) a large enough audience

3) an understanding of what is important to your community

Since you are the Community Manager, it’s your job to make sure your community is happy to attend these events and is getting value out of them.

Social Media Presence

A social media presence can be a valuable asset to your community. It helps you meet your community members where they are already active for other reasons.

By building up this asset, you’ll be able to bring members in to participate on demand, and you’ll get exposure to new potential members and partners for your growth goals.

Weekly Newsletter

Another asset that will help your growth is your weekly newsletter. While it isn’t likely your members will forward it around, they can mention it to others. However, the biggest benefit here is that it will help you prevent churn and have a baseline for activity in your community.

It’s hard to grow when you are losing members and a weekly newsletter brings people back to your community to catch up on the things they’ve missed. Please do not overlook the importance of creating an engaging newsletter for your members.

Content, Blogging, Articles, Guest Posts

I’m a big fan of content marketing. I have worked with dozens of marketing agencies over the years to help their clients use content marketing in several industries. It can be very successful for attracting people to your community.

I recommend getting active in your industry, turn those relationships into opportunities to share the great content from your community. Put it on blogs, get on webinars and podcasts, and mention your community and company. This will help you build your brand and attract new members over and over.

Ambassador Program

Last but not least, build an ambassador program for your most active and influential members. They multiple your efforts 10x over because you can build their passion for your community into avenues of growth. They are active in groups, social accounts and blogs where you are not or can not. They understand the value of being in your community and want to help others see it as well.

Some of the ambassadors I’ve worked with before are still great friends who celebrate the work we did together. This is your army, train them, and give them the opportunity to help you grow.

Conclusion

Growth will start out slow, but it can snowball over time if you keep adding to it. Start with just one of these tactics and build it up while you plan for another. Your membership will grow and you’ll see more growth with less effort. It’s a wonderful thing to watch and a lot of fun on the way.

Community Moderation Guidelines for Large Groups

by Mary Green | Jan 26, 2020 | Community, Moderation

Community Blog

Community Moderation Guidelines for Large Groups

Community moderation should be done by someone who loves and understands people and has deep empathy for them. Assuming you have chosen a community manager like this, they’ll need a toolbox of the following to keep large online communities (10,000+) managed.

The toolbox includes policies, moderation help, platform features, decisive action, discernment, processes and procedures, and the support of your team.

Community Moderation Guidelines & Policies

Make Fair Rules & Policies

From the start, it’s important to make fair rules and guidelines for your members. They need to be able to share their comments and ideas if they are going to come back and contribute.

I tend to error on the side of giving members more freedom to post and comment, as the community is growing and new members are constantly coming in. I want to keep in mind “What’s In It For Members?” so that I don’t over moderate, upset, and discourage a lot of members.

There is a fine line here, between what is acceptable, what isn’t, and what is too strict for your members.
You’ll need to include rules and policies to keep the peace, to keep members from attacking each other, from foul language (if it’s an issue in your industry), and guidelines on how to handle politically sensitive issues.

Clearly Identify Spam

As I mentioned, members should be able to share about their projects, content, etc on some kind of basis (perhaps a share thread each week?), so you have to figure out what is considered spamming and what falls into acceptable practice.

For instance:

Comments must add value to the discussion (no off topic links, comments, dirty posts, etc).
Community managers have the right to remove anything at any time (cover yourself for unplanned circumstances).
Link shares must also include at least 50 words of content to begin a discussion.
Unrelated links and comments are spam.

Publish Your Self-Promotion Policy

Related to spam, but a bit different as you’ll want members to share interesting projects they are working on. The biggest indication is “Does my contribution here add value or is it just to benefit me?”

Enforce Your Rules & Policies Politely & Fairly

There are rarely reasons to be rude to your members, even if you feel their behavior warrants it. Poor behavior on your team can turn into a public relations issue very quickly.

When you need to enforce your rules and policies, be empathetic, acknowledge how frustrating it can be for the other person(s) involved and keep your cool.

Community Moderation With Your Team

Have Moderation Policies & Procedures In Place

Outside of your own moderation activities, you’ll have to share your policies and procedures within your team and likely with volunteer mods and ambassadors (if they are to report issues).

It’s best to have some documentation available because you won’t always be available to assist on moderation issues. This doesn’t have to be public to the community, but it can be if you are comfortable with it.

This will allow anyone who has to step in, at any point to manage the community without you, and will easily allow you to bring in new moderators without too much onboarding or shadowing.

Bring On Volunteer Moderators

When your community is very large, and your team is not, it makes sense to get the most trustworthy community members active in moderation. They can flag and report comments and members who are causing trouble. You should also give them direct access to ban someone temporarily, in very extreme cases.

They will need to be able to email or chat with you. I recommend having monthly chats (Slack is fine) with your moderators to let them know what has changed, get their feedback on how spamming and members are using the site, share any trends in behavior, and learn about your company’s upcoming plans that affect the community.

I’ve found using volunteer moderators to be very helpful and effective in keeping a large community under control and rolling along smoothly with day-to-day activity.

Keep Mods & Members Up To Date On Changes

In addition to keeping documentation of your moderation processes, it’s a good idea to keep moderators and team members up to date on changes to the policy. People will not regularly check the document when they already know the practices, so changes need to come by notification.

A CRM attached to your community will help you send a quick email to mods, while a quick update in Slack will let your team members know.

Keep Your Team Aware of Ongoing Community Behavior Problems

As issues happen in your community and your team and mods get online and off, you’ll want to keep people up to date on issues going on in the community.

Everyone should know the names of members who are spamming, behaving inappropriately, or causing other problems. This way action can be taken when infractions happen, without allowing too many offenses to occur.

Have An Escalation Process For Your Team to Follow

Members won’t always follow the rules, and there will come a time you have to weigh the significance of the contributions someone makes against their poor behavior. So what happens after you have already warned someone? Perhaps it’s time for a suspension?

I recommend putting an escalation process in order, so you know exactly what to do next, and document how you handle these situations for future use.

When a warning hasn’t helped and it is a small infraction (posting useless comments or content) it might be OK to warn them again. If it’s a bigger infraction (swearing, insulting other members, etc) I’ve suspended members for a week to 2 weeks.

Any repeat of suspension type behavior in the future results in banning. If this escalation process doesn’t work for you, take time to discuss with other community managers (there are several online groups) or ask your team for advice in how to handle the member, another opinion is often helpful.

Continuously Look For New Moderators

Once you’ve started a volunteer moderator program, you’ll need to keep it manned with reliable, regular users.

Overtime you’ll see that not all moderators stay active, some will inevitably get busy or find other interests. When that happens you’ll need another person to take their place. If you keep people in mind from the beginning you won’t have to worry about getting someone new to add to the program.

Here are a few guidelines for choosing moderators:

Members who comment frequently over months of activity
Members who show protective tendencies in your community (calling out spam, etc)
Members who have already spent time reporting or using moderation features
Members who have a decent grasp of the topics discussed in your community
Members who show decent communication skills (reach out to test this)

Community Platforms & Moderation

Use A Platform That Offers Moderation Feeds

A lot of platforms allow moderation features like a comment and new posts feed. This is a lot more useful than having to visually differentiate what is new. For example, Facebook Groups doesn’t have this, they do have the option to get all new posts in moderation first, but not all comments.

Moderation feeds make it easy for you and all moderators who want to quickly skim for spam, or other problematic posts and comments, without first having to approve all of the content (before it goes live on the site).

See What Other Moderating Features Your Platform Offers

The platform you choose for running your community should let you know what features the offer for moderation. I prefer moderation feeds, options for flagging, deleting, and editing contributions, suspending members or restricting their ability to participate/comment/post, and public reporting features.

Enable Features That Allow Members to Report Poor Behavior

Flagging posts and reporting them can mean two different things, especially based on the platform you use. In my experience, letting the community flag posts means they are telling you this doesn’t look like it’s acceptable, however reporting it means it should be removed immediately.

These should go to separate queues for you and your moderators to manage.

Carefully Watch These Members

Closely Watch New Members

Your newest members are those most likely to misbehave, so it’s a good idea to keep an eye on them, or add their posts/comments to your moderation queue until they have been active for a certain period of time. Not all platforms will offer this feature so you’ll have to watch over them manually.

In Facebook Groups if you go to your members list, you can filter the list by date and see new members. If they have any recent posts, Facebook shows a link to their content and you can click through to check on their content.

Be Careful Of People Who Take Advantage

Last but not least, the experts and influencers you invite to your community may take the stance they can do what they want. Sometimes, it’s OK to give them special privileges, especially if their participation makes a huge difference to your achieving your goals. However, you also want to keep in mind that any behavior they display will also be followed by others.

When you seek to initially connect with them, it’s a good idea to remind them off the community guidelines, and you can go so far as to tell them you appreciate them keeping an eye out for poor practices so you can handle them quickly. Giving them some responsibility here, encourages them to uphold the rules themselves.

Conclusion

Large community moderation can be overwhelming if you don’t have practices, guidelines, support, and features in place to help you. When you approach it systematically you can manage the large amounts of conversation in your community, while keeping the peace and allowing members to enjoy themselves.

If you have any questions about community moderation, feel free to message me here, or tweet me on Twitter @marygreencny.

Run A Thriving Community on Facebook Groups

by Mary Green | Jan 13, 2020 | Community

Community Blog

Run A Thriving Community on Facebook Groups

Facebook is one of the most popular places to host a community. It makes sense because it’s free and just about everyone is active there. And Facebook has been putting a lot of effort into making groups a bigger part of the experience.

But just because it is popular doesn’t mean I would always recommend it. However, I know that it is the place many will choose for a variety of reasons so I wanted to help people be as successful with their community as they can. So, I’m sharing how I would (and have) managed a Facebook group for maximum participation.

Collect Email Addresses on Facebook Groups

To start with you need the email addresses of your members, without their emails you won’t be able to connect with them anywhere else meaning once you’ve lost their participation and attention on Facebook you can’t really re-engage them.

You can set up questions from the admin team in your group settings. I would recommend having one question ask about their agreement to your policies, one asking for their email address, and a question asking them to like and comment on posts so they will see posts from your community.

Send Weekly Newsletters

Once you have their email addresses, you should be running a weekly newsletter to share what’s going on in your community, what the most interesting threads were, and what’s planned for the following week.

I’d also recommend not calling the newsletter a newsletter in the email subject, it should be changed by what’s going on in the content of the email.

Recruit Members to Help Seed Posts

One way to get more exposure for your posts is to get people to like and comment on them quickly upon publishing each post. To do this, find members of your group that you can add to a private chat.

Ask them before adding them if they wouldn’t mind helping and ask if they are available when you normally post so you can get their help. It’s good to have several people in the group who can help because Facebook will notice patterns of the same people liking and commenting.

You can also ask new members to join, this will give them a feeling of inclusiveness that other groups aren’t doing. When you do post something new, take the link of the post and put it in your private chat asking members to comment and react. This is called seeding a post and will help get it seen by other members.

Tag Members In Your Posts

Another way to make sure members see your posts is to tag them into the post. Using the @ symbol you can start typing their name, then select their name.

You won’t want to overuse this, so make sure you focus on using it with people who are active and would be interested in the post you are making.

Post Consistently

A big reason Facebook will remove your posts from someone’s feed is they aren’t interacting with your posts (as mentioned above) to combat this, you have to post often, at least a couple of times a day.

This helps new members remember your group and gives them the opportunity to participate before they forget about you.

Content Calendar

To make sure you are posting often enough, you should have a content calendar. This doesn’t have to be a strict calendar you follow, but it should help you plan out enough topics for every week.

You can easily move the topics around, but you need to have a bank of discussion ideas to add to the group in case members are particularly quiet.

You can add all sorts of content to your group: podcasts, links, videos (people love video), poll questions, off topic thoughts, articles, new blog posts, celebrity related content.

If you can’t find anything look at your competitors’ social accounts to get some ideas. Between their Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram you should be able to find a lot of hot topics for your community.

Email Members to Get Them To Post

Another way to get members involved is to identify when they’ve brought up a new topic in comments and ask them to start a post about it. A lot of times they will say yes to your prompting and you’ll have a new post from sending a short email.

Remember: members like to be singled out, they like to be asked to contribute. They may not always have the time to make a post about it, but they usually appreciate you taking the time to talk to them personally.

Make It A Point To Message At Least One Member A Day

In any community, you have to take the time to understand what your members need and what you need to provide to keep them interested. The only way to do this is to build relationships with different members, constantly.

The more you speak to your members one-on-one, the more you’ll be able to bring up the topics that are important to them. Consider this free research for your content calendar.

Have Members Change Notifications & Seen First Settings

Each group has a setting for notifications on Facebook. When members first join the group you can send them an email asking them to change the notification from Highlights to All, they can do this right under the cover photo for your group.

Additionally, Facebook allows users to select up to 30 accounts they can see first in their newsfeed. You should ask members to do this if they don’t want to miss any of your helpful content.

A lot of members will not take either of these steps, but that’s ok. The ones who do are your ideal members and those you really want to connect with. It’s good to ask everyone so that you can increase your exposure even the slightest bit.

Answer Your Members’ Posts & Comments

Last, but not least, it’s important to take the time to answer as many of your members’ comments and posts as possible. Even if you don’t know the answer, or know how to help you should take the time to answer and let them know you can either research it, or tag someone who can answer.

People want to know they matter and you can make sure they do by answering their thoughts. This is hugely important to keeping people active in your group. How many groups will you go back to when you aren’t answered?

Conclusion

Running your community on any platform you don’t own (or have a paid account with) is risky because business will always happen with someone else’s priorities in mind. Facebook has closed groups on people for little to no reason so we have to be careful.

But none of this is going to keep people from using the easiest solution out there, and I completely understand. By following the tips in this post you’ll have extended access to your members and be able to run an active/thriving group.

I hope this post has helped and if I can answer any questions, please let me know here.

What Type of Startup Community Should You Start?

by Mary Green | Jan 10, 2020 | Community

Community Blog

What Type of Startup Community Should You Start?

The kind of community you start will directly relate to the benefits you will see from your investment.

Since 80% of startups are now saying they have a community, it’s important for those considering starting a community to understand the options in front of them.

There are several types of communities you can start, I hope to explain them, their differences, and benefits in this post.

Let’s jump in…

Social Media Community

Sometimes social media management is considered community. This just refers to your public profiles on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, etc as communities. However, fans of social media profiles don’t usually see these as community at all, they are more like broadcasting platforms.

But it is good to have these profiles and they are useful in getting traffic, sharing news, and showing the personality of your business. The main benefit of communities (building connections) is difficult to achieve on these profiles and therefore the feedback you might hope to get is quite low, let’s call it feedback level 1.

Getting started: Easy & Free

Pros: You should have the accounts for public appearances anyway.

Cons: You won’t get most of the benefits of having a community.

Example Communities: Taco Bell, McDonalds, Oreos

Support Community

A lot of SaaS companies have support communities and these are generally support forums where members can share their questions and answers in a public area. The company can monitor for wrong answers, and uses the forum to save costs on support, as well as to find the biggest gaps in their documentation.

This is a great way to get your feet wet in community without spending too much and while seeing a cost savings for your support department. However, feedback here only comes from customers who have an issue or problem so it tends to be negative and it isn’t a true representation of how your audience feels about a given issue.

Relationships built in this forum tend to be between the company and their most active helpful users.

Getting started: Easy and tends to be included with your support software

Pros: Save money on answering support questions publicly and getting help from users.

Cons: Little feedback or conversation that helps drive the company.

Example Communities: Square, Ebay Buyers, Vox Media

Customer/User/Brand Community

This next level of community can be quite intense. It involves carving out exactly who you want to serve among customers. It might be your entire fanbase (such as free and premium users) or just your users.

You will see a bigger investment if you decide to include your entire fanbase, and you will also get the lucrative feedback, relationships, and business development that comes with community.

If you decide to stick with your users only, you will have fewer topics and discussions, however this is still very valuable because all of the feedback comes from paying users. On the other hand, when you allow anyone to join your opportunities for business development considerably grow.

Getting started: Harder, consider a real community platform

Pros: getting a true understanding of your customers/users and their needs

Cons: large time and monetary investment

Example Communities: Codecademy, Evernote, Buffer, HubSpot, Trello

Topic Community

Probably my favorite type of community, a topic community is one that goes beyond your company and is seen as an authority for a certain topic. The topic could be dog health, WordPress, data science, AI, sales or marketing. Really any topic fits for a topic community. Membership isn’t specific to your customers, meaning your exposure can grow exponentially. And your opportunities for innovation from these communities are the highest.

On the other hand, these communities tend to need the highest level of investment, meaning multiple community managers, loads of content, events, and partnerships. However, all of the biggest opportunities come from these communities.

Getting Started: Hard and expensive you’ll need a platform that can scale.

Pros: Exposure to entire industry, highest level of innovation

Cons: Expensive to start and run

Example Communities: Inbound.org, GrowthHackers, Startup Grind

Service/Product Provider Community (Marketplace)

Among marketplaces, a lot of companies have adopted communities for their service or product providers. The point of these groups is to bring people together who are providing the items for sale, that a company profits off, by putting these groups together the providers learn from each other. The company learns more about the providers’ needs and can create programs and content that help the providers grow, thus helping the company increase revenue.

In these communities the community manager focuses on helping the provider succeed, and aligning company departments with the needs of the providers. This could mean working with design, product, customer success, changing sales policies, etc. Stories and feedback from providers will also help in marketing and sales, especially when it comes to increasing business development opportunities.

Getting Started: Requires internal dedication from marketing to bring awareness to providers.

Pros: Specifically linked to ROI

Cons: It can be difficult to get other departments on board with changes.

Example Communities: Udemy, Udacity, eBay (powersellers), Creative Market, Airbnb

Developer Community

A developer community usually focuses on bringing developers together to either contribute to a project (often open-source) or to get them to rally around your product (which falls under the user community above). Here I’ll focus on open source contributions as it’s a major trend.

It makes a lot of sense to bring developers together for this reason and the relationships are dually mutual. Not only does a company get the contributors who will build apps, addons, and plugins for their tool, and usually for free, but the contributor gets experience for their resume and in some cases builds a plugin they can charge for, jumpstarting their own business.

A successful community manager in this type of community will understand how to drive people to contribute without being paid. This is no small feat, but in a world where developers are often looking for projects to beef up their resume and experience, it can certainly be done.

The biggest issue may be whether developers will see the benefit in helping your community specifically since there are so many open source projects out there. This means you need a killer product that is easy to work with and highly useful for the audience it was made for.

Getting started: Harder to start and get momentum

Pros: Helps grow exposure for your product

Cons: Difficult to build the foundation of contributors

Example Communities: WordPress, Mattermost

Internal Community

An internal community, also trending, is one that focuses on building the community inside a company. This is usually helpful for innovation, communication, HR, recruiting, and customer success.

In many companies, the employee/contractor base is massive with hundreds to thousands of people who rarely interact. This causes a lack of communication and camaraderie around the products and services, and a lot of great ideas are overlooked. People tend not to know what is happening in other departments and there is a lack of growth among the company because of poor connections.

An internal community manager will help work between departments to bring people together, to share news, hold employee events, and build relationships. This is a wonderful way to get your entire company employee base on the same page, but it takes time to build and gain momentum.

Getting started: Difficult to build momentum

Pros: Communication improvements throughout the company

Cons: Time intensive

Example Communities: HubSpot

Community Platforms to Consider

While most community platforms are fairly similar, I am writing about the 3 most commonly used by startups, please consider how these platform limitations will affect your future startup communities.

Slack Community

This community isn’t necessarily different from the 3 listed above but I single it out for the limitations of the platform, and because of the limitations you’ll want to really consider whether this is the best place to host your community.

The basic limitations with Slack are the inability to link to conversations, losing conversation momentum once it’s stalled, too many notifications, and losing your history.

Since a lot of what is valuable for a community lives in past conversations, you’ll want to think about whether Slack is the best place for your community. The major benefits of using Slack are that a lot of people already have Slack on their devices, and the real-time conversation is enjoyable.

You can learn more about running an active, successful Slack community in my post here.

Getting started: Free and Easy

Facebook Community

Facebook has a free groups option that a LOT of companies use to start their startup communities. It’s free and most people are already on Facebook so it’s easy to add them.

However, a lot of community managers do not like using Facebook Groups for these reasons:

It’s hard to engage members – once a member skips a few of your posts in their newsfeed you disappear from their feed. No engagement = loss of exposure.

No data on who is active – seeing who is active and how members are participating is a manual practice, you can’t possibly keep track once you have more than a couple hundred members.

No ability to connect with ROI or CRM data – if you want to pull stats to share with management, you won’t be able to, so this can really impact your inability to grow.

No user privacy – Facebook uses your groups to sell more ads, and their privacy policies are basic at best.

There are other pros and cons to using Facebook and I’ll be writing about them next week, so stay tuned. And if you are already using Facebook groups, I will be covering how to overcome some of the limitations.

Linkedin Community

One last platform I want to point out is Linkedin Groups. I haven’t recommended using their platform in years but I still see people bringing it up and wondering about using it.

The problem is Linkedin really bombed on using groups and most are abandoned for lack of engagement, lack of content, or lack of interest. There are few (if any) notifications, no control over your community for marketing to them, and few people even consider using Linkedin Groups anymore.

They had a real opportunity to make something of professional groups, but for now I wouldn’t recommend the platform to anyone.

Conclusion

Communities can take on all shapes and sizes, but it’s up to you to guide and manage your community to grow it into the asset you have in mind. Hopefully, these community types help you understand what benefits you’ll get from choosing what direction you want to go it. If you’d like to further discuss, message me here.

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