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.

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. 

 

As online communities grow they tend to move towards running live events – people still want to meet face-to-face and have real life experiences together. 

Luckily, we have the technology today that allows community managers from any location to put together a live event for their community. 

As the community manager for a VC in California, I managed over a dozen live monthly events all over the United States. While a dozen might not seem like a lot, and there are definitely companies doing a lot more (like Duolingo who does over 200 a month), I think this will help anyone who is starting to plan live events from a remote location.

Organizing Live Community Events 

To start with, you’ll want to be very organized. We had checklists for every event and a calendar with tasks for each day/week.

For example, on a given Monday I would contact the hosts for the next week’s events and ask that they verify with their guests that the event is just over a week away. The guests were then asked to send in any presentation files they would be using for the event, and our hosts were asked to add the presentation template slides to the beginning and end of the documents.

This is just an example of how intricate the planning was and needs to be for your events. We will discuss the checklist further below.

Other aspects we kept in mind included:

• Volunteer hosts – We had people from the area volunteer to be our host, for a year at a time. I found these people by placing a call to action in our monthly email newsletters, posting on social media, and carefully explaining the benefits of working with our VC.

Namely, the VC would make introductions for them that would support the host’s own business initiatives. The host represented the VC company and would continuously meet people in C-level positions by representing us.

It’s important to note that the hosts were held to high standards, and it was made clear the position did involve a certain level of work – hosting the events and finding guests for the events. All hosts had access to our host playbook which explained our expectations and guided them through what each event should look like and how to go about finding guests.

• Event space – we had to find companies in each area that had space to hold our events. This meant building relationships with large companies in each city that had the space and interest in hosting events.

For many of these companies, the benefit to hosting came in the way of recruiting. HR teams were often at the events (with free tickets) and were networking with attendees to discuss potentially working together in the future. 

Some of the companies offered a snack/refreshments during the event and even had tables set up for their recruiting discussions. Since many of the attendees were product/software developers they were constantly in demand at the host companies.

Please keep in mind that not all companies will easily see the benefit in working with you, you might have to pay for the space, so it’s a good idea to use your negotiating skills and share all of the ways they can benefit from hosting your events.

• Tickets – We used Eventbrite to sell tickets for around $25 and had people RSVP, this helped with small costs we had such as snacks and a videographer and also helped with attendance because people were more likely to come if they paid for a ticket. 

We did use email marketing to get the word out about each event, specifically to people in the area, and to people who had gone to previous events. We offered early bird prices, and gave free tickets to partners, host companies, and guests who were speaking. 

• Videographer – We had to find contract videographers who could come and get decent sound and video for each event, our budget was around $300. This isn’t a lot of money, but we often found students who were willing to do it and we could offer regular work. We required them to get the video/audio to us digitally within 24 hours so we could upload it to our Vimeo channel, we had one channel for each city.

• Email Marketing – We used a lot of email marketing to the members who were subscribed, we asked them to bring guests, gave them opportunities to be guests to be on a monthly panel, offered discounts for early bird tickets, and sent NPS surveys immediately after each event. 

The NPS surveys were sent a half hour before the end of each event, we used Survey Monkey for this and had to manually schedule the emails to go out through Eventbrite. There is probably a better process for this, but sending the email so immediately increased the amount of responses we received.

• Panel Guests – The host usually found people who would agree to be guests, but when they couldn’t we would help them find someone. The format of the event often varied from networking dinners, to panels, to a presentation about product creation.

• Schedule – We adhered to a very strict schedule for when hosts needed to have someone selected for the event and that person needed to have their presentation ready if they were going to present one. Our schedule included a checklist of things to do leading up to each event such as checking with the host company to assure they could host that month, we had a snack, the guest was locked in, the guest had their welcome email and knew when they had to be there, etc. 

• Meetings & Support – We regularly (monthly) met with hosts, the host company, and anyone else contributing to the events, virtually. We would host several people at once and help them with questions they had, ideas for getting more people to attend, dealing with guest presenters, and sticking to the checklist. It was important to be very involved with the hosts and we started an online message board to further support them.

Community Live Events Checklist

For every event and task we had a checklist. Here’s a deeper look at the checklist:

Host Event Checklist

• July 1-31st Find guest for September event
• Email introduction to Community Manager and Guest once guest has agreed to event. Include ‘Guest Activities’ list in email so that the guest knows what is expected of them. Email should be sent no later than August 1st.
• August 8th – Send remind email to guest one month before event.
• August 12th – Ask guest to verify topic for their presentation by August 20th.
• August 20th – Ask guest to send topic to Community Manager.
• August 27th – Ask guest to send presentation by the 1st of September.
• September 1st – Get presentation to Community Manager, add the template slides at the beginning and end of the presentation. Community Manager will forward presentation to the host site contact.

Event Marketing Checklist

Event – September 8th

• End of month newsletter in June – include August/September events list for all cities at the end of the newsletter.
• 1st Wednesday in August – Email announcing new event/guest to area attendees. Include early bird sale for 24 hours. Ticket sales to end the evening of the event.
• 3rd Wednesday in August – Email topic to area attendees. Share that the tickets are limited based on how many tickets have already sold. 
• 1 week before event – Email those registered and remind them about event.
• 3 days before event – Email area attendees (email list) and remind them about upcoming event, increase tickets by $5.

Please keep in mind these checklists only represent the actual lists used and are meant to show how intricate planning for community events can be.

There is now software you can use to help you manage several live community events, it looks very promising, it’s called Planning Pod.

I hope this post helps you consider how you’ll plan events. With the growth of online communities, you will undoubtedly run into the opportunity to host live events soon and you’ll want to make sure everything is covered. If I can help at all, please contact me here. 

You can’t beat the real-time conversation of running a community on Slack. There are so many benefits to using Slack, but there are many disadvantages as well. In this post, I’ll share steps to safeguard your community so that you don’t fall into any of the common pitfalls by using Slack as a platform for your group.

For starters let’s talk about the disadvantages of using Slack.

Cost – It’s expensive, so you’ll be paying $7-$10 per person per month if you want to have searchable content for more than 10,000 messages and yes these 10,000 go pretty fast.

Linking to specific conversations or comments can be glitchy especially in the app which is probably where members will use Slack most often.

Too many notifications – members get annoyed quickly and turn off notifications or notification emails go to their spam folder.

Once they log out they are gone – Once members log out of their account they are gone. It’s hard to get them to come back and participate because they have to reinstall the app or at least their account on the app.

No SEO – you won’t benefit from having all of your conversations on a website for Google to send traffic to (any closed community will have this problem).

Standard profiles don’t allow a lot of imagination and are much harder to export to a CRM especially as the community grows.

No user statistics/metrics – not a lot of meaningful data you can use for reaching out to inactive members.

But, I know what you are thinking – you will use it anyway. It’s easy to love. 

Successfully Using Slack For Your Startup Community

It isn’t all bad though, using Slack is beneficial for many reasons, the first being that many startup people are already using it, the second being that it’s free (if you don’t want the search history). 

And whether it’s the perfect place to start a community or not, people are doing it every day, and you might be strongly considering it for your own community. I completely understand the lure of using Slack or Facebook for your community, so I want to help you do it right. 

To start, I recommend building your Slack community around a regularly updated website. The reason is you want people to know where to go to access resources that we will discuss in the following steps. This is a great place to store your newsletter as a blog post each week or to write content that you’ll share in the community. 

Resources – Since you probably won’t be paying for Slack, you want a place to save the best content. This should be linked to your website. You can add an addon to your Slack community so that you can easily star a message (as you monitor and moderate content) and the message will be saved to your tool of choice. You’ll want to keep this up so that your members have a place to access the best content from your community. (You’ll also want to remind them to do this, regularly.

Organize your conversation backups– this might sound time-consuming and it is, but it will save you a lot of trouble in the future. Make sure you choose a tool that allows you to tag your saved conversations that way you can find links, great advice, and topics that are consistently discussed.

Here are a couple tools to choose from Backupery, and Evernote.

Guidelines – An additional resource for your website should include guidelines for being successful members. Tell the members what they should post and discuss, what they shouldn’t, how they should treat people, what your policy is for self-promotion. 

Encourage new members on Slack – it’s a good idea to consider an onboarding series of emails to your newest members. You want to help them post, join conversations, and share their expertise. If you won’t be using a series, consider connecting with every new member to get to know them a little bit. When members feel welcome they will give the community more time to see if it’s a true fit.

Handle Slack invites – For a new community it might be best to manual approve all members, this will give you an idea of how many members are joining and you can reach out to them after they are invited to say hello. However, as your community grows you may want to automate the process – here’s a tool that will allow you to do that. Community Inviter

Guide New Members Through Notifications – I find it best to explain notifications and have members set up their preferences right from the beginning. I never want a member to get annoyed and turn off all notifications because they are frustrated. So it’s best to take care of this in the beginning and explain how to get the notifications they want.

Keep the Slack URL short & easy to remember – Slack has started getting ‘creative’ with how they name new installations by adding several characters to the end of the name you’ve chosen. That makes it harder for members to remember and login from their phones without any friction (requesting emails and going through the forgotten process). Pay attention when you register your new group and make sure to remove extra characters.

Keeping Slack Members Engaged

It’s no secret that people usually turn off notifications in Slack and email notifications from Slack – no one has the time to get inundated with notifications. So you have to be careful to manage your members’ attention or they’ll cut you out. That means logging out of their account and often never returning. With that in mind, here are some ways you can beef up the engagement of your members and keep them active in the long-term.

Keep @channel notifications to a minimum – as the admin you can make sure others aren’t allowed to @channel an entire group, this is good practice to keep notifications from annoying members.

Send weekly newsletters – Round up the greatest content, discussions, and resources from the week and manually put together an interesting newsletter that will peak member curiosity. This newsletter is going to be very important to engagement, so you’ll want to put in the effort it deserves.

Schedule a Content Calendar – One way to keep people interested in participating in your community is to constantly have new/helpful content and discussions. From the admin side, that means planning out some ideas for topics. You can do this with Trello or a spreadsheet. The most important idea here is consistency in adding content to the community.

Depending on what your startup business is, you most likely have a lot of niche topics you can discuss. Combined with industry news you should be able to find something to encourage discussion at least a few times a week, if not more.

Set up and seed group channels – Every group or channel you start needs as much care and content as the main community. You do not want a bunch of dead channels that scare away new members. Be sure to add content and get members interested in the discussions within each channel before adding more. Based on your startup you might be able to add a job channel, news, self-promotion, etc. 

Share good conversation on social media when it’s happening – One thing I did while working for HubSpot’s Inbound.org was use the Twitter and Facebook social media accounts to share developing conversations. This brought people into the discussions immediately (which is good for Slack chats) and gave us another outlet for marketing.

Talk to as many members as possible – One of the most common pieces of advice I give community managers is to talk to as many members as often as possible. Every day you should be getting feedback from members, learning what they like, and helping them achieve their goals. For startup communities, it’s important to understand how they like your product and how the product/services can improve over time. 

Conclusion

As with any community, once you start on Slack will need a lot of thought and ongoing work to keep it active and healthy. If I can help at all, please contact me and I’ll offer some help. Also, if you have questions, send them along and I’ll turn them into a blog post.

It sounds like a lot of fun to start a community and add several groups (or subgroups). You think it’ll make it easier for people to find topics they want to discuss, they’ll be able to find the people they want to connect with more easily, etc.

In reality, creating several groups from the get-go is a big mistake and it’s something you should rethink for the future of your community. In this post, I’ll share why adding additional groups to your community, especially in the beginning, isn’t such a great idea, and then how to add them when it’s time.

 

The Reality of Adding Groups To Your Community

When you start a community the first and only goal is to get people into the community and posting/sharing. That, and creating content for them to consume is most of the work you’ll be doing. 

Groups are communities within communities. If you’ve already started a community and worked on getting it populated you know how hard that is. When you add groups to your community you have to start that work all over for a new topic (whatever the purpose of your group is).

Every group you start needs the same amount of work as a new community. 

It takes a great deal of work to get people to post in your group, especially if you are in the early stages of building your community. It’s not a good idea to add groups at the beginning and expect to be able to fill that with content as well, for each group you add, you are multiplying your work.

For every group you have, you have to replicate getting people to join, getting them to post, adding content yourself, sending notifications for people to participate again, reaching out to people to build relationships, asking influencers to share your group, etc.

 

When & How to Add Groups to Your Community

Once your community is healthy and self-propelling and has reached a point where at least 50% of content and participation is done organically AND it appears that you need to add a group because a lot of people are asking for them or you want to separate out some of the content into a group (not a category which is completely different). 

You’ll want to make sure a lot of people are contributing to the topic you are turning into a group. Then, look for a person who will voluntarily lead the group. You’ll need someone who is already participating in a similar capacity (they are posting content and connecting with people who are ideal for the group). 

You’ll reach out to them, you may need to reach out to a few people. I would recommend putting them in a special group in your community or in Slack so you can easily chat with them. They’ll need your help building the group, ideas for content, for reaching out to people, for adding content to the group, etc. 

You should only work on a group or two at a time, to make sure the community has your focus and the groups have enough effort to make them successful. 
 

What About Slack Groups?

The one exception to this rule is when it comes to platforms like Slack. You don’t want a general discussion group that is overwhelmed with too much conversation and people can’t keep up. So, on Slack, you’ll want to start with a discussion channel, an off-topic channel, and potentially a jobs channel for business groups. Based on how many conversations you are getting between people you will want to add additional channels as needed. 

In my next post I’ll be discussing how to set up Slack so that you can use it for a community without losing great content, and keeping it organized, and active without losing members as Slack tends to have a high turn over rate. 

Conclusion

Groups are a great way to further deepen content and relationships in your community but only after your community has grown to a significant point and you can take the time to develop each group singularly. You have to overlook your excitement to add all the groups you can think of and push for the healthiest community before adding groups. When it’s time, you’ll need help and the very community that you’ve built will have members who will help. 

If I can help answer any other questions, please let me know here.

There’s a lot to consider before starting a community. It may seem as simple as inviting people to a Facebook group but when you plan it out more intricately, it’ll be a lot easier on you, your team, and your audience. 

To help you think ahead, the following are some of the most important questions to explore before you move forward with a new community. 

For the Community Audience

1. Who is this community for?
2. Why do they need it?
3. Where are they getting this need fulfilled today?
4. How are they consuming content today?
5. What topics will your community cover?
6. How will your community better help your audience?
7. What policies, spam guidelines, or codes of conduct will you follow?

Community for Your Company

1. What does community mean to you? (h/t to David Spinks on Twitter)
2. Why do you want to build a community?
3. What do you expect to get out of this community?
4. What resources do you have to contribute towards building this community?
5. Who and how can your team contribute to the community?
6. Have you shared your expectations for their participation?
7. What existing owned assets can you use in promotion of the new community?
8. What does your community need to do differently to differentiate from competitors?
9. Why should people choose your community over someone else’s?
10. How will you get people to participate or join?
11. Who do you need to work with internally to make this community a reality?
12. Do you have any stakeholders’ support for building this community?
13. How much of an investment can you make before seeing a return?

 Community Platform Questions

1. Where will your community live?
2. What tools do you need to make this work?
3. What features do you need in a platform?
4. Do you want a forum platform or a networking platform?
5. How can you utilize other features your platform offer?

Content For Your Community

1. What types of content can you provide – videos, podcasts, downloads, etc?
2. What content topics will be shared in the community?
3. Who will create or curate the content?
4. What content can you provide further down the road?
5. Do you have at least a month’s worth of content planned out?

Partnerships & Business Development

1. What partnerships can help this community?
2. How will you work to build these partnerships?
3. How can these partners participate in the community?
4. What can you give them for their participation?
5. What partners would the community enjoy?

Retention for Your Community

1. How will you stay in touch with your members?
2. How often do you want members to visit?
3. How will you craft an experience that will keeping them coming back?
4. How do you plan on getting members to participate in the first place?

Timeline for Community

1. When will you finish choosing your platform?
2. When will you finalize your strategy?
3. When will you open the community for testing?
4. When will the community launch? 
5. When will promotion begin?

Community Staff

1. Who will moderate and manage your community?
2. Do you need to hire someone?
3. What is the budget and job description for hiring?
4. What’s the deadline for hiring this person?
5. What experience do you want them to have?
6. What will the every day tasks be?

Founding Members

1. Do you already have a founding group of members?
2. What do your founding members expect to do to help you?
3. What do founding members expect to get out of helping you?
4. Where will you engage with your founding members – email, slack, private group?

Community Metrics

1. What metrics will you track? 
2. What will be your priority KPI?
3. What metrics do your stakeholders want to track?
4. How will you commercialize the community or generate revenue?

Now, you don’t have to have all the answers before starting your community, but these questions will help you foresee some things you do have to consider. 

You can print this list off or share it with your stakeholders or team to give them an idea of what’s coming in your journey for creating a community.