How do you create a community?

Michał Jońca
40 replies
Hi, whats up all? I'm really curious what are you doing to gain interest to gain and keep interest to yourself, your product, startup, company etc? How do you engage people, what are the most important factors to remember when building a community?

Replies

Gus Sachdev
While everyone strive to have a big community and we measure success by the size of the community. The irony is, that the larger the community becomes, the more isolated the members feel.
Rick Turoczy
@gundeepsachdev Totally agree. I think that finding the "right size" for a community and understanding the natural stickiness and/or churn of the community are critical factors in effectively maintaining a vibrant community.
Greg Ludvickson
Regular engagement through communication, value for nothing emails/deals, find ways they can be interactive with others/the product, get to know people on a deeper level than their name and budget. This of course comes after you have a product that people are interested in to begin with, which comes after engaging with your target market and knowing what your product would add to it.
Michał Jońca
@greg_ludvickson1 thank you for a short, wise reply. When I think carefully about community the depth of understanding that there is a human behind the name, budget or avatar seems essential in fact.
Jeff Zhang
Check out: https://www.producthunt.com/post... - awesome platform for creating communities. @han_wang6 can speak more about it lol 😅
Alice Pinch
Make sure you've created your brand internally first. Are all your employees actively engaged? Shouting about you on their social media? Do they often give open and honest feedback on your product/brand/company? Communication is key. Not only regular communication with your audience but requesting feedback. Be open, be vulnerable and ask your audience questions and feedback and get them involved in the building process. They are your biggest fans and your harshest critics. Where are your audience? If they're on Reddit, get on there and engage. If they're on Twitter, that's your go-to. Keeping interest through targeted reengagement, wether that's emails, popups, notifications, ads, phone calls - keep your brand front of mind without being intrusive or annoying. Giving them a tailored experience will keep them engaged.
AntoniusBlock33
@alice_pinch Sounds so easy to suggest using emails, popups, notifications, ads, phone calls in the same sentence together with a warning against beeing "being intrusive or annoying".
Alice Pinch
@antoniusblock33 Obviously it's not that simple and I didn't mean all at once! But by engaging with your audience, you can get feedback on what content they like, what they don't like. While you're building your community use data to back up decisions, do you see high email open rates but low click through rates? Try different content/channel. Do you see most engagement on push notifications but that leads to uninstalls? Map out your user journey and touchpoints, and your competitors. It's all trial and error.
Rick Turoczy
Love the question and all of the feedback so far. I always try to remember that we're not really creating community. We're recognizing it, optimizing it, and maintaining it. Communities often already exist. They're just not self aware. And your product/brand can give that nascent community a rallying point. So I try to think about the commonalities that draw people to your product or community and go from there, in terms of how you continue to refine and support that community. The place where I see communities most often fail is a lack of understanding about the dynamics of how the community actually wants to interact. They try to enforce a behavior model that doesn't resonate with the natural behavior of the community or the individuals attracted to it. (A key example is trying to force in-person communities online and vice versa.) I believe "a community" can be anywhere along a vast spectrum — from a single voice/brand broadcasting to an audience all of the way through members actively supporting one another, independent of the aggregator that brought them together. There isn't really a one size fits all for community. They all have their unique needs and foibles. The real work is understanding what the community does, where it needs help, and how you can make it more efficient for that community to engage in the way it wants to engage. Sometimes, building community means simply getting out of the way 😅
David V. Kimball
Creating a community starts when you get people together around an idea or thing they already are excited about. Then just keep building on it!
Felecia Genet
Well, first we should define... what is a community? Is community a matter-of-fact thing? Is it a feeling? Is it an idea? Is it subjective or objective? Something that I find very interesting is that one of the most common complaints for an apartment complex is "noisy neighbors". How interesting that we want to live on top of each other yet loathe the sounds of hearing other people living around us? So an apartment complex in which the residents never talk to each other, you know it's debatable whether or not that could be considered a community. But if we consider a community to simply be a group of people sharing some similar interest (a neighborhood, a hobby, an employer, etc), then it makes complete sense that communities aren't created, but instead, they're facilitated.... piggybacking off of @turoczy above. The question is, how do we get them talking to each other about that interest? How do we create an environment that makes them feel compelled to talk about that interest? Safe to talk about it... encouraged to talk about it, et cetera. And why should they talk about it? How do their lives enhance by talking about this interest with other people who share it as well? And whatever methods we decide to facilitate this community, the question then becomes... how can we do them so consistently that they begin to expect them, and miss them when they're gone? And then eventually facilitate them for themselves?
Elena Vakhromova
members within a community should see one another's activity, so the best way to organize them is some kind of a social media group or chat. it depends on the quantity. for large communities I recommend Facebook page with regular posting of company news, useful things, even memes. for small groups it may be a chat in Telegram or some other messenger with active discussions
Nazim @Koinju
Avoid sleight of hand. Tell true story, something simple based on your everyday life but which you are passionate about and which can excite a lot of other people. Make it authentic content that is entertaining, respectful of everyone and shareable on the networks. Simply tell your story as much as possible to as many as possible. It will help you to diversify and improve the way you tell and share your stories <3
Beata_Swinarew
I think it is worth the beginning to find soul mates like the project and share it on. Because telling about your product to people who are not even a bit interested in the topic will do nothing :)
Molly O'Neill
My company has been helping customers of all types build communities for a long time. We provide the software and also offer services to help. There are lots of good suggestions here but adding a resource from our website for you as well. https://www.crowdstack.com/hub/. This is series of articles and resources to help you learn to develop, launch, and promote a thriving online community. Feel free to reach out for more help
Gnana
We are taking a different approach to building a social community — when everyone in the startup ecosystem is going towards different mediums like audio and videos. We see the scope to improve our tried and tested text-based communication. And That's why we experiment with a social app that leverages our actual working of minds. Our app is called @youremarks — tries to solve issues inherent with text-based communication. To make it exciting and rewarding to the users, we have combined the goodness of @twitter and @hqtrivia and added more elements to achieve our objective. We are going live this week, Feb 18th, 2021. I want to invite you guys all to explore what we have to offer and share your feedback.
Marko Balažic
1. Community is a circle of giving. Give content, give compliments, and build together. 2. Ask for feedback, implement feedback and ask for more feedback. 3. Create a space for giving and receiving knowledge, content.. ✨
Noel Rajakumar
Wow! I loved reading all the comments on how to create a community and engage with them. I've been building Steve.ai's community on Slack and I would love to implement them for our community :) Thank you for creating this discussion @michal_jonca !
Mei
1. Niche down. 2. Pick a specific pain point. There's an audience for everything. 2. Start simple. Get them on the easiest platform possible. 4. Strike a balance between 1-1 chats and community wide calls.
Mei
Bring people together through a shared common niche. Keep your platform super simple. Make sure onboarding is structured and easy to follow. Set up 1-1 conversations with community members in addition to group discussions. Create a culture of giving and not just receiving. Know the difference between spamming and engaging. Set community ground rules.
Elizabeth Martinez
Create compelling content, leverage social media, foster connections, offer value, and listen to feedback.
Sophia Ward
Build a community with a sense of belonging, two-way communication, exclusive benefits, engaging events, and member empowerment.
Charlotte Cox
Engage people by understanding your audience, tailoring messaging, using storytelling, employing visuals, and delivering value.
Emma Bailey
Remember to establish purpose, create an inclusive environment, foster interactions, encourage collaboration, and adapt based on feedback.