Why communities are the future and how you can build one: A full-stack marketer’s guide
About the author: JC Macalintal is the community builder of Social Media Marketing Philippines, a community of 60K Filipino social media managers, marketers, and freelancers both in Web 2 and Web 3. He’s also the co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer of XO Projects, a Web 3 BPOS that provides full-stack marketing and community building services to help Web 3 projects sell out and build communities. Currently, JC is the Chief Marketing Officer of Bitskwela — a Web 3 EdTech company that helps Filipinos own a piece of the internet.
Meet the Home Buddies® Facebook community. To date, it has 3.1M members, with more than thousands of community members joining and posts being sent daily. Home Buddies is one of the healthiest and biggest Facebook community as of 2022 and is in the list of the top Facebook communities with the highest members as of writing.
If you were to ask an advertiser or marketer to build an advertising campaign to reach 3.1 million people in 1 month, it would take a daily advertising spend of P10,000 to P15,000 pesos per day. Simply put, for a 1-month brand awareness campaign to reach 3.1 million people within 1 month, it requires a fund of P300,000 to P450,000 ($5100 to $7600) on advertising spend alone.
Given a winning item that net profits P300 ($5.10) per unit sold, assuming a 1% purchase rate in a 3.1M targeting campaign means 31,000 units sold. 31,000 units sold is P9.3M ($158,159) net profit.
But if your brand has a community like Home Buddies, you spend $0. Brands, projects, and enterprises can launch campaigns, and retarget the same customer profiles with multiple campaigns for FREE.
Communities are arguably one of the best ways to maximize impact, impressions, and revenue per square inch of the company, but online communities aren’t always this big. Last 2010, Google reportedly indexed 620 million Facebook Groups (O’Neill, 2010). Since the past 12 years, Facebook users who also actively participate in groups every month have grown to more than 1.8 billion (Facebook, 2020). Conservatively assuming that MaU who use Facebook groups remained constant, a whopping 61% of current Facebook users (2.934B) are utilizing Facebook Groups on a monthly basis.
Numbers, results, and social media platform development wise, communities are the future. Last 2016, Mark Zuckerburg shifted Facebook’s focus to communities after the 2016 election, and it paved the way to where Facebook now is today.
A lot of people got surprised when Facebook rebranded as Meta in their pursuit of Web 3.0, but Facebook has long been developing their concept of leaderless organizations since 2016. According to CNBC (2020), last 2016, the company was under fire for not doing more to prevent the spread of fake news and misinformation. As part of its response, Facebook CEO mark Zuckerburg published a 6000-word note in February 2017 outlining how Facebook’s social network would improve by focusing on supporting and creating safe communities.
“There is a real opportunity to connect more of us with groups that will be meaningful social infrastructure in our lives,” Zuckerberg wrote at the time. “If we can improve our suggestions and help connect one billion people with meaningful communities, that can strengthen our social fabric.”
As CNBC (2020) adds, Facebook has made strides to emphasize groups, showing content from them more often in users’ timelines and using marketing to promote groups, including paying an estimated $10 million to run a 60-second commercial during Super Bowl LIV.
Why communities are the future
The straight forward answer to this question is simply because social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Telegram, and Discord are changing their distribution methods to favor communities. Moreover, the internet and the world wide web — as we know it — is evolving from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0.
Web 1.0 was the first version of the internet, it brought an information economy where users can only read. Web 2.0 was its second version — the platform economy — where users can now read and write, it was the first time interaction was possible. Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms you know currently fall in this category.
As the creator economy grew and youtubers, influencers, celebrities, and artists blew up, creators suddenly realized that there’s a problem of ownership in these Web2 platforms. Creators always had a “middleman gap” between them and their audience and platforms like Twitch would take a massive cut in their supposed earnings. More than that, the creator’s intellectual property when they published in these platforms would be owned more by the platform, than the creator.
Enter Web 3.0. Last 2014, Web3 was coined by Polkadot founder and Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood, referring to a “decentralized online ecosystem based on blockchain.” In 2021, the idea of Web3 gained popularity in the long awaited crypto bull-run, bringing forth the idea of an internet owned by the people.
Ever since the pandemic, millions of communities such as Home Buddies have been on the rise in Web 2.0 and Web 3.0. Though the fundamentals of community building is the same, communities have different use cases in Web 2.0 and Web 3.0.
Communities behave differently in different webs
Web 2 communities are often brand owned. Even if these communities are “leaderless” the posts and generated content are still absolutely controlled by admins and moderators. Though leaderless, there is still no concept of ownership for community members in Web 2.0 and are merely partaking in exchange of value.
Web 3 communities on the other hand, are people owned. Ownership from NFTs, cryptocurrency, and other Web 3.0 assets belong to the holders as the platforms are decentralized with blockchain technology.
Communities in Web 3 also have higher bearing to success than Web 2 communities. Brands can absolutely succeed in Web 2 without communities, just the right advertising and media buying strategy can help a brand generate 7-figures. However, the same isn’t true for Web 3. In fact, Web 3 marketing is community building — i.e., projects have to be community backed before they can be investor backed and creator backed.
So how do we build communities? Simply put, by adding value, and facilitating exchange of value.
Value is currency
Value is the currency of growth for communities. As I’ve always repeated in hundreds of my talks and articles about community building, a server or a group is not a community unless otherwise exchange of value happens on all levels of the organization.
Just because you have 20,000 members in your group or server doesn’t mean you have a community — if exchange of value doesn’t happen, you only have a group of people, not a community. Exchange of value happens when there are people within the community asking for connects, raising questions, and sharing insights — and other people in the community actually add value to said asks. Simply put, a group evolves to a community once the people inside the group help and add value to one another.
This paradigm highlights the difference of communities and email lists, which is one of the questions that I get a lot. Below is one of the most interesting questions I got in one of my talks for a company…
“What’s the difference between having 60,000 community members, vs 60,000 subscribers in your email list?”
Communities allow for a two-way channel of communication for brands and enterprises to communicate with their paying customers and leads. Versus email campaigns, brand can utilize user generated content and can involve customers in their campaigns as they will be funneled deeper in the brand ecosystem. In short, communities allow brands and enterprises to turn fans, into super fans, to turn super fans into product evangelists.
As my good friend Nas Arcayan (CEO of Mothership) a cognitive branding company puts it, brands are finding more ways to develop customer positioning from loyalty to allegiance — and communities are one of the best platforms to develop that.
To develop the community, below are three action items to facilitate exchange of value:
Ask questions
One of the best ways to facilitate engagements is to post questions and encourage questions in the community. The format for this is usually, “Hey <community name>, <brand> just dropped new update and it says <update a>, thoughts?”
Give community something to talk about
First movers usually win here. Giving a hot information or breaking news and giving the community something to talk about in the form of a statement or a question is one of the fastest ways to grow the community.
Determine a community pain point and solve it
If you’re a community builder, polls are your friend. This can coincide with action item 1 and 2. You can utilize polls to sense how your community members feel toward an event, or an update; or ask if there’s any problem or pain point they’re experiencing. At Social Media Marketing Philippines, we always do polls first before doing events for the community.
Culture is everything
Since exchange of value has to happen for communities to grow, culture will make or break a community. The difference between a healthy and a dead community is culture.
For example, Legendaddy — the first and only dad based community committed to “Dads helping other dads become the best dads — clearly define their culture in their community description. That they’re: 1.) family-friendly, 2.) politics free, 3.) MLM free, 4.) Respectful, and 5.) Prohibiting text-speak. One of the culture inside the community is community members call each other “legends” when they facilitate said exchange of value.
Consistency is key
Neil Dimapilis, the founder of one of the communities I’m developing — Social Media Marketing Philippines — wakes up everyday at 5:00 am PHT to moderate community requests, posts, and submissions.
Back to the Home Buddies case study above, one of the good problems that communities have is the amount of member engagement and post requests on a daily basis. But the burden of a 3.1M member count for a community is literal thousands of community engagement requests daily.
Hence, the facilitation of value and cultivation of culture has to be done consistently. Groups and communities also have their own distribution platforms and SEO (i.e., algorithm), so the community has to be managed daily — otherwise, the “health” of the community will drop.
In summary, communities are the future because the web is evolving towards communities. Fundamentals of community building is also the same in both webs (Web 2 and Web 3); however, the nuances and importance of community building is exaggerated more in Web 3 since its a version of the internet that relies on ownership and trust.
The job, then, of founders and community builders is straight forward — to facilitate that exchange of value that happens on all levels of the group or server; and to protect the community’s culture and purpose as if their life depended on it because it does.
To build a community, the community builder or founder must:
- Facilitate exchange of value
- Define, establish, and nurture culture
- Repeat diligently daily
Community building is the future of social media. If you’re in the train now, you’re still early — and you’re pivoting at the same time with the developers of the social media platforms you’re using. Just that you’ve read this article on community building means you’re already ahead of the curve. Expect this to blow up in the next 5 years. Welcome to the creator economy.
If you want to know more about how the web and the internet will evolve in the next decade, you can learn more about Web 3.0 at Bitskwela. If you’re looking for a community to learn more about Web 3.0, join our sister community Web3 Philippines — a group of Web3 builders, for builders.
JC Macalintal is a venture developer, full-stack marketer, and community builder. He helps entrepreneurs around the world build company portfolios. Read his pieces if you want to build, or you want to feel something.
