Community Building: How To?

A corporate job is considered to be difficult and one has to jump many hoops every day. A day in a community manager’s life is no less. Community management is not a piece of cake either- I thought I knew that always but I truly understood it after I stepped in the ground. So, here I share a few points or steps that, I think, every community manager should focus on before starting their community.

At first, it is important to question yourself:

• Why do you need a community? Is it really important?
• What is the purpose of this community? Or how do you think your community will be able to meet its purpose.
• Is there any other way you could achieve the above-identified purpose?

Once you understand the true purpose of your community, I would advise you to search for communities in similar domain. Become a member of them and learn the following from these communities:

• How will your community be different from the existing similar communities? Basically, why you and why not others?
• Study the connections and engagements in the community.
  Study the profile of the community members.
• What kind of engagement is happening in the communities?

…and like

And, for communities with businesses along-side:

• What is the ratio of the customers who avail their services to their community members?
• What is the expected benefit to the business from the community?
• Try to understand the journey of the members: how they have hooped the different roles-

a) from a Potential Customer to a Valuable Customer to a Community Member

b) from a Potential Community Member to a Community Member to a Potential Customer to a Customer.

Next, it’s important to identify your potential member and understand their needs. Try to identify why & how would someone be interested to join your community. You could get the answer to this by talking to people who are already in such a community or who shows signs of a potential community member.

Next important study is to understand how shall you increase your community members from 0 to 5 to 20 to 50 to 200 to 500 without losing the engagement quality. In my experience, the best way to get community members is by starting with potential community members you know about among your friends and family. Creating good and relevant content for them. Word of mouth would do the rest of the job.

The hardest part here is to understand how to be regular with good and relevant content. For this, you need to have a clarity of what content would work for what category of your community members. Run your expectations by your potential members. Observe their reactions. If possible, list down the type of content formats that work on most of your members. It will always come handy to you.

In nutshell, before you start your community, do talk to many potential community members. The more you’ll talk, the more you’ll get clarity.