From tiny waves to Tsunami — Building Online Communities p.2

Before leading people through a desert and splitting the ocean in half, it’s necessary to prove that you can actually do so, and know what you’re doing.

Interacting with a project community is a vital part of any projects developments. It’s necessary to educate the community on how your platform performs, which solutions for existing industry issues, are going to invigorate the process.

This is done via the team demonstrating its expertise and outlook. Community members catch on to the interests of their fellow members in the form of the project team and begin to share their opinions with them, and delicately tune in, some, even become evangelists. As a result, ultimately wielding the project’s power. Such individuals are the most critical voices in regards to a plan, they ask tons of questions, and if they’re satisfied, they will become the most crucial community members.

Let’s take a look at how to attract the attention of a community to your project in further detail. Moving along, we will take a look at the top 3 biggest community development stages.

1st stage — attraction:

1) PR is necessary to demonstrate the strengths of your project to the potential target audience — external community management. You can start working with your TA after they visit your project’s site. An opinion on a project is formulated based on a massive amount of nuances. Here, everything is necessary, starting from the site design and ending with the project team and their background.

2) The purchase of traffic in the blockchain industry varies significantly from placing advertisements in traditional sectors.

If this article gets 10.000 claps, we’ll write an article on a theme: “growth hacker notes.”

2nd stage — retention:

At this stage, the arsenal of Community manager’s is more extensive than in comparison to the 1st stage. However, success is achieved through the appropriate use of this arsenal.

SMM as a means of retaining an audience, project teams track news in the crypto environment, share their understanding of the blockchain industry with their subscribers, which, in turn, breeds contact points between the project team and community members. We’ll cover the potential of this instrument in upcoming articles.

Blog — diving deeper into the industries problems and providing theoretical, and even practical solutions in some instances.

Chat — everything pertaining to industries adjacent to the project are discussed. Competent CM’s can feel the needs of a projects TA, and depending on the audience they can hold various contests, gamify communication within the community, hold QA’s with founders to strengthen the connection with the community and to better understand the participants and their needs.

3rd stage — Forming the community:

Local memes and jokes appear, the community starts uniting. Thanks to the 2nd stage, the chat becomes a place which one wants to return to and discuss news, market, development of the product, etc.

The loyal community will help the project with beta testing of platform/protocol, get feedback or even get involved in the development of the product If it’s open source.

4th stage — Final point:

Forming a close-knit community will allow members to become agents of change or even ambassadors, pushing the project forward and sharing it within their inner circles and the world.

They will feel like a part of the community, and this feeling will drive them towards steering their surrounding environment to a better place. The sense of being needed is not one that should be underestimated by any means of the imagination. It’s imperative that project teams instill this feeling within their community members, the power-up will be enormous, and the returns will be stupendous.

Community empowerment is the final stage in the community development process. We’ve seen their ability to educate one another, dissect news, form bonds, now it’s time to make them indispensable.