Don’t create your own community platform or social network.
Instead, integrate into your members’ existing tech behavior.
The virtual social networks of most groups I’m part of are dead. Nobody is using them. Why is that?
Who are you competing with?
Imagine you’re an entrepreneur, you’re starting a website and you want people to regularly visit it. You are competing with all the other websites in the world that people are already regularly visiting. This may include major news sites like the New York Times or Reddit, global social networks like Facebook or Twitter, or whatever else is part of people’s daily digital diet. These sites have huge teams of developers and product managers, sophisticated and addictive UX that is constantly evolving, great web and mobile apps.
Sounds tough, maybe impossible, doesn’t it? Yet that is exactly what communities and networks are doing when they are offering their own platforms. Implicitly they are saying: We’re inviting you to change your behavior and regularly come to our website or mobile app.
Creating new behaviors is very hard. Startups pay very close attention to that. They use many different channels and incentives to get you back to their website. Most communities don’t.
Use the tech people are already using
Instead of trying to create new tech behaviors we have to identify how our members are already using technology and how we can integrate into those existing behaviors. For example:
- If a majority of our members are actively using Whatsapp, we should be on Whatsapp too. They will already have a behavior of regularly checking Whatsapp.
- If our members regularly use LinkedIn, we can experiment with a LinkedIn group. Instead of getting them to our own site, they’ll be going to LinkedIn already.
- Or: Our members might not have strong affinity for technology, but they use email for work. So we choose an email-based solution.
Engagement trumps features any day
I often hear people complain how commonly used technologies (like the ones listed above) have very limited features or imperfect data privacy. What if we could show all our members on a nice map? What if we could search the group for past knowledge? What if we could own and control our own data?
True: Whatsapp, Facebook, LinkedIn etc have very limited features. These aren’t elegant solutions. Yet there is no point in developing a perfect tech tool that nobody uses. So by integrating into existing tech, we might lose features, but we gain engagement.
How does this resonate with your own observations about the use of community tech? There are many people who think waaaay more about technology than I do and I’d be grateful to hear your thoughts…
—
Related posts
Interested in getting regular community building insights in your inbox?
Every few weeks we send out a short email with 3–5 of our favorite insights, blog posts and articles about building meaningful communities. If you care about bringing people together, this might be for you. Sign up here.
