By

Eric Tracz & Matt Jaworski

Table of Contents

Table of Contents 1

Foreword 3

Introduction - What Is An Online Community? 5

Understanding and Building Community Identity 10

The Boundaries of Membership 12
Members Influence the Community, the Community Influences
Its Members 13
Need Fulfillment 15
Shared Emotional Connection 17
Putting the Elements of Community Identity Together 18
Building Community Identity Online 20

Building The Foundations: Your First Members 22

Launch Slow, Grow Hard 23
Preparing For Your Launch 26
Seeding Your Community With Its First Members 27
Moving Into Second Gear 33

Building On The Foundations: Bringing Your Club To Life 34

Building And Maintaining Group Identity 35
You Can Raise Participation! 39
The Role Of The Community Manager 43
Build The Community 43
Police The Community 44
Manage The Community 46

Content in the Community 47

The Four Types of Online Community Content 48

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 Textual Content 48
Imagery 50
Video 51
Audio 56
Management Content and Community Content 57
How OurCrowd Used Content to Create a Community… and a
Community to Build Trust 60

Building a Community Across Platforms 64

Spreading Your Content Across Platforms 66
Spreading Community Content Across Platforms 68
Building a Cross-Platform Community Strategy 70
Creating Special Content for Special Platforms 73
Community Building on LinkedIn 76

Measuring And Monetizing Your Community 80

Measuring Growth 81
Measuring The Value Of Your Community With Surveys 82
Monetizing Your Community 85

Conclusion 91

2
Foreword
Treat this position as a necessary read for anyone who wishes to
create a successful online community.

Community is not something that can be forced. It needs to grow

organically. Commonality works like this magical force that attracts
and gathers people. We are, after all, social animals.

The Internet helped us overcome many limitations including, but not

limited to, our physical location. In the beginning we were able to find
other people interested in the same or similar things on dial-up
bulletin boards.

The dawn of the Internet was already yearning for some form of idea
exchange and technology was born from the sheer need for it.
Mailing lists and Usenet groups led to the birth of online forums.

All of it worked well, but people wanted something more. More

social, more human interaction. That’s how social networking was
born. Now it’s not only huge, it’s collectively one of the biggest
business sectors ever created.

All it took was a couple of decades for the technology to meet mass
acceptance.

All good and well, but some claim the big social networks grew too
big. We lost something. There’s no intimacy. There’s no privacy.
There are too many distractions. There’s way too much advertising.
People want to take a step back.

3
But to where? A step back to the comforting space of smaller,
focused communities where they can take an active part and feel
heard.

That’s where you come in.

This is your time to shine; your time to create that space. Are you up
for it?

4
Introduction - What Is An Online
Community?
Social networks are now a mature industry. Almost two decades
have passed since the launch of Friendster, more than fifteen since
Mark Zuckerberg started collecting headshots at Harvard. In that
time, two things have happened.

First, the social media companies have figured out what works and
what doesn’t work. They’ve experimented with suggestions, created
story features, counted which kinds of posts generate the most
engagement, and figured out, with varying degrees of success,
which content to push into their users’ timelines.

They’ve also collected vast amounts of user data, collecting

information about everything from users’ favorite television shows to
the nature of their relationships, the food they like to eat, and the
brands they like to use. It’s allowed them to become industrial giants.
Facebook now has more than two billion monthly active users and is
worth about $630 billion.

At the same time, social media sites still struggle with that power.
Facebook has suffered from data leaks and has become a platform
for spreading political disinformation. Twitter’s trolls and bots have
driven users away, including many of the celebrities the company
needs to keep eyes on the screen. Reddit has quarantined a popular
forum used by supporters of Donald Trump even as its CEO Steve
Huffman has said that the company wouldn’t try to block hate
speech.

5
The result, nearly twenty years after online communities became a
central feature of the Internet, is that the sector has been both a
giant success and a colossal failure. It’s brought people together. It’s
managed to create multi-billion dollar companies out of that
interaction. It’s met a real need and it’s brought value to people’s
lives.

At the same time though, it’s taken personal information from people
without their full knowledge and it’s failed to keep that data safe and
secure. It’s allowed into communities harmful elements that have
done much to spread suspicion, fear, and hate. It still hasn’t come up
with an answer to how to police an online community, let alone what
rules those police should enforce.

The other thing that’s happened is that the big community sites have
become too big to be useful. The reason that Facebook, Reddit and
others struggle with community rules is that they need a single set of
rules to cover communities as different as Bridge players and gun
rights. It’s an impossible task; a Bridge-playing community might
choose to agree among themselves not to discuss politics or religion
in order to keep the focus on card games and Bridge strategies. A
political community would want much looser rules.

So while the giant social networking platforms are still going strong,
users are also finding that they’re too strong to meet all their needs.
The result has been the development of thousands of independent
niche communities, filling the holes that Mark Zuckerberg’s
all-encompassing giant has created. While over a billion people are
speaking to everyone they’ve met about everything they do, many
are looking for focus. They want to connect with other like-minded
individuals around the particular passions that inspire them, without
all the extra “noise” that Facebook generates, and according to rules
that they can determine and govern.

6
Online communities are being built by artists and schools, by thought
leaders and by local communities. They’re being set up by
individuals and by groups and by anyone who wants to bring
together people who share an interest and a passion.

Businesses, too, are building brands, creating loyalty and

discovering valuable intelligence on what customers want and
expect. And they’re earning from it. When a company gives space to
its customers to gather and talk, it stops being a place where people
go when they need to make a purchase. It becomes a pillar of the
community, the only place where people go when they want to buy
something related to their interests.

And today, building those online communities is easier than ever.

The Internet means that anyone can now create their own
community. They can build a website that gives their customers all
the tools they need to easily hold discussions, meet like-minded
people and form strong bonds. They keep people coming back day
after day, month after month, providing a virtual and valuable forum
for people who share an interest.

Built right and maintained properly, a community website hugs

customers close, strengthens a business, and advances an activity.
But having the right kind of software to create that community isn’t
enough. You also need the right strategy to make your community
grow steadily and organically, without spending millions.

This book will cover everything you need to know to create a

successful online community, from the essential first steps to proven
strategies for growth and engagement. Once you finish reading, you
will have a clear understanding of what you should — and shouldn’t
— be doing to get your social network moving in the right direction.

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We’ll start by looking at what makes a community. What are the
bonds that hold it together, and how do its members define
themselves?

We’ll then look at the right way to build an online community, but not
just any community: a community that remains active and thriving. A
community whose members don’t register, look and leave but one
whose members come back again and again, post comments and
contribute to discussions. A community that people don’t just want to
join but want to be a part of.

Building that kind of community may mean taking steps that can feel
counterintuitive. We’ll explain why you should be taking those steps
anyway.

We’ll talk you through the process of launching a community.

The start is the worst time for a new community. There are few
members, few discussions and little reaction to the content that’s
being posted—not that there’s much content either. We’ll explain
how to find those all-important first members and discuss why it’s
better to engage a small number of highly dedicated early users than
attract a large number of users who don’t return.

We’ll then talk about building on that foundation. We’ll discuss the
importance of maintaining a group identity and show you how to do
it. We’ll talk you through the role of the community manager; and
describe the best strategies you should be using to increase
participation.

We’ll also talk about extending your community across platforms,

and about the content that will keep that community together.

Finally, we’ll talk metrics and money.

8
Although communities don’t have the same monetizing process as
other forms of online marketing it is possible to turn a community into
cash and online communities do generate figures.

You should know how to find those figures, how to read them and
what to do with them.

While so many businesses and community leaders focus on building

their Facebook pages or fret about their Twitter content, others are
having a ball discussing their favorite topics with people who
genuinely care about them and who return day after day to their
website to see what’s new.

Building that website is easy. Building that community is a little

harder but with a little effort, it’s an option available to any business
owner and any community leader. And this is the time to do it.

We’ve now reached peak social networking. Facebook, which has

dominated online communities for the best part of two decades, now
has little room to grow and users are increasingly suspicious of its
power. Young users are turning to entertainment-oriented platforms
like Tik Tok while forums like Reddit are suffering from a lack of
agreed rules and policing that can make any community unpleasant.
For brands, businesses, and community leaders who want to create
their own online communities with their own focus and rules, there
has never been a better time.

9
Understanding and Building
Community Identity

Imagine that you want to grow a bonsai tree. You search the web for
advice about planting, wiring, and pruning. You find a number of
videos on YouTube that explain how to take care of the tree and how
to find the right species for your climate. You also go to the library
and borrow a book about bonsai-growing, and visit the local nursery
and talk to the gardeners about moisture levels and the dangers of
morning frost.

With dedication and determination, you can learn everything you

need to know about growing bonsai trees—and that may be
sufficient. If all you want to do is plant one tree one time, then forget
about it, that learning will give you all need.

But let’s say you want to go further. You want to experiment with
other species of miniature trees. You want to hear what other
enthusiasts are doing, how they cope with the changing seasons and
find out what they do when midges start to attack the leaves. You
want to talk about a topic you’ve come to love, and you want to have
those conversations with people who feel the same way you do.
You’re no longer someone with a bonsai tree. You’re a bonsai
grower—and the difference is important. We all have interests that
might include gardening, sports, or particular television shows. But
some of those interests will root deeper than others. They become
not just things that interest us but parts of who we are. They make up
elements of our identities. Or rather, they become another identity
among the many that make up who we are, because we all have
more than one identity. At various times and in different contexts, we

10
define ourselves in different ways. When we’re abroad, we’re often
seen—and we see ourselves—according to our national identity. At
home, our cities or our regions are more important markers of who
we are, and we can take pride in a local dialect, accent, or terms that
mark our differences. We also define ourselves by our jobs, saying
not that we write software or unblock sinks but that we are a software
engineer or a plumber.

Identity is not what we do; it’s who we are. And it’s around identities
that communities are built.

In a 1986 paper1, David McMillan and David Chavis of the George

Peabody College of Vanderbilt University attempted to define the
criteria that make up a sense of community. They proposed four
elements:

● Membership​: A feeling of belonging or sharing a sense of

personal relatedness.
● Influence​: An individual’s sense that they matter, that they
make a difference to the group, and that the group makes a
difference to its members.
● Integration and fulfillment of needs​: The feeling that
membership of the group will supply resources that meet
the members’ needs.
● Shared emotional connection​: The belief that members
share a common history and similar experiences.

McMillan and Chavis’s paper was an attempt to understand and

define communities. But for people looking to build communities,
those definitions can also be seen as the most important ingredients
of successful, growing communities. Without each of those elements
in place—without a sense of belonging, of influence, of the meeting

1
David McMillion and David Chavis, “Sense of Community: A Definition and Theory,” ​Journal of
Community Psychology​, Vol. 14, January 1986

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of needs, and of a shared emotional connection—it doesn’t matter
how much effort you put into encouraging members to create content
or tell their friends to come and join. The community won’t grow and
members won’t participate.

Before you begin building your community, before you start

marketing and looking for new members, it’s essential to understand
what a community is and how it works.

The Boundaries of Membership

McMillan and Chavis define membership as “a feeling that one has
invested part of oneself to become a member and therefore has a
right to belong.” It’s a sense of belonging, they continue, of being a
part of something larger than oneself.

Perhaps another way to put it is that membership provides a feeling

of being at home, and that this community is a place for people like
you. Other members may differ in a host of different ways but you all
have at least one characteristic, one shared interest that binds
everyone together.

That also means that membership has boundaries. Everyone who

shares that unifying characteristic lies on one side of the boundary;
everyone who lacks that unifying characteristic stands on the other
side of the boundary.
That boundary is sometimes visible and even deliberate. When fans
watch their sports team play, they often wear the team uniform. That
decision doesn’t just show support; it also creates a boundary
between one group and another: anyone who wears the shirt is one
of us. Ritual provides another kind of boundary. The ritual of the
Catholic Mass draws a line between those who participate in it, and
those who do not. Language can perform the same role even within
linguistic groups. Jargon is one way for group members to denote

12
who is in and who is out. When Agile practitioners, for example, talk
about scrums, stand-ups, Gantt charts, and flow, they tell each other
that they’re part of the in-group; and they remind those who wonder
what they’re talking about that they aren’t members of their magic
circle.

McMillan and Chavis warn that those boundaries are “troublesome.”

Boundaries, they note, can generate the pain of rejection and
isolation among those who are on the “wrong” side of the line.

But membership also provides emotional safety by protecting group

intimacy. Gangs represent one form of community, membership of
which can provide physical protection (as well as additional danger.)
And membership can work against a sense of isolation. Membership
of a self-help group such as Alcoholics Anonymous enables
members to recognize that they are not alone and that they have
additional sources of strength to draw on.

And membership is also marked by a common symbol system.

Military regiments have their own badges. Fraternities can have
special handshakes. Religious sects have their own iconography.
Each of those symbols tells everyone who is in and who is out.

Each of these elements of membership—and McMillan and Chavis

also add a sense of belonging and identification, and the personal
investment required to join a group—is important to people building a
community. They tell you where a community ends and where it
begins.

Members Influence the Community, the

Community Influences Its Members
The community boundary draws a line between one group of people
and another. But it also draws a line between one kind of activity and

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another. Inside the community, influence is being exerted. Members
are molding the group’s behavior. They’re affecting its nature and its
rules. A community of supporters of a particular K-Pop band, for
example, may agree that they will support each member of the band
equally. But if one of the band members were to leave and start a
solo career, the community would need to decide how they would
relate to that former member. Would they still be referenced in the
community’s activities? Or, as a former member, are they now
outside the community? The decision will be made by the
community. The members will influence the community’s nature.

But influence in a community flows in both directions. Not only do

members influence the community, the community also influences its
members, pressuring them to conform. If the K-Pop community
agrees that a former member is beyond the boundaries of the
community, members who disagree will either have to conform or
leave.

Like boundaries that exclude some people and include others, that
makes this element of community troubling. A strong community has
the power to enforce conformity on its members and ostracize those
who refuse.

That conformity isn’t entirely negative. It has a role. People join a

community in part because they want to know that their feelings,
thoughts, and desires are shared by others. They don’t want to be
alone. Someone who finds that they like listening to K-Pop will be
reassured by the discovery of a community of people who feel the
same way they do. As that community evolves, however, as its
members’ behavior changes the nature of the community, the
pressure to conform changes—and members resist. Some may
choose to leave. Others will attempt to exert influence in a different
direction and express their own individual freedom. McMillan and
Chavis note that “this emphasizes the need to develop communities
that can appreciate individual differences.” They conclude by arguing

14
that members are more attracted to a community in which they feel
that they have influence but they also point out that the pressure to
conform is a result of the members’ needs for consensual validation.

That creates a challenge for builders of communities. On the one

hand, you want everyone to feel at home. You want everyone to
believe that they can influence the direction of the community, and
you want as many people as possible to stand on your side of your
community’s boundary. But you also need enough conformity and
clear enough boundaries for members to feel that this community
really is for them. Make the boundaries too broad and you’ll lose both
a sense of identity and the feeling among members that they can set
those rules.

One option is for large communities to create sub-communities. That

K-Pop community, for example, could contain groups for people who
like individual artists. The community as a whole would have a broad
boundary over which members have relatively little influence and
allows in everyone with an interest in the topic. But the
sub-communities could have tighter boundaries with greater member
autonomy.
Alternatively, you can try to encourage a tolerant attitude towards
community identity, making everyone who qualifies for the group or
has a link to the community feel welcome.

Need Fulfillment
But why do people want to join a community in the first place? Why
would they risk negotiating the community’s boundaries, determining
whether they fit, and attempting to influence the group at all? What
do they get out of community membership?

McMillan and Chavis talk about the importance of “integration and

fulfillment of needs,” which they translate as “reinforcement.” For any

15
group to maintain a positive sense of togetherness, they say, “the
individual-group association must be rewarding for its members.”

They don’t describe what exactly is being reinforced or why it’s a

need that has to be fulfilled but the inference is that membership of a
community delivers a positive effect that encourages people to join,
remain, and participate.

The researchers note that the complexity of individuals and groups

makes it impossible to identify every kind of reinforcement that
membership of a community can deliver, but they do identify three.

The first is ​competence​. People, they say, are attracted to others

whose skill or competence can benefit them. So one of the
attractions of a community for Ford Mustang enthusiasts would be
the presence of other members who understand the car even better
than they do. Those members can advise them on ways to enhance
their car or answer their questions. They provide a means of
obtaining more knowledge and of solving their problems. They allow
other members to level up.

For builders of community, that describes an important asset.

Communities should aim to identify members with the most
experience and the largest amount of knowledge or skills so that
they stand out and can provide the reinforcement that other
members are looking for. Some forums do that by giving members
ranks. They might start as “newbies,” and rise to be “experts” based
on the number of contributions they make. That status award is
another form of reinforcement but engagement metrics don’t have to
be the only way of awarding that status. Depending on the
community, members could stand out by being “professionals” rather
than “enthusiasts,” or by the amount of time they’ve been involved in
the community.

16
The intention is always to show members that not everyone in the
community is equal. Some people are more experienced and
knowledgeable than others. The community has competence, and
members who lack that high level of competence can see the benefit
that their membership can bring them. Members have ​status​.

And the third aspect reinforcement is ​shared values​. “When people

who share values come together,” McMillan and Chavis write, “they
find that they have similar needs, priorities, and goals, thus fostering
the belief that in joining together they might be better able to satisfy
these needs and obtain the reinforcement they seek.”

Unlike competence and status, those values aren’t easy for a

community owner to display. They’re shown in the content that’s
added to the community and in the way that members treat each
other. A community owner shouldn’t need to strictly police the
content but they can set the rules that govern behavior. A willingness
to allow personal insults, for example, says much about the values
shared in the community and about the culture that the community
creates. That’s work that needs more than a status tag on a profile
picture. Start by understanding how you’re going to show off
members’ competence, but also understand how you’re going to
define the rules that show the community’s shared values in action.

Shared Emotional Connection

A group of people is not the same as a community. Everyone in a
shopping mall on a particular day at a particular time has something
in common, but they are not members of a community and they don’t
see themselves that way. They lack a shared emotional connection.
McMillan and Chavis argue that that shared emotional connection is
based, “in part,” on a shared history. But members do not need to
have participated in that history. They only need to identify with it.
Members of a nation, for example, feel a sense of shared national

17
history and the emotional connection that creates is strong enough
for them to be willing to pay taxes and even fight for each other.

Emotional connection is also made up of a number of other features,

including interaction, the importance of events, and the investments
people make in their membership. The more members of a group
interact, the more meaningful that interaction, and the more they put
into the group, the stronger the emotional bond between the
members. So the emotional bond is strong between members who
are able to meet frequently or participate in discussions. It’s also
strong among people who have undergone a crisis together. And it’s
stronger among homeowners in a neighborhood than among renters
in the same area.

For people trying to build communities, that means that it’s possible
to build the bonds that bring those members together. But it will take
effort. It might take the organizing of events at which many people
participate simultaneously: a concert or a fundraiser, for example, or
a live online video or webinar. And it will also require encouraging
members to make investments in the community. That doesn’t have
to be financial in the same way that a sense of membership in a
community derives from the purchase of property in that area. It
could also include an investment of time or a donation of resources.

Putting the Elements of Community Identity

Together
After explaining how the different elements of community interact,
McMillan and Chavis provide a number of examples of community
feeling, in a neighborhood, in a youth gang, and in an Israeli kibbutz.
But the most interesting example comes in a university:

Someone puts an announcement on the dormitory

bulletin board about the formation of an intramural

18
 dormitory basketball team. People attend the
organizational meeting as strangers out of their
individual needs (integration and fulfillment of needs).
The team is bound by place of residence (membership
boundaries are set) and spends time together in
practice (the contact hypothesis). They play a game
and win (successful shared valent event). While
playing, members exert energy on behalf of the team
(personal investment in the group). As the team
continues to win, team members become recognized
and congratulated (gaining honor and status for being
members). Someone suggests that they all buy
matching shirts and shoes (common symbols) and they
do so (influence).

It’s easy to see how that model quickly comes to build a sense of
shared community identity, and it’s easy too to imagine these kinds
of communities being born again and again. Each year at colleges,
new groups and clubs form to bring together people who have a
need to socialize, whether that’s through sports, volunteering,
campaigning, or any other activity. The more activities members
participate in as members of those groups, and the more important
those activities, the stronger the bonds between them will be.

One of the most famous college groups, for example, is the

Cambridge University Footlights Dramatic Club, the theater group for
students at Cambridge University. The club was formed in 1883 but
really came into its own in the 1960s, when members included Clive
James, Peter Cook, and Dudley Moore. In the 1980s, when its
members included Emma Thompson, Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, and
Rowan Atkinson, the group won the first Perrier Award at the
Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Subsequent members, who have included
Olivia Colman and John Oliver, are aware of the group’s history.
They understand that membership of the club matters: both to
themselves and to other members. If each member contributes, the

19
result can be a successful career in entertainment. Membership fills
an emotional need, and the frequent rehearsals, preparation of
material, and competitions such as the Edinburgh Fringe create a
series of meaningful experiences that bind the group together.

Building Community Identity Online

Universities make for an easy sense of community identity because
they have clear boundaries (they’re only available to students of the
university with a particular shared interest); and they also provide
plenty of opportunity for members to meet and interact (all of those
rehearsals, training sessions, and demonstrations—and the
meetings in the bar afterwards).

That isn’t the case online.

In this guide we’ll explore some of the specific ways in which an

online community can grow and thrive, and create the kind of
community feeling that binds members of a group together. But what
would that group look like? How would it grow?

Imagine a watch enthusiast who wanted to set up a group for people

who love timepieces. He’d set up an online platform and begin
inviting other enthusiasts. The boundaries of the group would be
people who love clockwork wristwatches. So enthusiasts of digital
watches or smartwatches would be outside the group. But
enthusiasts of any make of analogue watch would be welcome. In
time, as membership grows, the community might create
sub-communities for people who like antique watches or Swiss
watches, Rolex watches, or Patek Philippe watches.

The community leader could identify professionals within the group

and sub-groups who could help to deepen the knowledge of the
members. Owners of watch stores for example, could be encouraged

20
to give advice to people wondering about the value of their watches.
Watchmakers could talk about how movements are designed and
offer advice about maintenance and common problems. That
participation would begin to allow members to receive and provide
influence. They would also find that their needs are being fulfilled, all
of which helps to build a solid foundation for the group.

But what would really cement membership, deepen the bonds

between members, and begin building a history that members can
take pride in, would be the creation of events. Online tools can go
some way towards filling the space taken in offline groups by
rehearsals, training, or planning meetings but they need to be
participatory. Webinars and live video tend to involve one person
speaking to many people. Rehearsals in theater groups and training
for sports teams bring everyone together on equal terms. They may
have a leader—a director or a coach—but they also require all other
members to participate and co-operate.

That’s the kinds of experience that online communities both need

and struggle to emulate. One option is to break the community into
regional groups. Once the community has grown to a sufficient size,
it can begin setting up local chapters who can meet in person. Until
then though it can also run regular teleconferences under the
direction of a sub-community leader. It could also sponsor events
such as annual watch shows, or provide membership cards that give
members discounts at participating watch repair shops. The intention
will always be to fulfil members’ needs while providing them with
shared, valued experiences.

But the first move is to start bringing in the members. We’ll talk about
that in the next chapter.

21
Building The Foundations: Your
First Members

Google Plus was probably the most sophisticated of all the

community platforms on the Web. When Google designed it, the
company got everything right. The “circles” were the perfect solution
to the problem of posting content that you want some people to see
but you want to hide from others. It tackled one aspect of social
media’s privacy problem head-on. By building different circles for
colleagues, clients, customers, friends and family, users were able
to post all the content they want on one attractive platform and do it
easily.

It had everything a social site needed… except for one thing.

It didn’t have users.

Or at least it didn’t have enough users. At the end of 2013,

two-and-a-half years after launch, Google was boasting of 300
million active “in the stream” visits each month. But when it became
clear that figure included anyone who so much as clicked the
notifications bell in their Gmail account, it also became clear that the
number of real users was much, much lower.

Compared to the billion-plus active members on Facebook at the

time, that was a drop in the ocean.

The reason that Google struggled to build a community site, even

with a great product, is that new communities suffer a Catch 22.

22
No one wants to join a community unless all their friends are there
too. But their friends aren’t going to join unless their friends have
already joined before them. So the site stays empty, waiting for
enough people to make the first move to reach a tipping point.

Or in the case of Google Plus, waiting for enough people to leave

Facebook. It didn’t happen. Google closed its personal version of
Google+ in April 2019. The platform just didn’t take off.

That’s the problem your community will face when you’re ready to
launch.

Your pages will be ready. You’ll have tinkered with the design. You’ll
be looking forward to seeing groups form, events booked, and
interesting posts generating comments and discussions on a wide
range of different topics.

But how do you persuade people to join when they know that few
people will read their posts and any discussions they hold will be
with… you, mostly?

Launch Slow, Grow Hard

The answer lies in the launch.

Ask a marketing executive how you can grow your community

quickly, and you’ll probably get a detailed launch plan. They might
suggest writing press releases, buying ads, and trying to gain as
much attention as possible so that lots of potential community
members stop by to find out what all the fuss is about.

Not all of those people will hang around, of course, but enough will
stay to give your community a foundation.

23
It sounds like good advice.

And it’s ​completely wrong​.

In his book ​The Proven Path2, Richard Millington, a community

consultant who has worked for the United Nations, Novartis, Oracle
and BAE Systems among others, describes receiving a call from the
European marketing manager of a multinational consumer products
company.

Millington flew out to Europe. He met the company’s marketing

manager. And he heard how the company had already burned
through half of a $4 million budget set aside to create an online
community.

The company had pulled out all the stops. It had done everything it
could to create the biggest, loudest, splashiest launch it could put
together.

The community platform itself had cost close to a million dollars to

build. Two journalists were hired to create content which was then
translated into 40 different languages. A PR agency was brought on
board. A team of community managers was put together. A social
strategy firm was commissioned to develop a plan. One of the
world’s top legal firms was even asked to create the site’s terms and
conditions, and a major contest was run to attract people to sign up.

After laying out $2 million, the company managed to attract 10,000

members as soon as it launched. That looked like a good start.

But the numbers soon fell. Even as the community manager posted
content twice a week and tried to engage those members, the early
joiners quickly faded away. By the time the company called Richard

2
Richard Millington, ​The Proven Path: The Most Successful and Reliable Approach in the History of
Building Online Communities​, ebook, https://course.feverbee.com/the-proven-path/theprovenpath.pdf

24
Millington for help just 50 people had been active in the previous
week.

After three months, the size of the community was down to… two.
Just two people remained active on the site. Two people for whom
the company had paid $2 million.

The problem is that growing a community from scratch is not a

numbers game. Your community won’t begin with lots of people and
it shouldn’t begin with lots of people. It will start with a handful of
people, people who really care about the community and about its
topic. People who want to see the community succeed, want to bring
their friends to join them and are as excited about seeing the
community grow as you are.

That means that the community will grow relatively slowly. You won’t
attract 10,000 people in the week that you launch. You might have
just ten people in the week that you launch, but those ten people will
stay and they’ll invite their friends so that by the end of the month,
you might have sixty people in the community.

And those people won’t just be members. They’ll be active users,

people who create content, write posts, upload images and lead
discussions.

As you launch your community, that quiet start followed by steady

growth should be your goal. It’s much more effective than a loud
bang followed by quiet, and it’s also a lot easier and a lot more
enjoyable to prepare.

25
Preparing For Your Launch

So your launch won’t be a big splash. There won’t be balloons or

contests or press releases sent out to every media publication in
your field when you start taking in your first member. Instead, your
launch will consist of emails, phone calls and comments inviting
people who you know will find the community interesting to sign up
and contribute content.

Before you can contact those people though, you first have to know
which people you want to approach.

And before you can do that, you have to know what kind of
community you want to build.

Online communities are usually divided into five categories:

● Action​ communities campaign for social change.

● Local communities focus on a small area, providing a way
for neighbors to exchange news and information.
● Professional communities let people doing similar work
share advice and experience.
● Communities based on ​circumstance gather together
people who share a particular situation, such as
motherhood or drug addiction.
● And ​interest communities are focused on a particular
passion or hobby.

Most communities built by brands and businesses focus on interest.

They provide a place for people who like a particular kind of product
to discuss that product.

26
In fact, those kinds of communities may well be the hardest to build.
Yours is unlikely to be the first community platform for people who
like coffee, video games or even for sperm donors (yep,
KnownDonorRegistry.com has even that one covered) so you’ll have
plenty of competition online.

A better solution is to give an interest community a direction. That

can come naturally. People who love a particular product often want
to proselytize and bring members together. The website of Udi’s
Gluten-Free Breads (udisglutenfree.com), for example, ends with a
call to “Join us on social,” and includes links to Facebook, Instagram,
Twitter, and Pinterest.

Members who join that community and are already gluten-free get to
feel that they’re helping others take their first step. It adds a powerful
extra boost to the attractiveness of the brand, and of course when
other gluten-free eaters are helping new customers, that’s great for
the business.

Having decided what kind of community you want to build, you’ll

need to start looking for your first members. That shouldn’t happen
by casting a wide net and trying to drag in as many people as
possible. It should happen through spear-fishing: by choosing exactly
the right members to land.

Seeding Your Community With Its First

Members

This stage of your community is critical. You’re about to address your

first members. If all goes well, by the end of the month, possibly even
by the end of the week, you’ll have a solid base of about a dozen
people who share your enthusiasm for your community. Even before

27
they’ve written their first post or created their profile, they’re already
imagining what the community is going to do—just as you are.

Get it wrong, though, and you’ll have pushed away some of the most
important members your community could have, and the constant
rejections could well make you so despondent you want to give up
on the project altogether.

You need to get this right.

Draw up a list of about a dozen people you think would want to take
part in the community. You can go for a few more if you want, but
don’t go over twenty. You’re going to be discussing the community
with them over email and even by phone so the more people you
choose at this stage, the more work you’ll find yourself doing.

You can look for early members in a wide range of different places.
Some of them you may know already. If you know them personally,
call them up or meet them for coffee and try to get them involved. A
community project shouldn’t rely on one person. If you can get good
help at this stage, you’ll make your life much easier and you’ll also
be able to bring in new ideas about the topics the community should
focus on and the benefits it can offer members.

For potential first members you don’t personally know, ​blogs are still
a good place to begin. Blogs might not have the cachet they used to
have but as long as people are putting up their ideas on places like
Medium, you know that there are people with thoughts that they
really want to share. Those are people who will be willing to join your
community early.

Avoid the top bloggers in your field. They may already have their
own communities and they’ll be too busy with their own blogs to
contribute to your platform. Instead, look for between three and five
medium-sized bloggers who write about the topic of your community.

28
Choose people who write consistently and have been doing it
knowledgeably and for some time.

These are blogs you should already be familiar with, and ideally you
should be leaving regular comments on them too. The blogger will
probably have noticed so when you make your first contact, they’ll
know who you are.

You can also target ​commenters on those blogs. Choose the people
who leave the most helpful and intelligent comments on more than
one blog in your field but bear in mind that if they’re not bloggers
themselves, they’ll be more likely to be commenting on other
people’s posts than writing their own. That has a value too, though.

Next, look for ​book reviewers​. Head to Amazon, pull up the latest
books in your field and look for the people who have contributed the
most helpful reviews to at least two of the books. This might take you
a little while, especially to find the contact details of the reviewer, but
you can also try leaving a notice in the review discussion boards.

Again, if you can find two or three people who have read some
books on the field and are thoughtful enough to want to write reviews
about those books, you’ll have attracted some valuable members
into your community.

Finally, search on ​social media platforms​. Again, don’t go for the

owners of the biggest Facebook pages or the Twitter users with
50,000 followers. Look for Facebook pages with just a few hundred
likes and fewer than a thousand followers. They’ll be keen to have a
larger audience and they won’t feel that being among the first
contributors to a new platform is a step down.

There are plenty of other places you can look, too. People you met at
conferences are likely to be good contributors. You can ​put up an
ad on your own website for people who want to contribute to a new

29
community. Review the people who apply and choose those who
seem to you to have the most to contribute.

And, of course, you can ​ask the people you invite if they know
other people who they think would be interested.

Avoid asking your current customers at this stage, though.

You want to have lots of helpful content and a warm, friendly

atmosphere before you start bringing your customers through the
door.

Drawing up that initial list will take some time. Expect to spend
several days browsing blogs and cross-checking book reviews on
Amazon. But it’s time well-spent.

And you can’t make up that time by skimping on the contact itself.
That also has to be nurtured over time. Send out a formulaic email
based on a template to everyone on your list, and you’ll just make it
easy to be ignored and make sure that your time spent researching
people was wasted.

For those people you’ve met in the flesh and whose phone number
you possess, pick up the phone and call them. You’ll show that
you’re serious and you’ll make it harder for them to say no.

For others, send a personal email. Explain why you’re writing.

Describe what you’re hoping to build and state why you think they
can contribute. Ask them what they think. Let them feel that you’re
looking for their opinion, not a commitment.

So if you were writing to someone who had left some really helpful
reviews on books about gluten-free living on Amazon, you might
write something like this:

30
 Dear Barbara,

My name is John Smith, and I’m writing to you because

I noticed that you left some great reviews on Amazon
under the books by Jane Harris and Phil Neal about
gluten-free living. I’m the owner of a gluten-free bakery
in Oakland, and I’m putting together an online
community about the topic. I really want to encourage
people to talk about their experiences of being
diagnosed, taking their first steps at cutting gluten out
of their diet—and of course to swap recipes and meal
ideas.

I spoke to Phil Neal while he was writing his book. He’s

already agreed to join the community and contribute
some posts.

Your reviews were really helpful so I was wondering

what you think and whether you’d like to take part once
the community launches. I’m sure everyone would
really appreciate your input and we’d certainly like to
know more about the books you’ve read on gluten-free
living. If you have time to talk on the phone, I’d be
happy to give you a call this week to tell you more
about the community and learn your opinion.

And if you know of anyone else who you think would

want to join the community, that would be great too!

Do let me know what you think!

John Smith,
Owner, John’s Gluten-Free Living.

31
That email isn’t a template but it does tick off a number of important
points:

● It’s personalized. Each email should say exactly why

you’re writing to that person.
● It’s specific. The email states exactly what the contact can
contribute to the community.
● It name-drops. You won’t always be able to do this but if
you can mention someone the contact knows, you’ll have
made your request even more powerful.
● It asks questions. The email doesn’t push the contact into
a corner. It asks for an opinion and for an opportunity to
share their ideas.
● It asks for referrals. Not every contact will drop you a
referral but each one that does gives you an easy
replacement for someone who doesn’t answer.
● And it explains who you are. The message places you in
the community and explains why you should be of interest
to the contact.

Most important of all, the email starts a conversation. It’s not a

request; it’s the opening of a new discussion. You’ll still have to do
plenty of work on the phone and through email before that contact
will be completing her profile and writing her first posts.

If your message doesn’t pick up a reply, though, stop. Cross the

name off the list and move on to the next one. Pester people and
they won’t come back. Ask them once and when the community
takes off, they might well join later.

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Moving Into Second Gear

You’ll want to begin the process of contacting potential early

members at least a month before you’re ready for your community to
launch. It should be part of the workflow of choosing the design,
testing, and preparing your platform. When everything is finally
ready, you should be able to invite the twenty or so people you’ve
contacted to create their profiles, look around and begin contributing
content. You’ll hit the ground if not running, then at least trotting.

Then the real work begins.

Once those people have signed up and are contributing, push harder
for their referrals. Don’t ask them to mention the community on their
website or blogs yet. You want to build up a bit more momentum
before you try to bring lots of people on board, but do ask if they
know of other people who can contribute to the site. You can even
suggest that you’ll do the contact work for them.

By the time you’ve managed to bring in about 30 or 40 members,

you’ll really have the core of a good community and it will still be at a
size you can just about handle.

Focus on building connections between those members. Use your

own page as well as email to draw attention to posts written by other
members. If someone has written a post that you know another
member will have a strong opinion about, make sure they know and
contribute, tag them in comments to get their attention. If someone
hasn’t posted for a while, get in touch and ask them why. You can
give them a topic that you want them to write about.

33
When your community is still this small, you really do have the ability
to cajole people together, make introductions and build
conversations. Your role here will be as much party host as
community manager.

Once you can see that people are talking freely and that discussions
are starting to flow, you can open up, suggest that people mention
the community on their blogs and accept people who haven’t been
referred or invited.

You still want to steer clear of paid advertising or press releases.

You still want slow, steady growth not a flood that swamps your
current community. But you should find that there’s a reliable uptick
in the number of contributors towards three figures and that those
members are active and engaged. They add to the community and
participate in it rather than lurking and leaving.

Now, as your community is growing naturally, you can start to

deepen your members’ loyalty and make them feel strongly attached
to the club.

Building On The Foundations:

Bringing Your Club To Life
Once your community has moved beyond its seed members, it will
start to enjoy some organic growth. Your members will tell their
friends, their site visitors and their followers. You’ll see fewer names
you recognize, more comments written to other members, and the
community will begin to develop a life of its own.

At this point, it starts to move beyond your control.

34
If individuals drift away, you won’t notice so you won’t be able to
contact them and try to bring them back. If comments and posts start
to fall off across the site, keeping a few members active won’t be
enough to keep the site alive.

The community and its spirit, the identity we discussed earlier, has to
be strong enough to hold the people who join and to attract people
who want to join.

Building And Maintaining Group Identity

The most powerful way to ensure that your members remain active
in the community is to give them a sense of pride at being members
of that community, to make their identity as programmers, game fans
or curry lovers dependent at least in part on their activities on your
platform.

That’s not as difficult to do as it sounds.

It is something that happens when the community feels special and

different, when membership of that community feels exclusive and
when participation in the community’s activities deepens each
member’s sense of identity.

One way to do that is to give the community its own unique brand.
Dribbble (Dribbble.com), for example, is a community platform for
graphic designers. It’s a place where designers can show their work
in progress and receive feedback from their peers.

The first thing you’ll notice about the platform is that it has a strange
name. Rich Thornett, one of the platform’s co-founders, had hoped
to play pro basketball but found that software development and

35
product design won him more points. His love of basketball,
however, is threaded through the site.

Potential members are “prospects.” They’re “drafted” as “players” at

which point they make their “debuts.” Uploads are “shots.”
Follow-ups to those shots are called “rebounds” when they come
from the same designer, and “playoffs” when they come from other
designers.

It’s all very quirky and unusual but it works and the platform’s odd
identity makes it easy to remember. Anyone who joins the site
understands that they’re buying into the concept and that acceptance
already gives them something in common.

Members of Dribbble aren’t just graphic designers; they’re designers

who bounce ideas around in the playoffs.

When Dribbble started, it had another feature that was even more
unusual—and even more powerful.

When new members clicked the sign up link they were taken to a
standard registration form. It was very simple: just name, username,
email and password, or registration through Twitter. That form
remains, although registration is now possible through Google.

But that registration form wouldn’t get you into the community.

It would only allow you to “find, follow and hire” the community’s
members.

The sign up form was for businesses looking for designers.

Designers could sign up using that form but they couldn’t show their
work—they couldn’t play, to use Dribbble’s terms​—​until they were
invited (or “drafted”) by another member.

36
According to Dribbble, the restriction delivered a couple of important
benefits.

It ensured that members took responsibility for the people they

invited. Invitations were limited so members who had invitations used
them carefully. They checked portfolios of prospects, looked for
people whose work and style they liked and once they’d joined, they
encouraged them to upload their best shots.

In effect, by only accepting people who have been invited by

members, Dribbble turned those members into mentors. Each
member who issued an invitation felt the need to help the new
members they’d chosen to integrate into the community.

It also allowed the site to grow at a rate that was manageable and
didn’t overwhelm the support services.

But the invitation did something else as well.

For new members, it made membership valuable.

Because the site wasn’t open to everyone, acceptance was an

award to be prized. It only happened after their work had been
reviewed by a peer, and with so many “prospects” pitching for
invitations, new members could feel that they were joining an
exclusive club.

And for established members, issuing an invitation was a rite of

passage.

They were no longer a rookie on the site. They became senior

players with someone to mentor and encourage. They were invested
in the community and their status as someone worthy of respect on
the platform depended mostly on the quality of their own work but
also in part on the work uploaded by the people they’d invited. They

37
had a solid reason to comment on and support their friends’ work—a
reason to keep returning to and using the site.

Dribbble’s strategy might not have been planned with the idea of
forging a strong community identity, but its quirky structure and its
limited invitations had exactly that effect. They might have restricted
its growth (the company conceded that “we know there are many
fantastic designers still undrafted”) but it has made membership
valuable and so reinforced the members’ sense of community
attachment.

The result was that the community grew quickly enough without
losing quality to become a conventional, high-level jobs site for the
creative industry.

Many successful communities will find themselves facing a version of

Dribbble’s decision to restrict access.

As your community grows, it will pull in new members with a looser

attachment to the community’s core interest. You may find that those
new members unbalance the community and in the process, push
away those initial members. Instead of community identity
deepening, it unravels. The first members leave and the new
members, uncertain what the site is for, also drift away.

That was the danger faced by Cars and Coffee in Irvine, California.
The group started as a real-life meet up for people who love exotic
automobiles. They could bring their cars to a car park and anyone
could come and admire them.

As those gatherings grew though, they also attracted people who

wanted to show their standard BMWs or their new Mustangs. Soon
the owners of rare automobiles found they were being squeezed out
and visitors found that they were looking at the same sorts of cars
they could find in their local showrooms.

38
Organizers responded by restricting access. Adjudicators would
decide which cars could enter the show area and which would be
directed to the visitors’ parking lot. Not surprisingly, there were plenty
of disputes, but the decision probably saved the meetings.

Online, the solutions are easier—and they cause less confrontation.

If you’re finding that new members are pulling the community away
from its center and weakening the sense of community identity, then
spin them off.

Just as the organizers of Cars And Coffee directed drivers of

standard new cars to separate parking lots, so you can set up a new
community for people who like American versions of Indian food
rather than authentic Indian curries or for people with an interest in
street photography rather than the documentary photography that
inspired you to create your community site.

There may be some complaints, but communities aren’t for everyone

who wants to join them. If they don’t have a strong sense of identity,
they’ll have weak engagement—and soon they’ll have few members.

You Can Raise Participation!

Boredom is every community builder’s biggest fear.

Even when you have plenty of users, you will be afraid that your
members will become bored and stop contributing. Once the site has
been built and the main features added, you’ll spend much of your
time wondering what you can do to encourage people to comment,
like and add events.

39
You might even feel that there’s little that you can do to persuade
people to act.

And you’d be wrong.

According to Peter Kollock, a researcher at the University of

California, Los Angeles, and an expert in online co-operation,
members participate in communities for any of the following reasons.

1. Anticipated reciprocity.
When a member comments on someone else’s post,
they expect that member to comment on their post in
return.
2. Self Esteem.
Members post and comment as a way to make
themselves more visible on the platform and to
appear more important to other members.
3. Influence.
By writing posts, organizing events and being active
members of the community, members can feel that
they’re influencing the direction of the community as
a whole.
4. Attachment.
Members of communities post as a result of the
association and loyalty they feel towards their
communities.
5. Need.
And members will also post in order to acquire
information that they need.

Not all of those motivators are equal but many of them can be
manipulated. Competitions, for example, can be a powerful source of
the need for reciprocity and they can be as subtle as the regular
highlighting of user content. On Flickr, Yahoo’s photography

40
community, the images that appear on the Explore page are chosen
by an algorithm that rates favorites, views and comments. As a
result, users of the site engage with other users’ photos in the hope
of receiving similar engagement in return. They also make a point of
posting their images to the site’s groups in order to increase their
visibility.

The more they comment, fave and share, the greater the chances
that they’ll see their own pictures win the respect of being featured
on the Explore page.

While it’s easy to implement, the strategy of highlighting the most

popular user content carries a cost. The comments under pictures on
Flickr are often filled with posts that say nothing more useful than
“Great shot!” Favorite folders can become so filled with images that
they become impossible to use as a way of navigating truly great
content. Flickr actually penalizes photos that are posted to too many
groups, although it doesn’t say how many is “too many.”

Despite the risk of spamming, however, contests based on

engagement can be very effective even when the rewards are
nothing more valuable than extra exposure and the kudos of winning.

Increasing the attractiveness of influence is much easier. Whenever

someone posts a suggestion to improve the community, the
community organizer can thank them, and explain why that
suggestion may or may not be implemented. Even if it’s not
implemented, by opening up the suggestion for discussion, you can
help members of your community to feel that they have the ability to
shape the community.

And, of course, you get to see some good ideas that may just
improve the site.

41
On Flickr, the page that has always had the most activity is probably
the Help Forum, a place where members can discuss the functioning
of the site. Employees of Flickr take an active part in those
discussions, ensuring that members feel that they’re being listened
to.

While a sense of attachment may be a result of high engagement as

much as an instigator of it, need can be reinforced by making the
community a welcoming place to ask questions which are quickly
answered.

As we’ve seen, one of the biggest strengths of an active community

is that experienced members are available to offer help and advice to
newcomers. If you can use your community platform to bring
together people with plenty of knowledge with people who need that
knowledge, you’ll give both sides a reason to participate.

One popular option, that’s also used on blogs, is to ask the leaders
of your community to take questions at a certain time about a certain
topic. Members can hashtag their questions to make them easy to
find or they can just be placed in the comments on their page. The
expert can then weigh in with their own suggestions.

Not only will you have helped to make your community into a
valuable resource, you’ll also have shown members that there is a
reward available for regular contributions: produce good content and
show that you know the topic, and you may be invited to feature as
an expert.

All of those motivations highlighted by Peter Kollock are powerful

and by engaging directly with members of the community you can
use them as strings to pull your members back to the page.

But there is one more motivation that may well be the most powerful
of all: the fear of missing out.

42
When your community is working, when you’re getting plenty of good
content, members should feel worried that if they’re not logging in
every day, they’re missing important updates. And when they’ve
managed to build connections with other members, they should feel
excited when they see an alert at the top of the page—and sad when
they miss them.

Those, though, are the products of a good community. Build that

community and you’ll find that the fear of missing out strengthens it.

The Role Of The Community Manager

Online communities are often built in the hope that, to a large extent,
they’ll be both self-sustaining and self-policing. The community will
add the content, bring in new members, help them to find their feet
and flag up people who cause trouble and need to be removed.

It never really works that way.

All successful communities have community managers, people who

care about the community, its members and its goals. Those
community managers have a number of different roles.

Build The Community

The first role is always going to be to build the community, to draw

up a list of those first members, invite them to participate and
encourage them to keep participating. That may take several
months, depending on how many people the community manager
knows as he or she is building the site.

43
An established business, for example, will have a mailing list of
customers and suppliers, and contacts with other people in the
industry. The process of contacting them, informing them about the
new community and encouraging them to join may take no more
than a few weeks.
Newer businesses hoping to use a community as a way of growing
from scratch will need their community managers to start earlier and
put in more groundwork. They may have to spend several months
participating in online groups, building connections in social media
and on blogs, as well as attending real-life events, in order to create
the connections necessary to encourage other people in the industry
to join the community.

That’s long, hard work that should begin long before the community
is ready to launch.

Police The Community

Policing the community is easier and more straightforward. Every

community should have a clear set of rules and guidelines. Those
rules should be strict but fair, and they should be written in a way
that emphasizes that their goal is to make the community better for
everyone.

Most of those rules will be fairly obvious. You’ll probably want to

state that pornography and obscenity won’t be allowed. You’ll
certainly want to warn spammers to steer clear, and you’ll want to
encourage people to be polite in their comments.

And you’ll also want to warn that the punishments will be severe: the
rules should state that people who spam, abuse or post obscenities
will be banned.

44
You don’t have to enforce that punishment if you don’t want to but
stating that you have that option will make it clear to other community
members that someone is there and looking out for their interests.

It will also ensure that you do have that option available if you want
it. And the chances are that you will want it.

Once an open community has grown to a certain level, it’s almost

inevitable that you’ll start to bring in some people whose comments
are more troll than expert. Instead of adding to the discussion they
detract from it and they’ll put off other users.

Derogatory comments aren’t just unpleasant. They can have a real

negative effect on your community. They can discourage people
from adding new content, put off other commenters with solid
information to add, and they can bring down the reputation of the
community as a whole. If a new member sees pages filled with
angry, sweary comments placed under posts, there’s a better chance
that he or she won’t come back.

So you’ll ban trolls, they’ll write back and beg to be allowed back in.
Because you’re nice and want to welcome everyone, you’ll give them
a second chance… and then they’ll do it again.

That’s the experience of many community managers, and the

process is perhaps inevitable. When you’ve worked hard to build a
community and bring in members, you’ll be loth to kick anyone
out—until you find that the people you let back in end up causing the
same problems again and again.

Make sure that your rules are clear, and you’ll give yourself the
freedom to be both liberal towards trolls at the beginning and strict
when your patience wears thin.

45
Manage The Community

Most of the community manager’s work though will be managing the

community, raising participation and ensuring that members post and
keep posting.

In general, you’ll need new members to continue contributing over a

period of at least three months in order to help them build the
connections necessary to keep them coming back.

That’s easiest to do when your community is small but even as it

grows, if people disappear for a couple of weeks, you can still send
email reminders to bring them back. Those reminders won’t bring all
of them back but you can expect a certain percentage to return and
add content.

Other emails might provide weekly digests or inform members about

posts that their friends have made or which relate to content that
they’ve liked. You can even actively build connections by introducing
members with similar interests to each other.

In short, community managers need to be more than traffic experts

and police officers. They also need to be email marketers and social
hosts who help shy community members to build bridges and form
connections.

46
Content in the Community
How are connections formed inside communities? We saw in the first
chapter that interactions between community members create the
emotional bonds that bind members together. Those shared
experiences—whether they take place on a sports field, in
rehearsals, or on marches—give the community members a
common history.
For online communities, the bonds have to be tied in a different way.
Members of online communities rarely get to meet in life. Their
interactions take place in a virtual space while they themselves sit in
their homes, their offices, or some other third space. That weakens
that sense of shared experience. Someone who contributes to a
discussion as they sit in their park watching their child play on the
swings is undergoing a very different experience to a fellow
contributor who is sitting on their sofa watching a sports game.
In a real life encounter, every part of the experience would be
shared. Car enthusiasts who attend a vintage car show together will
all see the same cars, hear the same sounds, enjoy the same
spectacle as they discuss transmissions and gears. Online
interaction only brings some of that experience together.
But what online community experience loses in intensity it makes up
for with frequency. It’s much easier to send a tweet or upload a photo
than it is to organize a theatrical show or turn up to a sports practice.
Of course, that ease also reduces the investment made in the
community, another factor that contributes towards the sense of
community identity.
Online, content is the only way in which member interaction is
created so it’s vital that that content serves a purpose. It has to have
value and it has to have an effect. In this chapter, we’ll look at the
different kinds of content that a community can create, and we’ll

47
explore ways to encourage and create that content in order keep
members contributing and active.

The Four Types of Online Community

Content

For all the growth in social media platforms over the last couple of
decades, and for all the increased sophistication of the tools used to
create content and interact with others, the kinds of content posted to
online communities still comes in four forms.

Textual Content
Written content tops the list. Even in 2020, a quarter of all websites
on the Internet3 are estimated to be blogs. Even pictures posted on
Facebook comes\ with text, and while Twitter provides ways for
users to upload videos, photos and gifs (features that weren’t
available at the product’s launch), it’s still largely a text-based
platform. Members argue and inform in 280 characters, and
emphasize what they write with images.

Facebook, too, might have told media companies that video wins
engagement but most posts in a timeline will consist of a
combination of image and text. The image captures the eye and the
text communicates the message… and the message is often to click
through to a blog post somewhere else on the Internet.

So text still matters—and it may well matter more than any other
form of content.

3
https://99firms.com/blog/blogging-statistics/#gref

48
The use of textual content requires a complex content strategy for
community building, both for the content created by community
managers and for the encouragement of content created by
community members.

The most informative content will be long blog posts that contain new
information. Dan North, for example, is one of the leading thinkers in
the Agile community. He doesn’t write blog posts very often on his
website DanNorth.net, but when he does, other members of the
community know that they’re going to be seeing insights that they
wouldn’t have learned any other way. The posts are long, detailed,
and sometimes technical. They move forward ideas that are currently
in discussion in the Agile and DevOps communities.

Not every member of your community will be able to create that kind
of content, nor should they. Dan North himself only creates this kind
of content a few times a year. But some of them should, and a
community manager should encourage members with special
knowledge to produce that kind of content by highlighting it,
promoting it, and raising the issues it poses for discussion.

The owner of a community about yachting, for example, might

suggest that a prominent member write a long blog post about the
biggest issues on long solo voyages. When the post goes up, the
community leader could urge others to read it, ask people what they
think, and even interview the author so that one piece of content
leads to the creation of more pieces of content. That one large,
detailed post would spark an ongoing conversation made up of
multiple pieces of content that together deliver value to the
community and its members.

It allows long form and short form content to work together.

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Imagery
Now that every mobile phone has a sophisticated camera, the
creation of imagery is simpler than ever. It’s also more popular than
ever. While Twitter has about 330 million members who largely read
and write small snippets of text, Instagram, with its emphasis on
visual imagery, has more than a billion. Looking at a picture requires
far less effort than reading a post, even a small one on Twitter, let
alone a much larger one in a blog post.

That’s because images catch the eye. They pull attention with a
promise of instant communication—and instant satisfaction.

But they don’t hold onto that attention, and they’re weak at
communicating. One of the reasons that the stock photo industry has
been so successful is that the same image can be used to
communicate a wide range of messages. Social media sites have
recognized the conflict between ease of creation and difficulty of
communication, and added ways to write messages on imagery.

Sometimes, that can be very effective. Memes might help brands

spread their viral messages but they mostly help communities talk to
each other in their own special language. Supernatural, for example,
is a fantasy television show that started on the WB network before
moving to CW. Over fifteen seasons, it’s built an avid fan base with a
network of communities—and generated an unending amount of
memes.

Fans create the memes, share them, comment on them, build

Pinterest boards for them, and in the process, they communicate
with each other. They keep the community active and talking about
the show. Fans have created so many animated Supernatural gifs
that the two main actors, Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki, have

50
joked that they can text using nothing but gifs of themselves
expressing emotions.

That kind of intra-community interaction is entirely driven by

members of the community. The television channel that makes the
show takes no part in those activities, and it’s not something that can
take place offline. It’s an entirely community-driven, online
phenomenon.

When you’re building a community, you should find that the

generation of visual content happens spontaneously. Fans of a
television show will start producing memes and gifs. People
interested in motorbikes will start creating memes about life on two
wheels. If that doesn’t happen, you can nudge.
You could create a post, for example, explaining how to create
memes and gifs and use community themes as examples. If
members still don’t get the hint, create your own, start feeding them
into your own content, and see if people pick them up and share
them. Memes and gifs have a habit of escaping from their
communities, creating an opportunity to bring in new members.

But this isn’t something you can force. Some communities just might
not be suitable for communicating in this way. In general, you can
expect younger communities to be more drawn towards gifs and
memes while older members stick to more traditional ways of
communicating. Television shows popular with teenagers generate
plenty of image-based content; Mumsnet, a forum for parents, relies
on textual content in the form of traditional forum posts.

Video
In 2016, Facebook admitted that it had overestimated how much
video people had watched on its platform. The measurement it used
to calculate the average amount of time people watched a video had
excluded anyone who watched for less than three minutes. That

51
significantly increased the average viewing time, with at least one
advertiser accusing Facebook of inflating viewing stats by as much
as 80 percent. The news followed earlier criticism of Facebook for
counting a video as viewed if a user watched for just three seconds.

That overreporting of viewing figures might well have led not just
community sites but the Internet as a whole to pivot too heavily
towards video in 2017. Some of that pivot has now been reversed as
publishers found that it just wasn’t generating the engagement or the
page views that they had anticipated. But it would be a mistake to
dismiss video entirely, especially when you’re building a community.
Video content can come in four different forms, each of which
delivers a unique kind of value.

The simplest is the spontaneous recording of something that

happens to catch your eye. Ideally, that should be related to the
themes of the community. A community for people who follow
fashion, for example, could shoot a video of a catwalk at local
college and upload it to the community site. But a member of the
community could also just share something interesting that they’ve
seen. If a storm is blowing into your neighborhood, for example, you
could upload a quick video of the trees arcing in the wind.

You have to be careful doing this, though. Off-topic videos can help
to bring members of a community together. They let members see
sides of each other that extend beyond the topic of the community.
Even the most avid fan of romance novels or vegan cheese will also
have a life outside the book or the kitchen. Those short videos make
them more interesting. But too many of them can quickly become
uninteresting; they’re not going to draw everyone in the group. And
you don’t want off-topic videos to dominate the content stream. An
occasional, exceptional video though can go a long way.

Viral videos are the dream of every community builder. Shoot a

single video and watch it sail around the Internet, and you can find

52
that you suddenly have masses of new followers and the community
balloons.

But it’s not something you should aim for. First, creating viral videos
is both difficult and unpredictable. Professional marketing agencies
spend fortunes shooting viral videos, seeding them to influencers,
and sending them out into the wild in the hope of seeing them go
viral, only to watch them fizzle and die. There is no formula and no
easy way to go viral. Either it will happen or it won’t.

And even if it does happen, the value of the followers who join after
seeing a viral video is often low. Users follow to see whether there is
any more viral content but they don’t engage. Their interest is
shallow. As we’ve seen, it’s better to start with a small, dedicated
core and scale gradually. The kind of burst that a viral video brings
rarely brings long-lasting benefits to the community as a whole.

More valuable are instructional videos. These do deliver something

of real value to members, a genuine reward for their membership
and engagement. They don’t have to be long—and short is
good—but they should enable members to feel that they have
learned something, even if they never put that new skill to use.

Fans of the BBC science fiction show Doctor Who, for example, can
follow the series on a dedicated Facebook page. About five million
people do. Because the page is run by the BBC (and because
Facebook places a great deal of power in the hands of admins and
community creators) the content of the page is entirely top-down:
followers can comment, creating new conversations, but they can’t
initiate new content.

But because the BBC has access to plenty of good content, including
behind-the-scenes videos and interviews with stars of the show, it
also has plenty of opportunity to keep followers engaged. Included in

53
that content are occasional instructional videos, such as how to
create a costume for a cosplay festival.

It is important to note that in this community, this kind of video is

rare. Quizzes, previews, and interviews are much more
common—and generate much more engagement. The decision
about which kind of video to include will depend on the nature of the
community and what its members hope to gain from membership.
For fan communities, especially those run by the creators of the
show, that will mostly be access to content that no one else can give
them. For other communities, such as those interested in cooking or
home repair, instructional videos will play a much bigger role.

A search for origami videos, for example, shows that most are
instructional rather than videos of shows or exhibitions—and those
videos come from the top down, from the creators of the page, not
from the members themselves.

That’s a waste. Members of the community will have a rich vein of

knowledge that can be mined and shared but because they don’t
have access to the community stream any uploads will be lost in the
comment stream.

That puts the onus on the admins to commission—or at least

borrow—instructional videos from other members. When the BBC
published its cosplay instructional video, for example, the advice
came not from the BBC itself, but from make-up artist and vlogger
Mark Zapanta. Part of managing a community will involve identifying
people who have knowledge that they can share in video form and
using your position to highlight that information and present it to the
rest of the community.

Community members get valuable content. You get better

engagement. And the creator of the video gets higher visibility and
more followers themselves. Good places to look for this kind of video

54
are businesses and other professionals who are also members of the
group. Non-members may well want payment that goes beyond the
value of exposure to your members.
The last form of video content is relatively new. Facebook launched
a live video service in 2016. The feature lets users broadcast videos
in real time. Other social media platforms, including both Twitter and
Instagram, have rolled out functions, and they bring two powerful
benefits.

The first is urgency. Viewers never know what’s going to happen

during a live video, and that video will only be live once. Community
members have to tune in at that moment to watch the broadcast.
(Although live videos are usually kept and can be edited and
re-watched in the future.)

And the second is interaction. Live videos usually allow viewers to

make comments while they’re watching, and those comments can be
seen by the broadcaster. That turns a live broadcast into a live Q&A.
Instead of an instructional video that only shows how to cook a
lasagna or fold a paper frog, a live video enables viewers to ask the
broadcaster about ingredient substitutions or what to do when they
get stuck. Third party providers like Belive.tv extend the functions
available on live video platforms to include chyrons, such as viewer
questions, and split-screen views ideal for interviews.

While the most common form of live video is a talking head—a

presenter talking directly to camera—which is also the easiest kind of
live video to shoot, they have proven to be very effective for product
demonstrations and for special events. To maximize audience size, it
helps to trail the broadcast. Time the broadcast for an hour when you
know much of your audience will be online. Tell people in advance
when the broadcast will go out. Remind them that it’s coming up and
encourage them to prepare questions that they can ask during the
show. You’ll be able to see people as they join the audience in the
same way that you can see people joining a video chat, so welcome

55
them by name. And leave time at the beginning for the audience to
fill, and for viewers to tell friends to come and watch too.

Live video is an underused asset for online communities. One of the

biggest disadvantages for online communities is that members can
rarely come together in real time and in the same place. A live video
might take some planning, and the audiences may only be small,
especially in the early days of a community, but it does represent a
rare opportunity to create a shared experience.

Audio
Live video has been on a slow burn since 2016 but the popularity of
podcasting has rocketed. According to one study4, half of the US
population aged 12 and older who have listened to a podcast has
now passed 50 percent and nearly a third of Americans listen to a
podcast every month. In 2019, Spotify paid $200 million for podcast
company Gimlet media, and ad revenue on podcasts is expected to
pass $1 billion in 20215.

Many of those podcasts, such as the multiple options available to

Harry Potter fans, deliver a particular kind of content to a community
that already exists. Other types function as standalone content that
can create its own community.

The problem with podcasts though is that they’re a unidirectional

form of content. Audiences listen alone and have no way to interact
with other members of the community. That means that the
community activity and the podcast have be delivered separately.
People might listen to audio content as they work out, sit on the bus,

4
Edison Research, “the infinite dial 2019”, EdisonResearch.com, March 6 2019,
https://www.edisonresearch.com/infinite-dial-2019
5
PwC, ​IAB FY 2018 Podcast Ad Revenue Study​, iab.com, June 2019,
https://www.iab.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Full-Year-2018-IAB-Podcast-Ad-Rev-Study_6.03.19_
vFinal.pdf

56
or drive to work. They’ll only talk about what they’ve heard when
they’ve finished.

So the community platform will discuss issues related to the podcast.

But the podcast itself will be distributed across all of the usual
podcast platforms—Spotify, iTunes, Pandora, etc.—and the two will
have to work together. The podcast would need to tell people where
to go to talk about what they've heard. The community platform
would need to provide links to enable people to listen to the
broadcasts, and community organizers would need to prepare for a
buzz of activity after each podcast is released.

Management Content and Community

Content
What using podcasts shows is that while content can have a range of
different formats, allowing plenty of space for creativity and
preference, there are two kinds of community content.

There is content created by community leaders; and there is content

created by community members.

Communities should be self-sustaining. They shouldn’t depend on

prompts from the founder to keep producing engagement and
interaction. The members should want to spend time in the
community and should be able to find subjects to discuss and ways
to discuss it themselves. They should be able to set the agenda and
determine for themselves the direction of the conversation.

That kind of activity keeps the community growing and active. J.K.
Rowling, for example, plays no role in any of the fan communities
that have cropped up over the years to talk about her wizarding
world. It’s fans who have created them, and it’s the fans who decide
what the communities will discuss.

57
But Rowling does have a role in Pottermore, the platform created to
release more content related to her books and which provides plenty
of information for fans to discuss.

That shows that the relationship between the community creator and
its members is complex. Managers want to give members as much
freedom as possible. But they also want to retain control over the
community and have at least some ability to influence its direction.

That’s particularly true when the community has been created to

serve a purpose. Without the Wikipedia community of editors and
contributors, for example, the site would lack information and any
information it did have would be filled with errors. But without the
leadership of Jimmy Wales, the community wouldn’t exist or know
how to organize itself.

Duolingo might look like a standard, education app with content

created by the company but it’s actually dependent on its community
of language enthusiasts to build its courses. In an interview with
CMXHub.com, Kristine Michelsen-Correa, Duolingo’s Head of
Community explained how the application used community to fuel its
growth6.

The company quickly realized that its internal team that was too
small for the application to scale quickly into new languages,
Michelsen-Correa explained. But it did have a community that
wanted to support the application, some of whom were bilingual. So
Duolingo created a platform called the Incubator. Bilingual
community members could apply to join the Incubator, and work
together to create new courses themselves.

6
Carrie Melissa Jones, “Here is Duolingo’s Playbook for Creating Community-Generated Content for
over 50 Million Learners”, cmxhub.com, last accessed February 12, 2020,
https://cmxhub.com/duolingo-ugc-challenges

58
The process was complicated. Duolingo first screened applicants to
find leaders, then let those leaders choose contributors for the
courses they were managing. The structure of the Incubator was
based on experiments that Duolingo had run with forums. “We
learned a lot about setting up ground rules from the forum program,”
Kristine Michelsen-Correa told CMXHub.com. “Always make sure
everyone understands why they’re contributing and what the goals
are.”

The Incubator enabled the application’s in-house language experts

to transition towards community manager roles, responsible for
mentoring the Incubator’s volunteers and ensuring that the
contribution of community volunteers remained at a high standard.

The creation of a course comes in three stages. The first is content

creation: community members translate sentences again and again.
The process takes about three months to prepare a course for beta.
Members will spend an average of about five hours a week
interacting with the community, creating the translations. The
in-house team manages the technical aspects of the course creation,
allowing the volunteers to focus on translations and keeping the
engagement as simple as possible. The courses then open to beta
learners who provide feedback that the community members can
then incorporate. That process of feedback and community
incorporation continues after launch and once the course is live.

Like many large communities Duolingo breaks its communities into

sub-communities. A general forum provides a place for everyone to
share language-learning insights, while individual language forums
bring together people who have knowledge of individual languages.

Kristine Michelsen-Correa also described some of the measures that

Duolingo uses to encourage participation. Teams of volunteers
co-operate within languages but they compete with other teams
working on different languages. Duolingo also tries to understand

59
what community members want and aims to help by offering
recommendations for college, graduate school or jobs; by delivering
a feeling of personal growth; and by recognizing people’s efforts by
naming contributors on the course pages.

Kristine Michelsen-Correa recommends that other businesses

looking to emulate Duolingo’s community-driven content provide
multiple ways for people to contribute so that everyone can
participate at their own level without ever feeling that they’re being
asked to do too much. Rewards should incentivize the group, rather
than individuals, and activities should build teams and co-operation.

It helps too that the activity has a fixed purpose—the launch of a new
language course—and a sense of meaningful accomplishment.

Duolingo’s community architecture provides guidance, structure, and

leadership from the top while relying on members to create the
product through their community action. Sometimes, though,
management will need to apply a stronger hand.

How OurCrowd Used Content to Create a

Community… and a Community to Build
Trust
In another interview with CMXHub.com, Zack Miller, the Head of
Community at OurCrowd, an investment group, explained what the
organization does to create community, and why it does it7.

OurCrowd is a particularly unique kind of community, and one whose

member activities stretch beyond answering questions on forums or
uploading memes. As a platform for crowdfunding startups, its

7
Carrie Melissa Jones, “This is the Content and Community Strategy OurCrowd Used to Get 7,000
People to Invest over $100 Million”, cmxhub.com, last accessed February 12, 2020,
https://cmxhub.com/ourcrowd-content-community/

60
members are expected to put their hands in their pockets and invest
in companies. The activity is to take risks, and the members will take
those risks together. “Our investors talk about the ‘investment
experience’ around startups,” Miller tells CMXHub’s Carrie Melissa
Jones. “We had always thought of it as a dispassionate process, but
there is a feeling of joint experience in investing in the same
company.”

To take those risks together, OurCrowd encourages members to feel

that they’re not just investors but members of a community. The
platform wants them to trust each other and trust OurCrowd to help
them find good places to put their money.

It builds that community through content—and through a range of

different kinds of content.

The first community event that OurCrowd produced was a real-life

meetup. That’s continued. In 2019, more than 18,000 people from
189 different countries registered to attend a summit that OurCrowd
held in Jerusalem, the site of its headquarters. The Summit lasts
typically lasts a week, with two days dedicated to invite-only events.

Few communities have the means to draw thousands of people from

all over the world, but they don’t need to. Miller stresses best
practices for local events that include running small, satellite events
in between the large community events, and creating a shared
experience or a common goal for the group as a whole.

OurCrowd has also run two kinds of webinars. One focuses on a

specific investment opportunity; the other, a bi-weekly teaching
webinar open beyond members. Those “Teach In Tuesdays” have
provided a useful way to share knowledge about both OurCrowd and
about startup investment.

61
Other forms of content include a “Knowledge Center” filled with blog
posts about different industry sectors and their opportunities; ebooks;
and even a YouTube channel on which OurCrowd live streams its
events.

What that content is trying to do, explains Miller, is to identify and fill
a gap in the knowledge. It’s trying to level up the community so that
members feel empowered, united in a common cause, and aware of
their own role in creating that shared goal.

It’s a top-down form of community management. OurCrowd is

creating the spaces for the community. It’s pushing content into
those spaces, and using the content rather than the interaction
between members to build community spirit and a sense of
membership. The most important action isn’t the sharing of ideas
between members as it is in most communities. It’s the shared
investment in a business idea. The content serves to create the
knowledge and the bonds that allow that community action to take
place.

When the community content flows from the top of the community to
the members, instead of swirling around inside the community,
stirred occasionally by community leaders, the strategy also needs to
be dynamic.

As community members become more knowledgeable, they have

less use for content intended to level them up through teaching.
OurCrowd’s webinars have become less frequent over the years,
even as its live events have become much larger and more
important.

Communities change, and whether the content is coming from the

members themselves or from the community leaders, that content
has to change with it.

62
One variable affecting that change is the technology of the platforms
on which that content is being shared. That’s what we’ll explore in
the next chapter.

63
Building a Community Across
Platforms
Imagine that you want to build a community in your neighborhood, a
club for people who like selling on Ebay. You head down to your
local community center, and you book a room. Every Monday
evening at 7.30, anyone in your neighborhood who’s trying to make
money on Ebay can come together and swap advice. They can talk
about packaging and marketing, how to handle complaints, and the
best time to take the boxes to the post office.

Everything is going great until a new café opens at the end of the
road. The café is much more comfortable than the community center.
The coffee is better and it has nice, soft armchairs. People still come
to your weekly meetings but the numbers are falling and you know
that members are also getting together during the week in the
café—and you’re fine with that. You want the members to meet and
continue to swap ideas, and you don’t really mind where they do it.
You just want to be sure that everyone is getting the same
information and that everyone is learning from each other. That’s a
problem when some people are coming to your weekly meetings and
some people are chatting in the café.

Your community of Ebay sellers starts to grow. Soon the post office
recognizes that many of its customers are using its services to ship
packages to their Ebay buyers. The postmaster has an idea. He
creates some booklets about Ebay selling and makes them available
for his customers to take away. It’s just good for business. The post
office clerks too, take a few minutes to chat with the community
members and share what they hear. As the sellers stand in line, they
also talk, sharing their information and asking each other questions.

64
Not all of the goods that the Ebay sellers offer comes from their own
homes. Some of the sellers are buying goods across the country
then shipping them on. They’ve rented mailboxes to receive their
purchases. There too, the community members stand and chat as
they collect their packages.

What started as a single site for sharing advice among community

members has developed across different sites, each sharing
information in its own way.

The community as a whole is getting smarter. But it’s also becoming

more disparate. Information shared in the post office doesn’t always
reach the people who meet in the café. The content of the talks that
you sometimes organize in the weekly meetings is not received by
everyone who could benefit from it. And the income you used to
make selling packing material, as well as website building,
photography services, and consulting work, at the meetings has
fallen too.

You don’t want to stop people from meeting and talking in the café
and the post office and around the lockers—and you couldn’t even if
you wanted to—but you do want to make sure that you have a
presence in each of those areas.

The same dilemma takes place in online communities. You might

choose to build a community on your own platform. You might design
that community with a keen knowledge of its members’ needs. You
might attract important members, create content that’s valuable, and
organize events that foster a sense of belonging. But no matter
well-built your community, its members will still meet elsewhere.
They’ll visit other platforms. They’ll get together on Facebook. They’ll
hold local, real-life meetings, follow each other on Twitter, and
exchange messages on WhatsApp.

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All of that is good and valuable. But it also means that you need to
be on those other platforms too so that your content and your
services can be reached wherever your members might be. You
can’t force members to only participate in your community. But you
can make sure that you’re present on the platforms they use—or at
least on the main platforms they use.

Spreading Your Content Across Platforms

The easiest way to meet your members where they are is simply to
open a version of your community on those platforms. If you’ve
created a community on your own platform, you can also open
versions of that same community on Facebook, on Reddit, and on
Twitter. Users of those platforms will be able to take part in those
discussions, and while they’ll still follow other groups, you’ll be able
to push your content towards them.

Or at least you can try to offer them your content because the
competition for attention on those other platforms will be much
tougher. Facebook has about 10 million groups vying for the
attention of its 2.4 billion members—and it works hard to prevent
those members from seeing that group content without paying. The
organic reach of content created on Facebook groups can vary but
your members will not see every post. In fact, it’s not unusual for a
group with 150 members to reach just four or five members with
each post. According to a report by Hootsuite and We Are Social, the
average reach for a Facebook post in 2019 was just 5.5 percent.8

Engagement is just 3.6 percent, and the number of likes grows at

just 0.13 percent.

8
Hootsuite, Simon Kemp, and We Are Social, The State of Digital in Q3 2019, 2019
https://hootsuite.com/resources/the-state-of-digital-in-q3-2019

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You can build a community for a cause or a hobby or a brand on
Facebook but it’s slow going. You won’t get complete engagement,
or anything like it, and you’ll be competing with other groups for your
members’ attention. At the same time, the growth of the platform
itself is slowing. Little more than half of US teenagers use Facebook
and the biggest growing demographic on the platform are people
aged 65 and over.

On the other hand, that low level of organic reach and engagement
does mean that you won’t have to worry too much about rivals taking
the attention of your members, and Facebook does have such a
broad range of different content types that’s it easy enough to take
content created on one platform and re-use it on Facebook. Whether
you’re shooting video, writing blog posts, organizing meet-ups or
demonstrations, or putting on webinars, you’ll be able to create that
content, place it on your main community platform, and also send
copies to Facebook.

Once you’ve set up your own group, set up a Facebook group. Add
some content, then tell your members what you’ve done and share
the link so that they follow you on that other platform. The least you
can do now is take the content that you create on your own platform
and also publish it on Facebook. That will help you to reach
community members who use Facebook but who visit your own
platform less frequently.

But doing that minimum would be to leave behind one of the biggest
advantages of cross-platform community building.

In practice, you’re not going to be renting a room in the community

center to organize your community, then watching members drifting
away to other forums. You’re going to be renting that room as
discussions in other venues already take place. The members of
your community will already be gathering, at least informally. You
want to bring them all together under one roof. That means you need

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to reach those other venues not just to keep your members engaged
but to draw them towards your community.

One of the biggest advantages of additional community platforms is

that they give you a way to grow your community. They contain large
numbers of people who could become your members. So it’s not
enough to send content in one direction only. It’s not enough to
simply recycle content created on one platform and place it on a
second platform like Facebook. You also have to use your content to
pull people to your main community hub.

That could be through something as simple as including a line in

your content to urge people to visit your platform. Just asking for
shares can help to expand your reach, especially when those shares
come from influencers with large numbers of followers. Instead of
using those platforms beyond your own to ensure that your content
reaches all the members of your community, you can use them to
build your community and bring new members to your own platform.

Spreading Community Content Across

Platforms
Pushing the content you create on your community platform to other
communities—to people on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter or
anywhere else—will broaden your reach and help to build your
community. But it depends on top-down content creation. The
content you’re spreading will be your own. It’s content that you’ve
created and for which you have copyright. You can republish that
content in as many places as you want.

That’s harder for user-generated content.

We’ve seen that not all communities depend on user-generated

content. OurCrowd uses its own content to build the knowledge

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necessary for members to take part in the community activities that
OurCrowd values most: shared investing. But for many community
sites, the interaction is everything. The manager of a fan site doesn’t
want to create every meme, post, or picture themselves. They want
the members of the community to create and share that content so
that they can focus on community growth. If you’re only producing a
small amount of original content, you’ll have little to share across
platforms.

That might sound strange. The very nature of social media is that
sharing is assumed. A meme is designed to spread across the Web.
A viral video has no power if it’s not reposted and uploaded to
multiple platforms. Marketing agencies put a great deal of effort into
ensuring that their videos are seen across as many platforms as
possible.

But the creator of any piece of content owns the right to that content.
They don’t need to register it or do anything to stake a claim to it. If
you’ve created a photograph, a drawing, a blog post, or anything
else, you own it—and only you can choose where it’s published. If
someone takes a photo that you’ve created and places it on another
platform, they’re breaching your copyright.

In practice, most people won’t complain if you do that, especially if

you provide credit. But as your community grows and becomes
prominent, it’s also inevitable that some people will complain. They
won’t want you to re-use their content and spread it on other
platforms without permission, and sometimes without payment.

There are two solutions to this problem.

The first is to ask for permission. If you’re the manager of a fan site,
and someone has taken a candid shot of a celebrity at a con, then
you can ask their permission to post the picture on a different
platform with a link leading back to your community. Twitter, for

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example, is filled with news outlets asking people for permission to
use members’ images in their outlets in return for credit.

That will allow you to take the entire content and re-use it as bait to
bring people to your community—where they can meet the people
who made that content. So you could ask to use someone’s selfie
with the star of some cult show, place it in your Facebook community
group and invite others to share their own images on your own
community platform.
But asking for permission can be fiddly. It takes time; you have to
wait for a reply before you can act. And they might say ‘no’ or ask for
payment, which can be awkward.

The second solution is easier. You can just link to that content. There
are no copyright issues, and no one is going to complain about a
link. But it’s weaker. Even if the platform automatically takes an
image from the hyperlinked page and includes it as a thumbnail—as
Facebook does—it’s still going to be less powerful than being able to
spread user-generated content across different platforms and adding
text or links that bring people back to your own community.

There is a better approach to take towards build a community across

platforms.

Building a Cross-Platform Community

Strategy
Both asking for permission to repost content and linking to other
people’s content is simple and straightforward. One is faster than the
other. One brings more benefits than the other. But neither is
particularly complex and both are used by publishing platforms,
brands, and communities every day.

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More complex is to consider community platforms as an ecosystem
made up of unique, independent units, each with its own
culture—and adapt your content to each of those worlds. It means
creating a complete cross-platform strategy.

That’s easier on some platforms than on others. Facebook was built

with communities in mind. If you’re building a community on your
own platform, your content—whether it’s imagery, videos or text—will
translate fairly easily to Facebook.

Twitter is much harder. That platform’s 280-character limit means

long posts have to be split across threads while keeping people’s
patience to scroll down the page in mind. Images remain important
but conversations that take place around a post can be clumsy and
unwieldy. Twitter might have started as a place to hold discussions
but posts on the platform work best as conversations between two
people while others watch and occasionally throw in a comment. As
the number of people participating grows, the conversation becomes
harder to follow.

Twitter then, is a good place to make announcements that are of

interest to the community. The Vegan Society (@TheVeganSociety),
for example, uses its Twitter stream to share knowledge about
veganism, make offers of vegan products, and provide advice about
a healthy vegan diet.

The account’s profile includes a link to the society’s Facebook page,

which repeats some of the content but also provides information
that’s more specialized. There are fewer product placements and
more announcements of events that might be of interest to the
community. Facebook members are told of job openings with the
society, talks by the society’s executives, and requests from the
media looking for vegans to interview.

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For the Vegan Society then, Twitter appears to focus largely on
outreach. Facebook is more about community relations. Instagram,
where the society also has an account, provides a combination of
both, with images showing employees receiving awards, notices of
job openings, quotes from the Society’s founder, and product
pictures that should attract new possible members.

The categorization isn’t hermetic. There’s plenty of

cross-posting—and there should be because audiences aren’t
hermetic either. A community organizer can’t make clear distinctions
between the kinds of audiences on each platform. They can’t say
that Facebook is for current members, Twitter for finding new
members, and Instagram for showing off the lifestyle. Each of those
different kinds of audience will be on each of those platforms—but
they’ll be on each of those different platforms to different degrees.

What the community organizers can do though, is adjust the balance

of their content on each platform to take each platform’s audience in
mind.

This isn’t a scientific decision, at least not initially. Social media

marketing is number-driven. Advertisers on Facebook and Twitter
run different types of ads simultaneously, with small differences in
imagery and copy. They quickly shut down lower performing ads,
then ramp up the budgets of higher-performing ads based on their
numbers of comments, shares, and likes.

Those kinds of stats will be less useful for a community. Shares and
likes will show that content is reaching new people—they’re good
measures for outreach content used to bring in new members.
Comments can show how much people are talking about the
content, but what none of those statistics can do is measure the
quality of the conversation.

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You want people to share the content you’re creating. That’s
essential for community growth. But mostly you want community
members to interact, and you want that interaction to be valuable
and positive.

On none of The Vegan Society’s platforms, for example, do we see

images of animals in slaughterhouses or in factory farms. Those
kinds of pictures are likely to generate large amounts of
comments—most of them angry. But they won’t help to drive
conversations about the vegan lifestyle. They might provoke a
reaction but they won’t create the kind of upbeat, inviting atmosphere
that the society wants in its community.

Communities that spread their content over multiple platforms will

need to use a complex strategy. They’ll need to be able to recognize
which of the platforms is best for holding discussions, building
connections, and spreading knowledge between members. They’ll
need to know which of the platforms is best for outreach and for
spreading messages. And they’ll need know which content on each
of those platforms delivers the results they want.

Usually, that will mean creating different kinds of content to build

engagement and improve outreach then sharing them in different
proportions across different platforms. But some platforms offer
some unique benefits, unique audiences, and unique opportunities.
They require unique and specialized forms of content.

Creating Special Content for Special

Platforms
The goal of community content, whichever platform it’s posted on, is
to build engagement, to lift up the quality of the community and allow
the spread of ideas. That will happen through the use of the kind of
content that you can find every day on community platforms.

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Announce news, ask questions, share offers, show pictures,
broadcast videos, place that content on the most appropriate
platforms, and you should find that you get engagement and growth.
But with a little creativity, you can do much more—and one place to
look for that creativity is in the way that brands use community
platforms.

A community built by a brand has a particular purpose. The

relationship between members is less important than the relationship
between the members and the brand itself. Although interaction
between the members will build a stronger community, it’s enough
for the community to feel a strong bond to the brand. That means
that content can be more top-down than it is in other communities,
with more control for the community leader over message and
culture.

How community leaders use that control, though, can provide

interesting ideas for other communities.

In 2014, Hellmann’s, the mayonnaise-maker, teamed up with

WhatsApp in Brazil to launch its WhatsCook campaign. People
entered their phone numbers on a website, and were contacted on
WhatsApp by a chef. The chef would ask the user to photograph the
inside of their fridge and send them the picture using WhatsApp. The
chef would then give them a recipe using the ingredients they
already owned—and, of course, Hellmann’s mayonnaise. They
would even send them videos showing how to do things like cut the
onions and reminders to take the dish out of the oven.

The campaign spread from Brazil to Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and

Paraguay, and proved hugely popular. More than five million people
were “impacted.” Over 13,000 signed up. Most importantly, each
user spent an average of 65 minutes interacting with the brand.

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That’s a remarkable figure for an online community, and it’s a real
two-way interaction that produces a real, shared experience.

The campaign was created by Cubocc, a Brazilian advertising

agency, and it would likely have cost Hellmann’s, which is owned by
food conglomerate Unilever, a fair amount of money to pay the
chefs.

But it’s also an easy model for a community to follow. Every

community has experts who know more than most. Just as
Hellmann’s chefs made their expertise available to home cooks, so a
community could ask for volunteers willing to give advice to other
members. Those members could leave a phone number, and one of
the volunteer experts could then use WhatsApp to talk them through
a challenge: cooking a vegan meal; fixing a motorbike; folding an
origami unicorn. It’s the kind of interaction that can now be
performed using community tools like WhatsApp—and using assets
like a large advertising budget or the goodwill of a community.

One difference between Hellmann’s action and the way in which a

community could provide a similar service though, is that the food
brand didn’t start with its own community. It did however try to build a
community around the results of its interaction. People who used the
service shared pictures of what they had cooked with Hellmann’s
who then shared them with its social media followers.

A community, however, begins with people already in place—both

experts and people who need help. The result of that expertise can
then be used to build deeper relationships between existing
members both on a one-to-one basis and across the community as a
whole. All members get to see that membership of the community
brings real benefits and genuine value.

This is also an example of cross-platform community building.

Hellmann’s used WhatsApp to communicate between the chef and

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the follower; it used Facebook to share the results of that success.
Each platform delivered on its own unique strengths: Facebook for
community sharing; WhatsApp for individual communications.

Community Building on LinkedIn

Another platform with a special quality is LinkedIn.

The platform, now owned by Microsoft, is often regarded as a

networking platform for jobseekers. Users can create a kind of
permanent resumé, keep it updated, and build up their contact lists
so that they can always be open to better offers. But the platform
now does much more than that. It also acts as a hub for personal
brands and as forums for people with particular interests.

Bill Gates, for example, has more than 25 million followers on

LinkedIn, a number similar to his Facebook followers. Those 25
million LinkedIn followers aren’t all hoping for a job at Microsoft. They
want to hear about the work of the Gates Foundation but mostly
they’re looking for words of wisdom from one of the world’s most
successful entrepreneurs. Try to read one of the pieces of content
posted on Bill Gates’s LinkedIn page, and you’ll first receive an
invitation to join the “Gates Notes community.”

It’s difficult to describe 25 million people following content online as a

community. They won’t know each other. They’ll struggle to interact
with each other beyond the ability to place comments at the bottom
of posts. And they’ll have far more differences than characteristics in
common. The only thing that will unite them is an interest in the work
of one of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs and
philanthropists.

But this is the right place for Bill Gates to build his community, and
not just because he owns the platform. LinkedIn is

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business-oriented. It’s B2B, not B2C, a place for professional
networking and knowledge-building.

So while vegan communities on Facebook, for example, tend to

focus on recipes and lifestyle content, and provide a place for
members to swap advice and suggestions, on LinkedIn, the groups
are largely about vegan business owners. They’re places where
vegan professionals and business owners can talk about the
challenges of matching their morals to their business practices. A
“Vegan Professionals” group has around 8,000 members; a “Vegan
Leaders in Corporate Management” group has more than 4,200
members. The most popular vegan group on LinkedIn includes
vegetarians but still describes itself as a “global group that is
aggressively seeking all vegetarians and vegans that want to
connect with like minded individuals personally & professionally.”
The professional element on LinkedIn is always present.

That means that for a community that spreads across multiple

platforms, LinkedIn does have a special use.

First, like Bill Gates, it can be used by a community leader to build

their own personal brand, especially when that brand involves
professional skills. A professional photographer, for example, could
create a group on one platform for photography hobbyists, providing
them with a place to share their photos and swap shooting tips
between themselves. They could also use communication platforms
like WhatsApp or Zoom to share personal advice and build relations
between experts and other members.

They could use a LinkedIn group to bring other professional

photographers together, and a LinkedIn page for themselves to
promote their own personal brand. Each of those platforms would
need their own content strategy. The content the community shared
across Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram would all be aimed at
members or potential members and would vary only in the balance

77
between participation and outreach. The content shared in the
LinkedIn group would discuss professional issues that could help
other photographers, while the content posted on the personal page
would talk about the challenges of running a business and promote
whatever hook the personal brand is offering.

That’s a lot of content—and it still doesn’t include the outreach

opportunity available by answering questions on Quora and the new
opportunities now available through young, new platforms like
TikTok.

And that’s the biggest challenge of cross-party community-building.

The more platforms you use, the more content you have to create.
You’ll have small sub-communities that need managing, and
comments that deserve responses. There are tools like Buffer and
Hootsuite that make cross-posting on different community platforms
from one central hub easier but you’ll always need to be careful. The
danger of growing too fast across different platforms is that you focus
on feeding in new content at the expense of interacting with the
community.

The goal of community content is always to promote community

interaction. Content shouldn’t be produced to fill space on platforms.
It should be produced to provoke conversations and deepen bonds
between members.

Someone starting a new group wouldn’t begin by renting an entire

community center. If the first meeting will hold just a few people, they
might even decide to skip the community center altogether and
agree to meet in the corner of a local café. As the members grow,
the choice of space grows with them. Once the group becomes so
big that it starts to break into sup-groups with their own sub-interests,
it can start to hold multiple meetings at the same time—like a
conference.

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The same approach can be taken with online communities. Begin on
a single platform, using other similar platforms for outreach. As the
group grows, expand your content across different platforms,
adjusting the content to appeal to specific audiences.

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Measuring And Monetizing Your
Community

Ask a social media expert to explain how much their efforts

contribute to the bottom line and you’ll probably hear something
closer to a shuffling of feet and a muttering about engagement being
vital for growth.

Too often, community building is justified on the grounds of

“branding” and “loyalty-building” instead of hard figures.

Maersk, a B2B shipping company that began investing heavily in

community-building in 2011, described the main goal of its social
media use as getting “closer to our customers”. At the same time,
though, it added, the company recognized that there’s much more to
gain from it, “such as better press coverage, higher employee
engagement, more brand awareness and even bringing in high-level
insights and intelligence from shipping experts around the world.”9

Those are all valuable benefits but it shouldn’t come as a surprise to

managers if more skeptical shareholders start asking what all of that
closeness, engagement and brand awareness is actually doing for
profits.

9
Claire BeDell, “How Maersk Line Container Shipping Turned B2B Social Media on Its Head”
Business2Community.com, March 25, 2013
https://www.business2community.com/social-media/how-maersk-line-container-shipping-turned-b2b-so
cial-media-on-its-head-0444840

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That’s a question that community builders should be ready to face,
especially those building communities for businesses. In fact, it’s a
question they should be happy to face.

A community throws out a great deal of data and plenty of figures. If

you know how to access them and how to read them, you’ll be able
to better steer your community towards stronger growth and you’ll
also be ready to answer questions about the bottom line with hard
numbers.

You’ll also know how to increase those numbers with real sales
attributable to the community.

Measuring Growth
Some of your community data should be easily accessible and easy
to understand. A community site’s admin page, for example, should
show user engagement as a graph, as well as the total number of
members, posts and content the community has produced.
Community managers should be able to see at a glance the number
of likes, comments, shares and status posts users have made over
the previous week or month. Raw data statistics should also show
how many groups, photos, videos and events have been posted over
a set time period, as well as basic demographic data about users,
including age, gender distribution and location.

That’s all valuable stuff. By tracking the amount of content being

created and passed around the community you’ll be able to measure
your growth rate. If you see that the number of posts or comments is
starting to fall, you’ll want to step in quickly to find out whether
people are pulling away because the posts have moved off-topic,
whether established members are crowding out new members or
whether there’s some other reason for the community beginning to
lose ground.

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Whatever the reason, you’ll be ready to take action and push the
numbers back up.

Those stats let you measure the pulse of your community but alone
they won’t tell you everything.

Your Google Analytics data will tell you a little more. Here, you’ll be
able to see where your visitors are coming from, how many of them
click away before joining and which are the best sources for new
members.

You’ll also be able to see how long people are spending on the site,
a really vital piece of information.

Together, those two data sources—your community admin and

Google Analytics—will give you a good picture of the health of your
community, how well you’re managing to grow it and how much
people are enjoying it.

What they won’t tell you is how much it’s worth. To calculate that
figure, you’ll need to collect some very different data.

Measuring The Value Of Your Community

With Surveys

Regardless of what Maersk’s social media managers have told the

company, a community created by a business only has one final
goal.

All of that engagement and branding and closeness should lead to

higher profits. That can happen for two reasons.

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It can happen because membership of a community causes people
to spend more money.

And it can happen because membership of a community reduces a

business’s costs, perhaps by taking some of the weight off support,
public relations or marketing.

If you can prove that either of those things are true, you’ll never have
trouble justifying the value of your community.

You just might have a little trouble doing the calculations.

For example, imagine that you’ve create a community to support an

online store selling floral designs. By the end of the year, you have
1,000 members. On average, those members spend $100 each year
in your store, earning your company $100,000. Customers who
aren’t members of your community, however, only spend $50 each
year.

You could argue that each member of your community is worth $50,
the value of the extra spend.

But it’s not quite as simple as that.

First, you’d have to be sure that those extra purchases came as a

result of joining the community. The community may simply have
attracted your highest-spending customers.

And second, you’d need to be able to collect that financial data in the
first place.
That data collection takes effort but it will tell you how much your
community is increasing your profits and whether those extra profits
are being produced as a direct result of your community activity.

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To collect that data, you’ll probably need to conduct surveys. You’ll
need to survey your members, and you’ll need to survey
non-members so that you have a control group.

That might sound old-fashioned. You might feel that an online

community activity throws up so much digital data each time
someone presses “like” or posts a comment or clicks a link that you
don’t need to do any more than decipher your graphs.

That may be true and for some communities it will be true. But for all
communities, surveying is the most revealing way of pulling valuable
information out of your members — including information about
sales.

You’ll need to conduct a number of different surveys at a number of

different times.

You should survey members who have just joined the community
and the same members a year later. As a control group, you should
also survey customers who aren’t members of the community and
the same customers a year later.

The surveys should ask questions about a host of different issues

about your business. (If you’ve got people’s attention, it’s a shame to
waste the opportunity to gather some valuable feedback.) But the
most valuable question will be how much they spent at your
company over the last twelve months.

If your community is creating value for a business you’ll find that not
only did the average spending of community members increase over
twelve months but that it increased at a higher rate than that of
non-members. You’ll be able to calculate the total extra spend and
arrive at a value for your community as a whole.

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Usually, a survey is the easiest way to collect this data. You can use
survey software to put the questions together and you can
encourage people to take part by offering a discount on a product. It
might cost you a little money but the data will be worth a lot more
than the cost of gathering it.

It is possible, though, that you might be able to do without a survey.

If you can match the email addresses of people who bought from you
online in the past to the people who joined your community, you’ll
have an accurate account of your members’ spending patterns.
You’ll then be able to track the growth in their spending after joining
the community and compare it to the spending patterns of people
who didn’t join the community.

If you can collect figures in this way, they’re likely to be more

accurate. On the other hand, customer surveys are so useful that
they’re worth doing anyway.

However you choose to do it though, the result should always be

enough data on spending patterns for you to be able to prove that
the community is contributing to profit growth.

Monetizing Your Community

Extracting revenue from community members, however, isn’t
straightforward.

Users expect use of online communities to be free. They expect to

be able to post status updates, hit a “like” button and add their own
comments, photos and videos without paying.
They don’t pay for Facebook so they won’t see why they should pay
for your community.

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But just as Facebook makes plenty of money out of its non-paying
members, so you can monetize your community too.

There are a number of ways to do that:

1. Offer Premium Services

Charge for basic membership and you’ll struggle to
build your community. Offer limited use of the
community for free but charge for the most valuable
services and you may be able to earn revenue from
your most dedicated members.

The Warrior Forum (​www.warriorforum.com​), for

example, is a community for Internet marketers.
Anyone can join the forum and open threads, but
membership of the War Room costs about $97 a
year and allows members access to learning
material.

2. Sell Products
A community set up by a business will always have
the aim of making more sales from its members. You
can increase those sales by making exclusive
special offers to community members and you can
also offer other people’s products to your members.
If you can identify products that your community
members would need or enjoy, you can cash in on
the trust your members feel towards you by
promoting them and earning affiliate fees.

Mumsnet (​mumsnet.com​), for example, has an

Deals section where it’s partnered with a host of
different brands to push discounted products.

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3. Sell Information
One particular product you can sell is information.
This won’t work for every kind of community or for
every business, but you might be surprised at how
broadly you can spread the idea. While communities
for professionals can earn from coaching, even
organizers of gaming communities can make money
by selling guides, cheats and tips to powering up and
beating levels.

You can also sell in the opposite direction. Instead of

selling information to your community, you can also
review the knowledge being shared in the posts,
groups and comments in your community, extract it,
organize it and sell it to other people in a format
that’s easier to access than ploughing through posts.

4. Sell Courses
Not all the people who join a community will know
everything that can be learned about it. Many will
want to learn more. They’ll pay to take courses,
whether those courses will help them to take better
pictures, play better music or code better games.
Sell those courses on your community and you’ll be
able to deepen your members’ knowledge and earn
passive revenue from your students.

Expert members can give their advice for free, or

they can sell detailed advice for a fee with the
community taking a share of the revenue.

5. Organize Events
Local communities can build closer relationships by
getting together in real life — and the builders of
those communities can earn revenue by organizing

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 those meet ups. This will take a bit of effort.

You’ll need to find a location, arrange the activities,

ensure that there’s parking, food and other services.
You’ll also need to figure out the pricing so that
everything is covered and there’s still money left
over for you. Get it right once though and you may
well find that the meet up becomes regular, the
community grows closer and your revenues grow
larger.

6. Add A Marketplace
If you’re finding that many of the posts made in your
community are telling people that they have items for
sale, you have an opportunity. Whether they’re
pitching cars, baseball cards, cosplay costumes or
anything else, create a marketplace and charge for
listings.

Then charge more for promoted listings.

7. Create Merchandise
Communities with a strong sense of affiliation can
monetize loyalty. Services like Zazzle and CafePress
allow anyone to put logos and messages on
everything from mugs and t-shirts to skateboards
and mobile phone covers. If your members feel
proud to be part of your community and want to
show off their membership, create a store and fill it
with products that carry the community logo.
8. Sell Advertising
Advertising is often the first revenue source that
community builders think of. It should be the last, the
one they turn to after they’ve installed every other
monetization method that the community can benefit

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 from.

Advertising is intrusive, often irritating and it’s not

what brings people to the community.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it.

If you can bring in advertisers with products that your

members would like to buy, then banners and other
ads should certainly be part of your monetization
strategy. Just don’t rely on advertising and make
sure that you implement it in a way that adds to the
community experience and doesn’t detract from it.

However you choose to monetize your community, whether you do it

through increasing sales of your own products, through partnerships
with other businesses, through membership fees and exclusive
access or simply through banner ads and AdSense, you should
always be following one simple principle:

Bring value to the community.

Every monetization strategy should bring something extra in return

for the cash you want to extract from the users.

If you want people to pay membership fees, don’t cut them off from
the activities they’ve been able to do for free until now; create new,
better activities and charge for them.

If you want members to buy more of your products, create special

offers that are exclusive to members or even special products that
are exclusive to members and reward them for their loyalty and their
membership.

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If you’re going to advertise, pick advertisers with a strong connection
to your community members.

Make sure you bring something to your members before you take
something away from them.

Measuring and monetization are vital parts of building a community.

You will need to know how fast your community is growing and you’ll
need to know how much those members are worth.

Don’t rely on “branding” and “loyalty-building” to justify the

continuation of your community. Count the cash and you’ll be able to
count on the community to continue to receive funding in the future.

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Conclusion
Building an online community is enjoyable, inspiring, challenging,
thrilling and fun.

You’ll get to meet some amazing people.

You’ll get to talk about a topic you love with people who are as
passionate about it as you are.

You’ll get to watch your community grow, its members contribute

more and more content, help each other with their problems and
raise questions and issues that you would never have considered.

And you’ll get to see that community contribute to your bottom line.

Your business will grow and it will grow in a way that’s more
enjoyable than just about any other method.

In this guide, we looked at some of the most important aspects of

building an online community.

We started with identity, the thing that binds a community together.

We then discussed the launch, and we explained why it’s better to
grow slowly, to bring in small numbers of chosen, dedicated
members a little at a time, rather than to launch big and fill the sites
with people who look, click and leave.

We explained how to find those people and what you can do to pull
them in.

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We then discussed how to step things up and what you can expect
to happen when your community begins to take on a life of its own.
It’s fascinating to see and watching your members place comments
on each other’s posts, ask for more content and spark conversations
is always fantastic. We also talked about the sort of content you and
your members should be creating both on your own community
platform and on other platforms.

Finally, we talked figures, perhaps the most overlooked aspect of

online community building.

Although online communities aren’t as easy to track as other forms

of Internet marketing, their admin pages report plenty of figures, and
Google Analytics provide more. There’s no reason for community
organizers not to know exactly how quickly their community is
growing and how deeply its members feel engaged.

No less importantly, there’s also no reason for community organizers

not to know how much its members are worth and the amount of
dollars they’re contributing to the business. They’re more likely to be
able to do that when they know what they can bring to the
community that will encourage members to pay. We talked
monetization too.

The biggest incentive to create a community is always going to be —

and should be — the desire to meet your customers if not in person
then at least online. Building that community takes planning and
takes time. Get it right, though, and you won’t just have a business.
You’ll have a business that does business with friends.

Just like we do on ​PeepSo.com/Community​. Come, see for yourself.

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