How to start a community

Home / How to start a community
Nicou   No comments   Strategy, Tools 30 July 2022

How to start a community

Hey everyone, Lenny here!
My goal with CM Adventures is to share as much experience as I can with professionals & players, in order to hone each others’ skills while improving the understanding of Community Management. You can learn more about the project & myself in the Introduction to CM Adventures.

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Sommaire :

 

What is a community, my precious?

If you want your Brand (a product, company, project) to be successful, you will need customers.
How do you get customers then?! How do you create a community?

There are many ways for you to attract customers: you will need a Community Manager, a Strategy, and Patience.

► A community is a group of people who have similar interests or who want to achieve something together.
► A Community Manager is someone whose job is to make sure that a brand has a positive image & good relationships with its customers, by playing a key role place between the company and the community.

Communities offer people a sense of belonging, a place where you can connect with others who share your interests.
The bigger your community, the greatest reach your company has, which means potentially higher profits. Companies will want to build relations with their customers sharing the same interest, that is why community building is so important in any business: This strategic initiative and the underlying processes are known as Community Management.

💡 Do not create a Club: A Community needs to be inclusive, you want to reach more potential customers, so don’t gate your members with requirements!

 

Why should I develop a community?

Community Management takes a lot of time, but trust me, if you do it well your customers will catapult you to a whole new level.

There are many benefits that you can get from nurturing your community:

  • Feedback – You might think your product is great, but customers are the ones using it in the end. They will provide you with feedback for you to quantify & qualify; Then, following the vision you have for the product, you may want to review your strategy. Stay open to criticism so you can go with the flow and implement your customers requests.
  • Communications – New updates, important information, customer support, interactions with your community are super important to connect with your customers on a more personal level. Build platforms that will facilitate discussions both for users-users, but also for users-company interactions.
  • Sentiment – It is the level of satisfaction from your community. Everything you do or say will influence the Sentiment — The higher it is, the better — And the more new customers will flow in, increasing your profits. The Brand Awareness will boost customers satisfaction, value, and referrals. The community will amplify your product for you.

 

Community & Social Media Managers?

These are two different jobs. One person can do it all, but much like a full stack developer: It takes a lot of time to learn the different facets.
Note that companies tend to have different meanings for the roles, but here are the main ones:

  • Community Manager CM – The brand’s ambassador; Interact closely with the community, listen & escalate the feedback, keep customers & brand united.
    • Community Coordinator CC – usually support the CM’s efforts depending on business’s size.
  • Social Media Manager SMM – The brand’s content creator; Posts content on the social networks, engage customers following the Marketing’s Strategy & Tone.
  • Community Developer CD – The brand’s strategist; Develop the community by tinkering with new ideas, projects, events, programs to… well, develop the community.

The jobs are so inherently interconnected that it is easy to misunderstand the various caps one has to wear to efficiently “manage the community”.
A “Community Manager”, in the broadest sense of the term, does all of this. Plus Data — we all do metrics to measure stuff — But it’s another subject.

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Strategy & Identity

The CAFES

Starting from scratch is a very tedious and difficult task, but hiring an experienced Community Manager will get you there.
If you’re a known company, an influencer, or if you have an existing community: You can leverage it to get traction more rapidly!

Keep in mind, you won’t have your fully grown community in a glance.
It takes time to develop a loyal community through regular content!

What you will need for your strategy, is a lot of CAFES (I made it up 🤤):

  • Content
  • Advocacy
  • Feedback
  • Engagement
  • Support

 

▲ Content

You want to create Content that will resonate with your customers’ minds & hearts.
I have shared a lot of content ideas in a recent article: Deconstructing CK3: Royal Court’s Strategy.

💡 You are not alone. Keep an eye on users generated content & stories that you can share. You could also ask your colleagues if they want to take part in an “Inside [business’s name]” initiative where you discuss about their jobs and lives. For example a previous company I worked with, Paradox Interactive, had their own Life at Paradox Instagram for this.

I encourage you to create at least one piece of informative/engaging content for your main social Media platforms, on a daily basis.
And one piece of content for your secondary platforms, on a weekly basis.

 

▲ Advocacy

You want customers to tell other customers: “This is some good sh*t!”

Content Creators are your friends. Initiate partner / ambassador / loyalty programs to develop positive words-of-mouth about your product.
By developing long term relationships with the Most Important Users, their own communities will support your  global community and grow your business.

Keep discussing with them on a closer level than the usual customers.
Prepare a Non-Disclosure Agreement document if you want to merge them into your internal documents & tests.

💡 Absolutely DO NOT ignore content creators who are sharing negative sentiment about your brand! Keep discussing with them, turn them into positive users. Understand them, and help them grow. It might also just be that it is their own way of interacting with their community. Negativity can be constructive, stay open to criticism. Though, insults & harassment are a no-go so make the line clear when discussing with these villains.

 

▲ Feedback

You will be criticised. Usually, it shows that the users care about your product, and a few enhancements could make it better (according to them).

Feedback can come passively through your social networks: thank your customers for their time & feedback. It is also a good thing to redirect the users to one of your discussion platforms such as a forum. The more customers you have discussing Feedback, the more you can judge the importance of this Feedback and the best way to implement it.
💡 It is generally a good idea to note the most reported pieces of advice, so you can escalate it to your teams via a Report.

Feedback can also be active, much like a one on one conversation, through a survey. It helps your business ask precise questions, to improve your product through direct targeted comments.
💡 Reward the users filling the survey.

 

▲ Engagement

As the community’s ambassador, the brand’s voice, you want to be very visible!

By engaging with your customers, you will give them a sense of attachment to you & your brand.
💡 Interact on your brand’s accounts, but also reach out to other communities by joining their discussions & Discord servers. Engage with content creators.

The link between the community & the brand must be strong. You are the link, so you must be strong & present for your customers.

You don’t have to use the brand’s tone as a Community Manager; This is for the Social Media Manager mostly.

 

▲ Support

You will have unhappy customers, or simply customers who experienced a problem with your product.

Be kind to them, always. Give your all to listen and understand the issue, find and deliver a solution. Follow-up with them, it is a turning point for your business! Customers who have had their issues solved thanks to your support are more likely to become loyal and tell other users that you have helped them.

💡 I encourage you to build places where your customers can discuss with each other.

A Forum or a Discord server are great platforms that will foster discussions, feedback, and even help you to support customers.
A FAQ article will be instrumental so you can keep all the hot questions & information in one place. Self-service is powerful, it will deflects many incoming questions saving you time.

Back to summary

 

The plan

▲ Understand your community, be human

If you want to grow a community, you need to understand how they are working, what’s in your customers’ minds.
Three important things to start are: a Tone, Values, and Culture. How will you interact with your users? Why should they join your community and stick with you?

  • Tone – The manner in which you will interact with your community. Your tone will be used in the vast majority of your interactions & content. Fully professional? A cheeky character? A cheerful persona from your product’s story? A mascot reflecting the company’s values/culture?
  • Values – The guiding principles that inform your company’s decisions, actions, and behaviours. Usually companies have a set of values, keywords.
  • Culture – It resonates with the real life. What does your company promote?

💡 While following your values & culture, you could even have a more “personal” account for you to share your life as a Community Manager… or even push the concept further by showing how your company & employees are working and simply: living!

💡Because you follow Values & Cultures, that is also the time where you will want to create Guidelines for your community; This way, your community will reflect on your company’s values.

 

▲ Key Performance Indicators, KPI

It is sometimes difficult for a Community Manager to provide their teams with relevant KPIs, because we are all about community’s sentiment. The latter doesn’t always translate to more Sale.
The most interesting metrics for you are usually:

  1. Engagement Rate, click-through, interactions, …
  2. Sentiment Level, that I usually rate between [1 2 3 4 5]
  3. Number of Followers, only a secondary indicator to me because some of your followers could not care or even simply not see your content because of reasons & algorithms. It will grow with time if your Engagement Rate is high & steady.
  4. New members Retention, can you keep users interested?

💡 These metrics are usually escalated in your Reports, and used to understand how your community is performing, what topics & themes are working well.

 

▲ Communicate

Usually when you arrive to a party, it can be a bit cold in the beginning… it is your role as a Community Manager to start the discussions and get your users to chat.
This is done through your Content, Engagement, and Programs.

💡 Again, you are not alone: If you can get your developers, programmers, director to engage with the community in a safe place; It will show your company is human, and there for your users.

As a link between the community and the company, I also like to launch initiatives to bring developers & players together. Now kiss!
For example, you could start an Ask Me Anything on Reddit, or a Questions/Answers session over Discord between the dev team and your community.

 

▲ Content Creators

Bring them together, and in the darkness bind them… or something like that.
Give engaged players a chance to interact with you.

Your Most Important Users must create content together toward one positive goal. Discourage competitivity by lodging them at the same table, have a special place where you can chat directly with them. Encourage them to network with each other so that your community becomes a place for them to meet and speak.

The more trust that group has, the more likely it is to support your product & company.
💡 If the group is large enough, you could even encourage & support members to start their own events hosted by your brand.

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Social Media

There are various platforms on which you could live long and prosper.
💡 If you are starting your community, I would advise you to focus on one or two maximum in order to focus your content & members in the same place. You might get tired & dilute your content if you start with a full flight of wild social networks.

We Are Social & Hootsuite — DataReportal — produce every years a very detailed Report about social Media.
Yep, 300 pages a bit outside of this article’s topic… but it’s very interesting!

Some key takeaways, focussed on Community Development:

  • Top social Media average time per month that users spend:
    • YouTube, 23.7 h/month
    • Facebook, 19.6 h/month // Top #3 favourite social Media
    • Tik Tok, 19.6 h/month// Top #6 favourite social Media
    • What’sApp, 18.6 h/month // Top #1 favourite social Media — WeChat Top #4 in China
    • Instagram, 11.2 h/month // Top #2 favourite social Media
    • Twitter, 5.1 h/month// Top #7 favourite social Media
  • Mobile phones are more than ever used by users, so keep it in mind while creating content;
  • YouTube is more than ever interesting for advertisements, as its potential Reach continues to grow up to 2.56b users, +12% from 2021;
  • Instagram has grown even faster with +21% from last year, with its potential Reach up to 1.48b users;
  • Tik Tok? Even faster still! with +7%… in only three months! Its current potential Reach is now of ~885m users;
  • Users are significantly more likely to pay for digital content compared to last years, 7/10 users pay for content online;
  • Video Games represent the largest part of annual spendings on digital media downloads and subscriptions, with $155.5b;

 

▲ Facebook is still the most-used social platforms, with 2.91b users as of October 2021.

Facebook is the world’s largest social media, with almost 3 billion people using it each month. Over 65 million businesses use Facebook pages and over six million advertisers promote their business on Facebook, making it a pretty safe bet if you want to have a social media presence.

→ It is a great network to build and retain customers while relaying your content.
→ Facebook has an in-built very efficient advertisement feature, and detailed Insights.
→ Videos posted natively & images with a call to action work the best.

 

▲ Twitter is my preferred platform to create, engage, and federate a community; Though it is often laughed at compared to Instagram. It is just my preference and I obtain excellent results with the content I post, matching if not exceeding Instagram’s. 436m very engaged users, making it the infamously “drama” platform, so be careful with what you post.

→ The platforms allows you to use many formats from simple posts (tweets up to 280 characters), up to 4 images, a video, gif, polls, livestreams, emojis and more features.
→ Customer Support & Engagement are easy to perform as you can reply to each tweets individually, or tag multiple users in the same tweet.
hashtags are also an important feature, allowing discovery of content much like Instagram.
→ It differs from most other social media sites in that it has a strong focus on real-time information, which is what is happening right now.

 

▲ YouTube has closed the gap with Facebook over the past year, with the platform’s audience growing almost twice as fast as Facebook’s. YouTube now has at least 2.56b active users.

→ In addition to being the second largest social media site, YouTube (owned by Google) is also often referred to as the second largest search engine after Google.
→ An excellent network allowing you to share videos such as trailers, gameplay, reviews, reactions, dev diaries, and many other formats.
→ YouTube also has a very powerful Ads feature, in fact the most powerful of all social Media at the moment. Insights as well, very detailed per videos & accounts.
→ YouTube Shorts, very short videos formats, can be used coupled with Tik Tok & Instagram/Facebook stories

 

▲ Twitch is the #1 Livestream social Media, allowing you to create regular high quality Live videos for your community.

→ While YouTube Gaming is better if you want to grow fast, Twitch puts an emphasis on higher viewed streams. So if you are new you might want to start on YouTube and release videos here and there. If you are already somewhat known, or if you aim to stream A LOT, start on Twitch and get your community there.
→ Twitch offers more interactivity with your viewers. YouTube Gaming offer more editing post-Live.
→ If you are into gaming, go over to Twitch. If you are not a gaming business, go over to YouTube where it will be easier for you to be seen.

 

▲ Instagram keeps growing, 1.4b users at the start of 2022. Reels haven’t quite gained the same momentum as Stories yet, we’ll keep an eye on it.

→ A powerful visual identity is needed in order to highlight your content.
→ Stories are a powerful short format on Instagram, use it to show authenticity & real life events/montages
→ Use 3-5 hashtags in your posts to leverage the use of the Explore tab.
→ Carousel Posts are the engagement king here, but videos & photos are doing very well as content posts.
→ To enable your insights, you must enable the Business or Creator account in your profile’s settings.

 

▲ TikTok’s ad audience also continues to grow at an eye-watering pace with 885m users, and it is now not only popular with younger users so get up to date!

→ Much like Instagram, TikTok proposes many effects & filters to be used during your videos.
→ Do not take TikTok too seriously: you must be light, keep things short and very entertaining from the 1st second of the video
→ Low Cost quick videos often work best than very polished videos, be spontaneous!

 

▲ Reddit, 50m active Redditors on thousands & thousands of sub-Reddit categorizes by topics & interests.

→ Reddit, also known as the homepage of the Internet, is a platform where users can submit questions, links and images, discuss them and vote them up or down.
→ There are subreddits (i.e. dedicated forums) for almost anything. So it’s worth doing some research to see if there are any popular subreddits your brand can participate in.
→ Do not ignore this excellent platform that can make your content go viral more easily than other platforms, thanks to its upvote feature.
→ It is difficult to start your own sub-Reddit, I would advise you to let your community create it. Keep tab of when will this happen, it will at some point especially if you are a gaming business growing big enough. When it happens, support the sub-Reddit with Ask Me Anything sessions & regular dev team engagements… but leave space, users like their freedom!

 

▲ Discord has grown so much since its release, proposing a lot of features to engage with your community.

→ Discord servers are organized into topic-based channels where you can collaborate, share, and just talk with other users.
→ With the recent updates, it is now easier to configure your own server, but professionals will sure use its full potential with bots & features.

 

▲ LinkedIn. 808m users, and an interesting platform to share professional content to other professionals.

→ LinkedIn is now more than just a resume & job search website. It has evolved into a professional social media site where industry experts share content, network and build their personal brand. It has also become a place where companies can establish leadership and authority in their industry and attract talent to their company.
→ It is also a great place to promote your company’s values & culture through posts & hashtags.
→ No need to post often; Post quality professional content aimed at other professionals.

 

▲ What’sApp and Facebook Messenger could be interesting on mobile, especially if you use a chatbot to deflect customers’ questions through a self-service feature.

→ Chat. Quickly. I have never used it professionally, but I see the point depending on your business needs.
→ What’sApp allows you to share a message to everyone following your phone number, up to 256 persons in the list. You could use that list for quick info to your Most Important Users.

 

▲ SnapChat and Pinterest are slowly falling into the abyss, I would recommend not lingering on these socials even though they were great in their times.

→ Pinterest is a place where people go to discover new things and get inspired, unlike most social media where engagement is the focus.
→ Snapchat is a social media app that focuses on sharing photos and short videos (also known as snaps) with friends. It made the Stories format very popular and the latter has spread to other social networks now, like Instagram.

 

In the end: It all depends on your business and what you want to do with it.

  • Video games – Facebook, Twitter, Discord, Instagram, …
  • Music – Twitter Spaces, Spotify, …
  • Videos – YouTube, TikTok, Instagram Stories/Reels, …
  • Images – Instagram, Pinterest, Imgur, …
  • Writing – WordPress, Medium, …
  • Discussions – Reddit, Discord, Quora, …
  • Livestream – Twitch, YouTube Gaming, …
  • Professionals – will use LinkedIn, Slack, …
  • Reviews – TripAdvisor, Yelp, Glassdoor, …

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The Tools

There are hundreds of tools available to Community Managers to help them carry on with their tasks.
Here is a selection of my preferred ones.

▲ Social Media:

  • HootSuite – Manage different social networks in a single window. Scheduling, planning, monitoring, insights, reporting and more tools for you and your team. Hootsuite are professionals using their own tools, they know what they do and even propose to train your teams on various topics. The Analytics/Reporting is powerful even if I always prefer to produce my own reports, but there are interesting data that you may want to read. Hootsuite also analyses your posts and propose ‘better’ times for them. Also, giveaway/contest integration! I must say, Hootsuite can be expensive but it is the absolute best, to me, with more features.
  • SproutSocial – Similar to Hootsuite, cheaper if you work alone but more expensive if your team is composed of 3+ members, and packs a chatbot that you can set if you like. I like the Analytics as much as Hootsuite, slightly different way to present data and Sprout offer audience discovery. You might find SproutSocial easier to read.
  • I’ve heard Buffer is doing great, at a very affordable price. Monitoring, Scheduling, Analytics.
  • TweetDeck – A very capable social Media management tool, for free!
  • Later for Reddit or Cronnit – Schedule Reddit posts
  • Yet Another Mail Merge – Send mass emails with Gmail
  • Mailchimp – Mails newsletters
  • Feedly – Stay up to date with what’s happening on the interwebz

 

▲ Analytics, but I’ll make a whole article about this later:

 

▲ Management:

  • Asana – A powerful organisation tool for you and your team
  • Trello – This free tool helps you organise your tasks with your team
  • Your Notepad. I love it. And it’s free… just… remember to save it before turning your couputer off. Pro tip.

 

▲ Assets:

  • Photoshop – A very powerful assets creation tool, and expensive too.
  • Photofiltre – When I don’t need the heavy Photoshop, I can edit images quickly here.
  • IrfanView – This beast can open nearly every assets format, useful to save weird formats to more used one. Excellent to edit & rename batch of images as well.
  • Screen to Gif – Easy to use, high quality gif at your fingertips.
  • Ezgif – A simple online GIF maker and toolset for basic animated GIF editing.
  • VFX & Motion Graphics
  • Balsamiq, User Interfaces – I used this when we redesigned the Customer Support website & ticket system with Bethesda

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Conclusion

When starting your community:

  • Create engaging content & events, always quality > quantity
  • Prepare places for your community to interact with other users, but also with you! Be present for them.
  • Keep the costs low. First you have to connect, test, understand your users
  • Do not pay for advertisements, everything must be organic (≠ paid)
  • If you start from 0 Fans: invite your friends to like your content, share it with your coworkers, ask your family to share your content and talk about it

 

I hope that you learned a thing or two with this new article! Thanks a lot for reading it until the end.
You can always drop comments with Disqus, at the bottom of every articles.
Cheers!