Community and Cold Coffee S2 🥤😎| Ep - 6 Community tools
Does the perfect community tool exist? There is an endless search on which tool is best for a community, and we all have ended up exploring a ton of tools but still, the search doesn’t seem to come to an end, so this week’s C3 made an attempt to try and end this search. We called together people who have turned almost every page around community tools where we can host communities.
This whole session was quite a journey in itself, is it possible to put together years of pursuit of community tools in an hour? Maybe it is, cause we were able to curate so much information that Google might feel envious of us.
Identifying where the frustration starts will eventually lead us to the place where we can make it end, so here’s where we started
What’s the toughest part of community building? | How to handle these stumbling blocks |
ENGAGEMENT, this term is something that keeps slipping out of a community manager quite often. Having consistent engagement in your community is by far the toughest job and especially when it’s online.
| 1. Consistent fun activities being hosted will increase engagement. 2. As moderators are responsible for bringing in engagement in the community. Encouraging moderators and making them feel responsible and belong will reflect in the community’s engagement. In order to achieve that, making moderators feel special and awarded can help a long way. For example, naming them Saviours, Community Coaches, etc giving gifts, coupons and books will motivate them to do more voluntarily without an external push from you. With these techniques, you can start sparking engagement in your community. |
Seeding quality content- People come to a community to learn something or to find valuable content, this becomes a challenge as the process of finding hidden gems to come forward and contribute is not an easy job. The quality of the community lies in the quality of people who create quality content. And to achieve this is no easy job | 1. Have to bring a sense of belonging and make them feel that they are responsible, they are a valuable contributor. When they have that feeling they will start taking responsibility on their own and they’ll start referring and contributing quality content. 2. Only allowing quality people to come in. You need not worry about numbers when good content is available in your community people will start coming in on their own. Quality over quantity is all that matters 3. Invite quality people for interviews, AMAs, events, etc. repurpose the content you made through interviews, AMAs, and other events by creating blogs out of it. |
Change- To transfer the community from one platform to another platform and to change from offline to online. The change people have to go through is the toughest job cause people don’t that easily change when there is a new concept. | Tell them your side of the story and make them understand the moral. Make people fall in love with the purpose of your community and if they fall in love that’s when the perfect match for your community is found. Once people start understanding the purpose they will know the importance of the change and will not hesitate to make the change. |
Making people understand the purpose of community- people turn up and they themselves don’t know why they are there and what they are going to get from that. | Educate people from the start. Show them what they are into by introducing success stories, and inspire them to be part of this. Make people find their purpose with the community. |
Boon and Bane of the products we are using
WhatsApp Groups:
Boon- People are always there and it is super easy to engage. Its open rate is super high.
Bane- Has no control over conversations, it would be nice if it has the features of discord.
Discord:
Boon- It’s super fun, it feels like a hangout place. Their bots are really helpful
Bane- It’s new to the Indian market and so people don’t want to get used to it, it’s too old for the foreign market they don’t want to use it anymore. People were never up to download another app. There is no filtration process as anyone can join in, this also makes the spam level high.
Facebook Groups:
Boon- Easy to bring in people as people are already there.
Bane- Very distractive as it is an entertainment platform, it is very hard to have people in your community and have a serious conversation. Especially, the notifications just drive them away to have a lot at something else very easily.
Things that should reach the ears of product builders
The community-building process is no joke and as people who have been into this business together, they felt that if these features are there in a product it will make community builder’s life easy.
If a product could sieve through the conversation and tell out the top 10 topics that the community has been talking about in the past few months.
A product that is not overwhelming but provides infotainment would be great.
A platform where people don't let members get distracted.
It should be fun but at the same time should be made in a way that it sets an environment for serious conversations.
This talk on community tools has been really insightful. Tools do have a great part in the community’s success, and that is why this is a pursuit all community people are running towards and this C3 has been very helpful to know the tools in the market how, where and for what needs are met by them. I am super sure that we all will come back to this blog to get peer advice from these community folks whenever in want of advice.
Psst: Another peer advice, Habitate, a community-building platform is meticulously made having in mind the problems faced by community builders. And so we have a simple yet comprehensive platform that is super fun to use, explore and we hopefully believe that your community platform search ends here!
Habitate