Why | |
Article Contents here
There’s a saying from the famous movie “Field of Dreams”: “if you build it, they will come.” While inspiring, that’s just not always true, in fact, many times things go the opposite way when it comes to community building. Sometimes instead of bums on seats we get crickets. Let’s explore the common reasons why people don’t show up and how we fix them. #1. Your community is not offering enough value to your audience
To figure out what your incentives for members joining should be, ask yourself a simple question. What does your audience hate about life? What is the pain they’re experiencing? When you focus on relieving their pain, they will join you. That is the key. For example, a common pain point of camera owners is spending a lot of money on camera equipment without knowing if they’ll like it. So, what value can you add to relieve that pain? In this case, you could give them a list or summary of top rated equipment, so they no longer worry about this. Maybe you could also provide them with a forum they can join to ask their questions? As another example, if you are building a community of musicians who are struggling to understand a piece of audio equipment, maybe you could provide them with a free e-book that walks through the gear when they join your community? The key is to understand what they are struggling with, and give them value that relieves it. #2. People haven’t heard of your community
When launching a community, a sprinkling of social media posts, emails, and the odd video here and there simply isn’t enough to get people to join. Instead, you need to have a constant flow of valuable content and opportunities that lead people to your community. To do this, I suggest making a weekly list of 3 – 5 interesting discussions, events, content, and other things going on in your community each week. Then, share these different things across social media, blog posts, videos, and beyond. Another way you can raise awareness is to simply to feature your community in your other tools and resources. For example, list your community on your website, social media descriptions, GitHub repositories, events, presentation decks, YouTube videos, and more. Again, focus on finding every possible opportunity to promote your community everywhere and put it center stage, where it deserves to be. #3. Your onboarding sucks
The same happens in video games: the first few levels are designed to help you familiarize yourself with the controls and achieve some simple tasks. The key point here is delivering a simple, elegant, high quality experience. We need to do that in our communities, and the first step in doing so is nailing the onboarding experience. Far too many people spend bags of time on the outreach and promotion of their community, then underwhelm once people actually join. Or worse, people just get stuck in trying to figure out how to get started. I suggest you get your onboarding process in shape before you worry about the promotion. There are six steps to do this, which need happen in order: Give them a reason to participate.
#4. Your platform sucks
You wouldn’t be alone if you chose your platform based on the latest and greatest features, however, there IS such a thing as TOO much tech, as it can be confusing for your users. Focus first and foremost on delivering a simple community experience where you can help great content and discussions bubble to the surface. As you are building growth, switch off the unnecessary bells and whistles such as leaderboards, top lists, and other fluff. Focus most on why your members are there – the content and the discussions. For example, one of the first communities I started only used an email discussion list for communication. We experimented with other platforms but ultimately kept going back to the basics. It just worked! Always ask yourself when choosing a platform and the features within it, “is this feature really necessary?” If it is not, give it the boot. Also, don’t spread your community too thin across too MANY platforms! Just pick one spot to send all your members. This will keep things simple and most impactful. #5. Your engagement just isn’t good enough.
Well, once they are in, you need to keep them engaged. You see, all community members start out as window shoppers. They find some cool content, browse your community, and lurk without ever registering an account. This is totally fine! Then, when they do sign up for an account, we need to make sure it was worth it. We need to keep them coming back for amazing discussions and insight. In many cases, this means you’ll need to master the ancient art of small talk. Communities are like restaurants. If they look empty, they’re simply not appealing enough to go into! But, communities are also like parties. When you have a party, some people are always early, and you need to get them introduced to each other and chatting, even when they’re the only ones there.
Then, don’t let the conversations die!
If you can fix all five of these common community mistakes, you’ll be sure to skyrocket your community sign-ups without fail.
|
How | |
Google advertising | |
Social Network | |
Free Tiki (hosting) | |
|
Related | |