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9 Comments

Best place to build a community?

Where is the best place to build a community (FB, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc) for your product? Thanks!

  1. 6

    Honestly, it depends on your goals and people.

    Also, bear in mind tools don't make a community, you can build community wherever you have a conversation. A tweet, therefore, could build community.

    I would never build on FB, for example, my people aren't really there, it plays against my ethics and they control too much of the data/algorithm. Your opinion and goals may vary, and that's ok.

    These days I go for the approach of having your own website and emails, building up a good amount of interest in the things you are doing, then using that as the foundation to point them elsewhere.

    It could be pointing them to :

    • a blog post
    • a tweet
    • an online meetup/event
    • a Slack
    • LinkedIn group
    • Whatsapp or Telegram
    • Discourse, Circle, etc set up.
    1. 2

      Thank you so much for your response, much appreciated! Definitely a lot of diff ways to build community. A lot more research to do :)

      1. 2

        I geek out on this stuff, here on and for IH, but also over at rosie.land 😇

        1. 1

          Awesome! I will check it out!

  2. 2

    As an addon to what everyone said,

    Community is people. People are at all of these platforms and more. Start by gathering them up - and then spread the assets to several platforms.

    You can start in Facebook, moving the community to your Substack list, then adding a Slack channel and a more-intense Signal group.
    Once someone will look for you in Facebook, he'll find you.
    Once someone will look for you in Google, he'll find you.
    Once someone will look for you in Signal, he'll find you.

    Enjoy as many platforms as you can. Yet start with one.

    GL

    1. 1

      Very true! Honestly, it would be ideal to build a community on each platform, that way, you aren't making it difficult for users to go to another platform they may not use regularly, and then when the time comes, funnel them to one site/platform/etc.

  3. 2

    I've gotten a lot of value out of paid Slack communities. But the sign up flow is a bit cumbersome and weird, I don't know if it's the best end-user experience. I rarely use Facebook anymore. I dig Twitter, I learn so much there, but don't know how to approach community building on the platform. There's a lot of competition there now.

    One app I tried out was Circle.so. I liked it, but I wasn't planning to spend daily effort to build a community, so I didn't move forward with it. If you're planning on purposefully building a community, I would definetly try Circle. It's built just for this.

    1. 2

      Thank you for your response! Yeah, Slack is definitely clunky IMO. I've checked out Circle but it creates more friction when trying to get people to move from one platform to another. Twitter is bomb, I love it there but I also don't know how to build a community there other than just growing my following.

    2. 2

      Great insights! What do you think about voice communities? something like Clubhouse for websites?
      Hosting AMA, Q&A, and community questions with voice rooms rather than forum style like Circle.so?

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