Question on building your community
Hello IHers,
I had a question on building and engaging communities I thought I'll ask here for the benefit of others in a similar dilemma.
I have always heard that the community you build on a social platform is not yours to own, you should have your own E-mail list from your social audience as well as of your product users and keep them engaged.
But what if I do not have the bandwidth to engage the community? Is it okay if I just want to build and ship my product and not contact the users much even when I have their contacts? I can grow the user base through other forms of marketing and word of mouth without connecting the users on the platform.
And what if I am happy on engaging with my social audience sporadically and don't have time to engage them in say a newsletter or something? Have any of you thought like this and worked around it? Would be glad to know.
Not every product needs a community. I feel like there's a lot of pressure these days to push 'community' as a marketing strategy, when that is not what community is about.
What you are talking about wanting to do is more like 'audience building', which is fine and is the approach most companies take. Out of an audience a community may rise, but it doesn't have to.
Thanks @rosiesherry, super helpful!
If you think you can grow through other marketing, that's fine and probably good. I think the narrative around community is equally about validating an idea and an avenue to sales and ultimately that shows you are building something that people want and will pay for.
You might succeed if you blindly build something and "launch it" but a community may help reduce the risk in the short term.
But there probably does need to be a distinction between "customer feedback" and "community", where community is just a good catch all.
Super helpful, thanks for this view!
If you already feel that there's no bandwidth for a community, it sounds like you'll end up with a dead community anyway, which isn't useful to you regardless of your product or service. In addition, if you're not sure how you would leverage that community to support your product, then again, it will be dead and useless.
Very true, thanks!!
This comment was deleted 6 years ago
Sure, thanks @benjamin_b!