Tips needed for building a community
Hi I'm trying to build a community for developers in our community platform based around sharing learning resources to help each other progress dev skills. Marketing is not my strong point and running out of ideas.
We have 7,000+ People so far but growth isn't happening as fast as I'd like. Traffic to our site is low as its a new domain & no SEO power. Social marketing is where I'm having best results so far. Any suggestions?
7000 people is a lot to be working with. What have you done to try to build stronger communication between you all?
👆🏻 — work with what you got... to start, right?
That's what we're tackling at the moment. :)
If I was your consultant, I wouldn't be able to answer this until I asked a few more questions:
Like other folks here, I'm looking at 7000 members and thinking that's a great problem to have :-D. But I also know that size doesn't guarantee success. I'm in Slack groups with hundreds of members that are useless. No engagement. (Everyone's there to take. Almost no one's there to give.)
Generally, I would look at what Rosie does here at IH. She actively models the kinds of behaviors that make for a strong community. This encourages others to do the same.
Also, I'd think about how you can reward people who lead in your community, making it a better place. Get in there and talk to people and ask them what they love and don't love about your community. Why are they there? What do they want to get out of it? What would it take for it to be a place that they are excited to tell others about? Ideally, happy members are the best recruiters for new members. And I bet there are members in there who are highly experienced in the community realm who can give you great feedback.
7000 members still seems huge, even though you want to grow it bigger. I have a feeling that a community of that size has its own special challenges and ways of growing that I can't speak to...
Thanks for the comment. Some really interesting points in there. Our North Key metric is new posts to the platform. We've started to increase our targets but I think we can expand that out to a "new post from how many people". Maybe a ratio will give us a better understanding.
We're looking at how we can reward community leaders. We have a few who are very active on our platform. Any examples of companies who do rewarding well?
Wow! 7,000 users
I am running a small community for impact entrepreneurs and leaders www.impactbreakfastclub.com
We have been focusing on creating value for our target group, essentially saying that # of users is our lowest prioritised KPI (right now). Weekly live sessions where 16-30 people show up and get supported through peer-to-peer networking has boosted word of mouth and we are now 120+ users on our digital community. There are a lot of engagement and super low churn-rates (our challenge is to keep the value up as we grow)
Try to ask your users what they want from your space, how you can help them go to where they want to be and what they thought they would get when signing-up!
Good luck and feel free to reach out if you want to bounce ideas
Really like that idea. bring together small groups to create good value.
+1 on this <3
Wow, 7000 is amazing man!
I work of a 100 people newsletter and 1000 twitter followers, so considering it could always be worse or better.
I would just work with those 7000 people, if you even get 100 of them ambassadors your golden!
Congratulations on having 7,000 people already! I'm also building a little community (https://midnight.pub) and we are far away from that number. If social marketing works well, I'd definitely push and double down on it. Maybe you could even try some targeted advertisement and see if they bring good result.
Have you considered creating a newsletter? It can be a highlight of things that happened, so that people get a chance to be reminded every once in a while to come back.
i really like the concept of
midnight pub... very cool.Thanks for the suggestion. I'm just building in a weekly digest with the most popular posts. Will see if this helps with engagement and report back.