Where should I build my community?
Dear IH,
My product (tresor.one) is gaining some momentum and I have many very engaged users, sending me feedback emails every day and going into a lot of detail on the product. They just want to be part of it - and it's awesome.
I would like to create a place for the users to exchange (instead of only talking to me) for multiple reasons:
- User can help each other (lifts some support burden from me)
- Users create content (which helps SEO)
- Users can discuss on topics and portfolios
- Users have more reason to come back to the site
- Users spend more time on the site
- I have a place to discuss features
- I have a place to announce new features / bigger changes
Now I would like to have this community as close to the page as possible without a separate registration. But I simply don't know which tool to use...
If I look at existing communities, the closest to what I want are Github Discussions:
https://github.com/zeit/next.js/discussions
If I could have Github Discussions on my own site - it would be my dream 😍.
This is what I thought about:
- Facebook Group
- Slack
- Forum
- Discourse
- Disqus Comments
- Subreddit
- Build it myself
The target audience are private investors (stocks & ETFs) in Germany.
Slack, FB Group, Reddit to not help SEO. All need separate registration. Nothing is really embedded into my site except Disqus.
On the one side, I want to get started asap and just use something. On the other hand, I want AT LEAST to dock my current user accounts (from auth0) into the service.
What would you recommend?
I think the tricky part is building a community somewhere your users don't already go frequently. Because you need to build a new habit for them, perhaps send email digests to re-engage them, etc.
Example:
I know someone who runs a popular SaaS product for people tracking their hikes, but when they made a community....no one went there. They set up a discourse, probably integrated with the user accounts, and it remained deserted. He was convinced that "a community doesn't work".
That's why for example, our SaaS' community is on Facebook. Even if it's "risky" when you don't own the community platform, if our users are on Facebook all day, new posts in our group are hooked into their normal notification stream, and we get solid engagement with minimal effort. Facebook handles the re-engagement for us, basically.
How have you acquired users? Do any of those streams offer platforms already you can leverage? And what type of questions will your users be asking? Is there any risk that they WON'T want those questions to be "easily visible"? (E.g. "grey area" investment questions?)
For my newsletter I'm looking at https://circle.so. So one more thing to add to your list :D
this is fantastic advice. I 100% agree that creating a community outside of the regular platforms is very very hard. I would love to use a platform. I only wish I could fetch the posts to display them on my site.
Like "latest posts from FB Group" with a button to "reply" or "create a post".
For the reasons you listed as well as getting started fast, a Facebook group or a subreddit might be the best bet 🤔. Subreddit because many current users came from my reddit post.
Great job building an engaged community Sumit! That’s half the battle.
I agree with the others that it’s best to start where your users already hang out. Work with the habits they already have. :)
Thanks, yes. You are right!
I would probably recommend Circle, not sure you can have the single registration with that though. I maintain a list, it's a bit overwhelming what is out there, but the trouble with most of them is that (as @momoko mentioned) they all require work from the user to develop that new habit of going elsewhere.
Circle is quite new, I saw @tylertringas post this about Circle, which looks fancy.
Discourse is pretty solid, I wish the UI were a bit more exciting/modern.
However, all things considering, I would seriously consider engaging for as long as you can via email.
You can achieve a lot that way. Take those conversations, the ideas from them, cross post them places. To twitter. To a blog. Ask them more direct/personal questions.
It's really really hard to actually get people to participate in an online forum, but a personal email in an inbox can 'convert' much easier.
The other option is to use a tool that is more for tracking feedback, like Canny.
Awesome tools and suggestions thanks a lot. I took your advice and will stay with email for now, build a proper list and send out regular email updates.
Fingers crossed!
You could try Panion (https://panion.com)
Thanks for the suggestion @Mellie66 💪
Don't build yourself. Any forum/community engine at your service. But keep in mind - unless you use ASP.Net (and maybe, some else) that allows creating a virtual folder, there is no way to make your community help SEO as you will able to install them only on subdomain what will be indexed by search engines as a separate resource.
Yes you're right. I have to stop with the SEO stuff through community content it won't happen.
Have you considered installing https://www.discourse.org/
Taking care of a Discourse forum myself is not a good use of my time. It's too much out of my regular tech stack to just be one more thing I do. I don't want to deal with this.