David Frosdick
Last Updated: February 6, 2023
Here are 4 platforms that you can use today and start building your community and tribe.
If you've ever launched a product online to the sound of crickets then starting a community might be something to look at.
Building a community of like-minded people passionate about a niche is one of the most strategic plans an online business can have. However, most businesses don't look at it this way. They would rather focus their time and money going after new customers.
If you run your own membership site, a community forum can be the most powerful part of that site. Obviously, you need great content but a community will keep people coming back. Members will check in to ask questions, help other members and return to check responses. They really are the lifeblood of a successful business.
Like most aspects of building your business, building a community is not a walk in the park. It can take months to grow active discussions. Some site owners even create multiple user accounts to kickstart discussions, however, this is a little more tricky with social network communities.
Building a community is a long term growth strategy.
One major strength of running a community is being able to shout about new products or news knowing that people will read it.
Depending on how well you nurture your community, they may be responsive to your announcements. Even better, they may be hungry buyers ready to purchase from you!
Your community is your audience. It's a place where you can chat about ideas related to your niche and offer support, but never forget they are real people on the other side. They have personalities like you not just an image on the screen.
Treat your community with respect. Manage it with care and adhere to strict rules so your community trusts you and engages more.
"Treat your community like it's your family and they will become your family.
Some benefits of running your own community:
Here are some ideas for starting your own community:
Think of what you know, what you love and go create a group!
Here are 3 strategies for managing your community:
Run an open community
Run a pre-approved community (optional - force email)
Run a private community
Deciding on the type of community you want to run will depend on what you're trying to offer.
You may even have multiple communities for different products like a private group for customers or private group for your team.
A community can even be used as a bonus for a product you're selling.
Heck, I’ve even see community groups use a membership site where people are paying for access and the owners have links to external videos within the group.
Let's dig a bit deeper into these strategies.
This is the "anyone" can join type of community. These offer open chats, usually some strict rules about spamming, but the general gist is an open discussion which gets as many people as possible to join.
You often find the primary owners of these groups tend to push their own products (subtly) and some offer days when you can self-promote. Open communities can be the start of your audience growth strategy. You may offer an open community at first to entice more members to join, but having a unique twist to your open community will help spread the word.
These communities are a little more monitored. The owners offer a form where you would complete some short information about you, what you're trying to achieve and who you are etc... Buffer have this process for their own group.
One clever tactic is forcing email opt-in. People who want access to the community are willing to swap name and email to gain access.
This is a sneaky little method for building your email list. You could also gather a little extra info about the people wanting to join your group.
Used more as a private forum or bonus to a product. These are usually used like small masterminds or product-specific groups. The perfect way to have open discussions about your own products and gather testimonials.
There is something important that you should be aware of if you create a large community using the networks below, you don’t own any of the content. If the service shuts down you lose everything. Always bear that in mind.
Before we take a look at some of the platforms you can use to grow your own community, here are a couple of features to consider and questions to ask.
Site: Slack.com
We love Slack here at OP. It’s one of the main tools for communication for the team allowing us to share and search files and directly message other team members.
Buffer has also created a new community over in Slack.
https://buffer.com/slack
Wistia switched from a forum to the Slack group. https://wistia.com/community
ConvertKit switched to Slack to encourage more open discussions: https://convertkit.com/community
To get started go to Slack and click Create a new team. Take a moment to admire their new landing since we recorded our Teardown.
Give your team a name, set up a password and you're done. It's very simple to have a slack group up and running in minutes.
Site: Facebook Groups
Probably the most popular of all groups because of the ease to create. If you already have an audience on Facebook, you can easily pull those followers into your group.
Here's our Beta group we've just launched.
When logged into your news feed, click Groups in the left-hand menu.
Create Group
Site: LinkedIn.com
Not something I've personally explored much, but I have seen firsthand through power users that it's a powerful platform for small businesses. If your audience is on LinkedIn you should certainly create a group there.
To create your own LinkedIn Group go to Interests > Groups > Create group.
Site: www.reddit.com
Definitely the most overlooked place for creating a community, but Reddit is a beast. I love it! The communities are real and very much alive.
They don't take kindly to self-promotion, but the discussions are ripe and there's a diverse audience there. Creating your own subreddit allows you to control the rules and could be a great starting point if you already have an account there.
Simply join Reddit and when logged in click Create your own subreddit for your community. I made this one for OptimizePress.
For the last year, we've been knee deep in building new features and apps as part of the OptimizePress brand.
A discussion that often comes up is one about opening a public "official" OptimizePress group. Often in the past, these groups become support groups and disgruntled people decide they can go in and moan about not being answered even when we specify it's NOT a support group.
So that brings us onto the announcement of our new Facebook Group. Notice how we didn't use the word "support" there.
The official OptimizePress Facebook Group is for our customers: https://www.facebook.com/groups/optimizepress
You can go there and chat, share ideas, show your sites but not spamming! Feel free to post support questions, but don't expect support answers directly from OptimizePress.
We welcome the community to support each other sharing tips, workaround, and plugins they have used themselves.
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6 replies to "Building a Community? Check Out These 5 Platforms"
Facebook might be the better platform to have a group, but few people realize that all Facebook groups belong to Facebook. Furthermore, they have ownership which means not only access to your members, but they can prevent you from moving your group or even censor your members since they are the owners. So I declined and went elsewhere.
I never knew I have a great resource center like here….I have been struggling all this while. thanks for the eye opening post
Glad you liked it!
Based on what I’ve seen – as a participant (past or present) of Slack, a Facebook Group, a Reddit subthread, I’m a bit opposed to use a chat app like Slack to build a community, because you’ll get so many voices talking everything gets lost – it’s hard to keep up with who’s talking to who, and having hundreds, or even thousands of PM’s isn’t really ideal either.
Facebook Groups work the best, I think. You can really take the time to read what everyone says, and focus on giving back something that’s useful in a very personal way, and people feel that their voices are heard. Facebook also sorts through the announcements to alert you of the most important ones, which I assume are based on some well designed algorithm, so I’ve been very happy as a participant of two private Facebook groups.
Those are valid points. Slack does offer threaded discussions now. You can also star any messages you want to look back on.
I see some excellent Facebook posts that do actually get lost in groups because of that “well designed algorithm”. Just because they don’t have lots of comments they get pushed down the group and never seen.
I didn’t know about threaded discussions – will have to check in later again.
I don’t know what algorithms they implement specifically, but I’m quite sure that given the current state of the software field, it’s possible to predict, with a high level of accuracy, whether a post is valuable or not – it’s just a matter of implementing them, and seeing that such a trivial feature makes no difference to Facebook’s revenue stream, it’s no surprise it’s not on top of their priority lists! 🙂 Maybe one day, we’ll see improvements.