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In a perfect world, my car would run on starlight and dreams, fries would taste good reheated, and we would never be asked to prove the ROI of community management.

Unfortunately, that’s not the world we live in — so I reached out to 3 different community management experts and asked how they show the value of their community.

Below, I’ll share their best tips for communicating ROI to your stakeholders. (We’ll tackle the fries thing another day.)

But first, it helps to know what you’re up against…

Table of Contents

• Why is it so stinkin’ hard to show the value of community management?
• Tips for Proving the ROI of Community Management
• Drawing a Line from KPI to ROI

Why is it so stinkin’ hard to show the value of community management?

If you run a community (or have been a part of one) the value is self-evident. So why isn’t it as easily stakeholder-evident, too?

As you take on reporting for your community, you need to keep these challenges in mind.

The benefits aren’t always monetary.

Direct access to your customers is priceless. Unfortunately, that means it’s also hard to put a price tag on it.

And how do you measure the value of a user who didn’t file a support ticket because they found the answer in your community?

The benefits aren’t always visible.

Brand awareness, advocacy, sales acceleration, and increased product usage are all very real, very tangible benefits of a thriving community.

Unfortunately, unless a member comes right out and says it’s because of your community, those benefits are usually happening behind the scenes.

Tracking attribution is tricky.

Even when the benefits are both visible and monetary (like leads, signups, or sales) it can be difficult to show that your community was the interaction that caused that conversion.

It’s likely that your members go through several touchpoints (blogs, videos, events, etc.) before even reaching a potential conversion event.

It often spans multiple channels.

Finally, as your community grows, it will likely live on some combination of forums, Slack, social media, etc.

That’s great for growth, but a challenge for analytics.

But hope isn’t lost. Behind every successful community is a leader who figured out how to report on its value. Below, you’ll hear from three experts who’ve done exactly that.

Tips for Proving the ROI of Community Management

Ultimately, the only way to show ROI is to draw a straight line from your community’s actions to the stakeholder’s goals.

Of course, we know from the challenges above that it’s not always that simple in the living. Here are some actionable ways to make that happen.

1. Get buy-in before you build.

Showing a return on investment is a lot easier when your stakeholders understand what the potential value is. Without buy-in, you’re not actually reporting on progress toward that value; you’re trying to justify your existence.

“In theory, if your company is launching a community you already have executive buy-in,” says Jenny Sowyrda, HubSpot’s very own manager of community strategy and operations.

“If you don’t, pause here and go back to find an ally who wants you to have a community,” she adds.

(Seriously. Stop reading and go book a meeting.)

“A very blunt way to say this is that if you aren’t building your community, your customers and prospects are already building one somewhere else,” Sowyrda says.

“And when you don’t manage the community where your brand is being discussed, you lose control of the narrative, you lose direct access to your audience, and you’re going to be running an uphill battle of trying to build trust with a group of people who don’t need you.”

But how do you get that buy-in if you don’t have anything to report on yet? Jenny has your back in our next tip.

2. Start with a small pilot.

“I would call out the importance of experimenting and testing before going all in on a community effort,” says Sowyrda. “Start small and simple and then scale.”

In other words, start with a small pilot that can serve as a proof-of-concept for larger community efforts. That may look like a simple Facebook group, a product forum, or a single, dedicated channel on Discord or Slack.

“This gives you time to identify what your success metrics are, see if there is a positive correlation, and then scale,” she adds.

If you find that positive correlation, you’ve now got the data you need to make your case to leadership. And if you don’t find the correlation, your program is still light enough to try something new.

3. Set clear expectations for timeline.

You’ve presented your pilot and gotten buy-in; the next most important thing to talk about is timeline.

“There are no quick wins in community,” cautions Jenny Sowyrda. “Yet it is such an important part of building a trustworthy and valuable company.”

That may not be immediately clear to business leaders who are used to the relatively fast turnaround of paid ads and traditional marketing. It’s part of your job to set expectations for the timeline — and you need to set them early and repeatedly.

“Make sure your stakeholders know that building a strong community is a marathon, not a sprint,” says Alyssa Martin, community manager at HeyOrca. “It takes time to build trust and advocacy.”

4. Ask stakeholders about their goals and what metrics define success.

While you’re having those initial conversations anyway, go ahead and ask your stakeholders what they care about.

“Get to know them, get to know their pain points,” says Max Pete, community engagement program manager at Square. “What are their goals and what are they looking for in terms of success metrics?”

Another great question is how they define “success”—both in terms of data and outcome. Other questions to consider are:

• What metrics do you use to measure your goals?
• What would a meaningful impact look like to those goals?
• What outcomes do you need to see from this project?

“It is super important to have those early conversations with key stakeholders on what is important data for them,” Max adds. “[Proving ROI is] difficult if you don’t know what you should be reporting on.”

5. Approach reporting as problem solving.

One of my absolute favorite takeaways from talking with Max Pete: To approach reporting not as simply presenting data — but as how community helps to solve stakeholder problems.

Now that you know their goals, pain points, and definitions of success, tailor your reporting to tell a story about how the community addresses all of that.

As a bonus, this mindset will also help you focus your reporting on only the most important community management metrics.

6. Connect your community to other teams.

Finally, consider that stakeholder goals aren’t the only way to show value. By connecting your efforts to other team’s goals, your community increases its own ROI.

“I am very biased but I’m pretty sure you can apply community to every element of your business,” Jenny says with a smile.

Max Pete gives the example of using Square’s community reach to bring attention to a new marketing campaign.

“Because our cross-functional partner and I had a common goal of increasing engagement, we came up with a month-long activation campaign for members to participate in the community,” Pete says. “The idea was to drive conversation around specific topics and use a CTA to drive members to read more.”

In the end, the collaboration boosted traffic to the marketing campaign while also increasing engagement among the community—a win-win for both teams!

And both of those successes will look great during stakeholder meetings.

Drawing a Line from KPI to ROI

So now you’ve established goals. You’ve set expectations. You’ve defined success. It’s time to choose what metrics will combine all of that into a cohesive story.

We’ll go deeper into how to measure these KPIs in our blog about community management metrics, but for now, here are some options to consider based on what your stakeholders value.

Brand Awareness

Social Mentions

“This is probably one of my favourite ways to prove how a community is building trust,” says HeyOrca’s Alyssa Martin. “Always take screenshots of these posts! It’s great to have to help prove your point.”

Share of Voice

Share of voice compares your portion of brand awareness against competitors. In addition to social mentions, it can include paid ads clicks or keyword traffic.

Referral Rate/Advocacy Rate

If your stakeholders are focused on brand awareness, referral rate is a great metric to highlight. Communities are uniquely effective in turning customers into promoters.

Event Participation Rate

This can refer to in-person events as well as online events like courses or webinars. Community members often have a higher participation rate than non-member audiences.

Conversion/Revenue

Conversion Rate (CVR)

This can be a tricky metric, because communities made up of existing customers may have a lower conversion rate. You’ll have to define what conversion means for those cases.

Community Attributed Leads/Signups/Sales

This is another area where cross-functional campaigns can help. Other teams may already have access to downstream reporting on their own success metrics. If you can show that your community is a source of traffic for those teams, that can help you connect their conversions to your community campaigns.

Cost Per Conversion (CPC)

You’ll need to calculate the total cost of running your community in order to find your CPC. That can be a big ask, but it’s likely worth the effort.

You’ll probably find that community-attributed conversions are much more cost-effective than other forms of marketing.

Customer Service/Customer Support

Traffic to FAQ Pages or Knowledge Base Articles

Remember above when we asked how to show the value of a customer who doesn’t file a support ticket? This is one way.

If you can show that your community is a major source of traffic to self-service resources, it indicates that your community is saving your company money.

Average Response Time

Since you’re spending so much time with your community, you may find that your response time is quicker than officially filed tickets.

Response Rate

While this typically refers to the number of queries that receive a response, Jenny Sowyrda explains that it can also refer to the percentage of responses that come from your company (versus other members).

That can be a good indicator that your members are receiving accurate information from trustworthy sources.

Resolution Rate

This metric is like response rate, but specific to members who bring up issues or complaints.

Product or Company Feedback

Surveys and Polls

Direct access to customer/prospect opinions is one of the unique benefits of community management, and you should be tapping into it often.

“If you want to know what they want, you can just ask them!” says Sowyrda. “If you want to know what they don’t like, they’re probably already telling you (but you can also just ask them!)”

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

You may not know it by name, but you’ve definitely encountered NPS surveys before.

NPS is based on some variation of the question “On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend our brand/product/service to a friend or colleague?”

Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis refers to using software to analyze the emotional tone of content. A good community management tool can help you analyze how your members feel about your company, product, or service.

Feature Requests

Your members can be one of the best sources of new ideas for improving your products and services.

And, in return, fulfilling feature requests can be one of the best ways to delight your community members.

Product Feedback

“You can give the microphone to your community and let them speak about their experience and expertise,” says Jenny.

If you follow the tips from our experts, you should be able to quickly narrow down which of these metrics are right for your community.

Soon, you’ll be the expert who’s figured out how to prove the ROI of community management. Next stop, french fries.

If you‘ve seen other posts I’ve written about community management, you know I used to manage a Facebook community for a TV station where I worked as a digital journalist.

My experience gave me first-hand knowledge of why community management is important and why brands should invest in it.

Don’t believe me, well consider this: 86% of social media marketers believe having an active community is critical to brands’ success on social media in 2024. Furthermore, 60% say their companies are already building such communities.

Still not convinced? Keep reading, and I‘ll share five reasons community management is integral to marketing based on my experience and that of HubSpot’s Principal Marketing Manager of Community, Erica Finley.

Let’s get into it.

My Experience in Community Management

For context, my experience in community management stems from my time as a digital reporter for a television news station called First Coast News.

The station has a popular Facebook Community page called First Coast Weather Watchers, where viewers can speak to the station’s meteorologists in real time, discuss local weather, and share interesting photos and videos of weather phenomena.

My responsibilities included engaging with our audience, answering questions, facilitating discussions, keeping the online community safe and welcoming, and gathering user-generated content.

Now that you know my credentials, we‘re ready to learn what I’ve learned!

5 Important Reasons for Community Management

1. Community management builds trust and brand loyalty.

When I managed First Coast News’ Facebook community page, I noticed a rapport being built between our audience and our meteorologists.

We often saw the same faces popping up on the page, sharing content, asking questions, and welcoming new members.

And that trust lent to higher viewership for our weather segments and visitors to our website.

“Consumers make decisions based on opinions from people they know, like, and trust,” says Finley. “Word of mouth has never been more powerful, and seeing real-life use cases, being able to ask questions, and hearing earnest reactions to products and services are no longer just ‘nice-to-haves.’”

Building trust via dedicated community spaces can be intimidating for companies because it means yielding some power to audience interactions.

Still, Finley says the conversations are happening anyway, so why not join in the fun and use it to your advantage?

“You may as well carve out dedicated spaces that folks can lean into for inspiration, advice, entertainment, and more,” she says.

2. Community management creates a valuable feedback loop.

Finley says that with community management, “You’ll get a bird’ s-eye view of what’s working and what’s not, what people love, and what they’d like to change, and you can use that insight to improve your product or service.”

And I can attest to this in my own experience.

One of the things I enjoyed most about managing First Coast Weather Watchers was getting feedback from our audience in real-time.

For example, we noticed our community loved the candid explanations one of the meteorologists gave about weather phenomena and how he’d often post photos of himself analyzing weather patterns with coffee in hand.

So, we took this feedback and added a segment to our weather forecast called “Science with Steve,” which turned out to be a hit with our television viewers.

3. It humanizes your brand.

This all goes back to the first point I made about trust. 81% of consumers need to trust a brand before they consider buying. One of the most tried-and-tested ways to build trust is to humanize your brand.

Replying to consumers, engaging in authentic conversations, and throwing in a little humor when appropriate will show the human side of your business.

According to Kristen Baker, who put together our Ultimate Guide to Social Community Management, these interactions make audiences “feel like they’re interacting with real people rather than a faceless entity.”

An example that comes to mind is DuoLingo’s TikTok account.

The account frequently engages with its audience by replying to comments under its videos and trading jokes with its followers.

The company’s close relationship with its followers was beneficial when its account mysteriously lost its verification badge.

Followers were so distraught that they made Duolingo trend on TikTok, demanding that its badge be returned. They even came up with theories as to why it was removed in the first place.

Dedicated followers brought visibility to the issue, and after the company had contacted TikTok, the badge was returned.

4. It can generate unique user-generated content.

Another aspect of community management that I enjoyed was the amount of unique user-generated content we received from viewers in the community.

From videos of tornado spouts to photos of a purple sky after intense storms, the station garnered so much unique content that could be found with our competitors.

We’d then share the content on all our social media platforms and include them in our weather segments on TV while shouting out the senders, encouraging more community members to send in content.

So, if you want to gain more UGC for your social media, website, or marketing channels, starting and managing a community around your platform is the way to go.

Still not convinced? A recent HubSpot survey of 500+ marketers found that 92% say user-generated content increases brand awareness of their products.

5. It drives traffic and conversions.

While managing the Facebook community page, I noticed that organically directing our audience to our website was easy.

For example, I’d often post updates saying, “If you want to learn more about why the sky turns purple after a severe storm, go to the First Coast News website.”

As a result, our posts linked in the community would see higher traffic than posts that weren’t.

The fact is organic interactions with followers create natural opportunities to direct them to your website, blog, or landing pages.

As social media and digital platforms become more integral to marketing and consumers’ experiences, brands must build and leverage online communities to connect with their audiences.

Community management ensures your brand is humanized to your consumers to build trust and a loyal customer base. I see community marketing staying strong for a while, so start building your community now.

When I started thinking about the different types of online communities that exist, I felt like the possibilities were endless.

After all, new communities pop up every day. Some are free, some are paid. Some are public, some are exclusive.

However, based on what I know about community management, there’s a smart way to categorize these communities based on your brand’s engagement goals.

Here’s a list of the main types of online communities for your inspiration.

Top 6 Types of Online Communities

Disclaimer: Some communities may overlap across categories or share similarities with each other. For example, a brand community can also be a social community, and vice versa.

However, there are nuances to keep in mind for each type, and I think that makes all of this worthwhile.

OK, now that I got that off my chest, let’s get into the top six.

1. Brand Communities

A brand community is a place where like-minded customers can come together and talk about how much they love what you do, create, or value.

From my perspective, these communities can help you strengthen the relationship between your brand and your biggest supporters. For that reason alone, just about any type of community could be considered a brand community.

How brand communities work:

• This community is typically cultivated from the people who follow you on social media and/or actively buy (and enjoy) your products and services.
• They have an emotional connection to your brand which inspires brand loyalty and advocacy to other potential customers.
• Often, companies who leverage this community type offer incentives for sharing or creating brand-related content (e.g., showing others how to use their favorite products).

Best for: Brands of all sizes and across industries, especially those with a strong brand identity

Example: Canva Design Community (Brand Community for Canva Designers)

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What I like about Canva’s Design Community: I absolutely love Canva, and I’m always looking for inspiration for my next project. This community is easy to join. Plus, I get all the best advice from users who enjoy the platform as much as I do.

2. Social Communities

Naturally, these types of communities live on social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and X (formerly known as Twitter), LinkedIn, and Reddit.

The goal of a social community is to create a virtual gathering space where your followers can chat, have fun, and make connections.

How social communities work:

• You’re building engagement around audience interests, your brand campaigns, or industry events. The first example I think of is an interest-based Facebook Group (my millennial is showing).
• They can be as big or small as you’d like — from larger interest-based groups (like Nike Run Club), to smaller discussion-based forums (like this Supernote subreddit).
• While conversations are generally led by the community members, brands can encourage engagement through user-generated campaigns and targeted conversation starters.

Best for: Brands who have a strong social media presence, emerging businesses who are looking to increase brand awareness

Example: Instant Pot Community (Social Community for Instant Pot Users)

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What I like about the Instant Pot Community: Instant Pots are SO versatile. This community inspires diversity. It allows people from all walks of life to share their favorite recipes with each other — from family recipes to cultural staples.

3. Networking Communities

Be honest, was LinkedIn the first thought that came to mind for this one? It was for me.

LinkedIn is one of the largest professional networks that exists. This makes it a great channel for networking communities — like professional organizations and advisory committees — that promote collaboration.

How networking communities work:

• Networking communities are typically discussion-based and designed to help connect members to new opportunities.
• You can connect your members with industry professionals for advice, mentorship, or training — as well as people seeking those services if your community holds the expertise.
• In addition to LinkedIn, you can use free platforms like Zoom or Microsoft Teams for virtual meet-ups, real-time forums, or community events.

Best for: National businesses with local hubs, educational institutions, brands in specific niches (e.g., career development)

Example: Chief (Networking Community for Women Executives)

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What I like about Chief: Outside of the fact that Chief supports women in power positions, I like that the network of women executives is vetted. This positions the community as trustworthy which is attractive to prospective members.

4. Content Communities

When I say content communities, think of this blog, forums like Reddit, and chat platforms like Discord. Multimedia communities like YouTube are also in the mix.

Content communities rely on shared contributions from its members. Your favorite subreddit is nothing without threads, and the HubSpot Blog would be nothing without our writers.

How content communities work:

• People join content communities because they share a common interest. It could be professional, recreational, or based on lifestyle.
• The community thrives off of its members who regularly contribute, consume, and share content.
• Guest content opportunities, user-generated content campaigns, and quizzes/polls are all great ways to get members involved and facilitate growth.

Best for: Businesses with limited resources who would benefit from external contributors to round out their content strategy 

Example: Chewy (Content Community on YouTube)

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What I like about Chewy’s YouTube Community: Chewy makes great use of the poll feature in YouTube’s Community tab. They ask targeted questions like “What’s on your pet’s summer wish list?” which gives them the insights to tailor their offerings to their customers’ preferences.

5. Support Communities

If you’ve ever contributed to a knowledge base or shared an FAQ, congrats! You’re an important part of a support community.

Support communities are ideal for brands who benefit from offering technical guidance or strategic insights to their customers.

How support communities work:

• Support communities are usually focused on peer-to-peer conversations with support from technical experts and customer success specialists.
• Resources like how-to articles and discussion forums for common challenges and solutions live in these communities.
• They rely on first-hand experience using a particular product or service along with tips, tricks, and best practices from fellow users (or developers).

Best for: Businesses with a dedicated customer support department, technical brands or brands with products and services that require guidance (e.g., SaaS, internet providers, DIY, etc.)

Example: HubSpot Community

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What I like about HubSpot Community: OK, sure, I may be a little biased. But the HubSpot Community is jam-packed with helpful support resources. You can easily join in on top conversations, discover new forums, join community groups, and much more.

6. Learning Communities

Learning communities inspire education and knowledge-building, but they don’t have to strictly be academic.

A lot of these communities are either centered around building a skill (e.g., communication) or a specific topic or area of interest (e.g., candle making).

How learning communities work:

• Learning community members are all working toward a common goal — like improving communication skills or getting good at making candles.
• The community benefits from people sharing ideas, asking questions, giving feedback, and supporting their peers.
• Learning communities are often part of larger communities like brand, social, networking, content, and support.

Best for: Brands of all sizes and across industries, especially those in specialty niches (e.g., cooking/baking) or higher education

Example: CandleScience (Learning Community for Candle Makers)

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What I like about the CandleScience Community: If you can’t tell by now, I’m a candle enthusiast. And I actually make them in my spare time. I love how CandleScience uses their blog as a discussion forum for aspiring chandlers.

Before we wrap up, I highly encourage you to check this out if you’re new to community building: How to Build a Successful Online Community: A Step-by-Step Guide.

Deciding on a community type is one thing, but that will tell you how to really make it shine (with tips from the experts who’ve done just that).

Happy Community Building

Feeling inspired yet?

If I leave you with nothing else, just remember this: Focus on building the type of community that aligns your brand and supports what you want to accomplish.

With the right strategy, you’ll make it easy for your audience to meet you where you are.

Brands build online communities around their target audiences.

As consumer preferences change and technological advances offer more and more opportunities, community management strategies change alongside them.

In this piece, I’ll go over community management trends to be aware of in 2024 and how you can adapt them for yourself.

Community Management Trends in 2024

1. Hyper-Personalization

A community management trend I’ve noticed most often is hyper-personalization, and I’m not surprised by this:

Consumers’ expectations for personalized experiences have reached an all-time high, and this desire has grown within online communities.

Consumers, including myself, want to feel connected to the brands they support, and personalized experiences create a sense of belonging that keeps people coming back for more.

How to Adopt This Trend

My top tip for community managers looking to adopt this trend is to gather information about your ideal members and use that information to create a personalized experience. For example;

• Data about your community members behavior, interests, and preferences can help you generate personalized content recommendations and target messaging that is unique to individual users.
• You can create personalized onboarding experiences for each member with custom welcome messages, suggestion sections or community spaces to join, and resources to help them get the most out of their experience.

AI can be extremely helpful when providing personalized experiences, and I’ll touch on this below.

2. Leveraging AI in community management.

Community management helps you ensure your community runs as you want it to, enables you to build those relationships with members, and ensures your community is a safe and respectful space for all who use it.

As more and more people eagerly join online communities, it can become understandably more challenging for community managers to keep a pulse on everything.

To supplement their duties, a recent trend in community management is leveraging AI-powered tools as trusty sidekicks.

How to Adopt This Trend

My top tip for using AI as a community management sidekick is to choose a tool that is specific to your exact needs.

Some tasks that AI tools can be helpful for are:

• AI tools can scan through the content within your community to detect and remove harmful content in real time to keep communities safe and aligned with your community standards.
• AI-powered chatbots can use information about members to offer personalized experiences and direct them to the content most aligned with their interests.
• Sentiment analysis tools can monitor conversations and alert human moderators to any issues that need immediate attention.

If you want a general solution, look for community management tools with multiple use cases.

Pro Tip: Whenever I recommend using AI, I have to mention that it’s important to not become overly reliant on it. Use it as a trusty sidekick to bolster your efforts, not as the sole thing responsible for managing your community. Always look over your tool’s shoulders to ensure it performs exactly as you want it to.

3. In-person community events.

Online communities help you deepen relationships, but there’s no better way to build relationships than in-person connections.

Jenny Sowyrda, Manager of Community Strategy and Operations at HubSpot, had the same thought and told me, “It seems like 2024 is becoming the year of people wanting to find value in person. I believe that folks are saturated with online content and the curation that comes along with that.”

In-person events are an additional opportunity to offer immersive and interactive experiences that you can’t necessarily build online.

As a result, a community management trend I predict will grow is creating opportunities for in-person connection at in-person events.

How to Adopt This Trend

Sowyrda says, “There’s something fun about going to an in-person event, or meeting folks in person, because you don’t know where the conversation is going to go – you don’t know what you’re going to learn.”

I recommend looking for opportunities where it makes sense to offer in-person elements. They don’t have to be large-scale, expensive experiences — you can choose whatever works best for your budget and ability.

For example, if you’re launching a new product, you can invite a select few members to a small launch party where they can try out your new product.

However you adopt this trend, always make sure your in-person events are focused around building connections and allowing attendees to interact.

4. Niche interest communities.

Consumer desire for increased personalization gives way to this trend, as more niche communities let people join groups hyper-specific to their interests.

And, these more niche communities go a long way in building trust and genuine connection between community members and between you and your community members.

How to Adopt This Trend

Successfully offering niche communities comes from understanding your community members. Do they have any unique interests, hobbies, or identities that align with your brand? Any unique interests can be used to create them.

You can create niche interest communities that are standalone, or even create sub communities within your main community, so long as you share content and offer engagement opportunities that members would expect to find.

This is an extremely general example, but it explains what I mean: if you’re a t-shirt company and you create a niche community for red t-shirt lovers, you want to share red t-shirt related content. Talking about purple t-shirts isn’t of interest to your members.

Pro Tip: Micro-influencers (between 10K and 100K followers) can shine in helping you attract people to your niche communities. They bring marketers the most success because they have a smaller group of more loyal and engaged followers.

If you find an influencer that fits with the niche community you want to create, they likely have a trusted group of followers who are a good fit.

5. Humanizing your brand.

Consumers want the brands and businesses they support to let their personalities shine. They want conversational tones that show there are real people behind the brand that add an air of humanized authenticity that people crave.

I think Viktoriia Khutorna, communications specialist at Promova, puts this well:

“People are likely to go to a company that not only sells at a reasonable price but also communicates humanly, jokes, supports, or honestly admits mistakes and goes to fix them.”

This consumer desire runs over into online communities as well: people want to know that there is a real, human community manager that engages with them.

How to Adopt This Trend

My tip for community managers is to be conversational when you share content with the community and in any interactions you have with members.

Canned responses can be the baseline templates, but further humanize them with each interaction you have.

You can also share behind the scenes content that show the day to day of your brand, display your unique personality and humor

Sharing behind the scenes content is also a great way to humanize your brand.

You could, for example, have a community manager give a behind the scenes look into their day to day as a community manager. It gives a face to a username, and shows members that there is a real human behind the screen.

6. Data security.

A trend we uncovered in our Consumer Trend Surveys is that consumers are more concerned than ever about privacy and data security, and this is relevant for community management as well.

Members expect the communities they’re part of are safe and secure, that information they share about themselves to join the community and while they’re in the community is protected, and any personal data and information is secure.

How to Adopt This Trend

If you’re building your community, I recommend having data and privacy protection measures in place. For example:

• If you collect credit card or banking information for subscription payments, it must be stored securely or deleted after one-time payments. I highly recommend using secure payment processors built to help you prioritize financial security.
• If you collect personal demographic information (like email or addresses), it needs to be stored securely so bad actors can’t access it.

For whatever kind of data you collect, always let members know you’re collecting it, how you store it, and how you plan to use it. Transparency is key; consumers are more likely to trust you if you give up-front explanations.

Consumer preferences are always changing.

The community management trends I mentioned above are the most recent developments I’ve discovered, and they stem from consumer preferences and technological advancements.

I recommend leveraging those most relevant to your online community and reading the HubSpot Blog to stay on top of evolving trends.

A key decision when creating an online community is whether it’ll be free for members to join or if they’ll have to pay to access it. And, the model you choose can have a significant impact on how you end up running your community.

This piece will be all about free vs. paid communities — I’ll explain what each one is, the pros and cons to each model, and dive into expert tips for choosing between the two.

Table of Contents

• Free vs. Paid Online Communities
• Free Online Community
• Paid Online Community
• Owned Online Community
• Freemium Online Community
• How to Choose the Right Community Business Model

Free vs. Paid Online Communities

The two main types of online communities are free and paid. Within each, communities can also be owned and use the freemium model. Let’s start with free vs. paid online communities.

Free Online Community

A free online community is, well, a free-to-join online community.

It can be owned and run by your business (more on owned communities here), like a forum you create on your website or a social media profile you make, like a Facebook Page.

Best For

I recommend free online communities for brands, businesses, or creators and influencers who want to build brand awareness, increase visibility, and attract a large and diverse user base with varying levels of engagement.

Free communities are also excellent ways to learn more about your audiences in an open forum.

Pros of Free Online Communities

• Free online communities have low barriers to entry, meaning it’s easier to attract new members and build larger communities with more diverse representation.
• You can build brand awareness and platforms your audience might already be on, lessening the work it takes to build a community from scratch.
• You can be more hands-off with a free community and let your community members create engagement opportunities for one another.

Cons of Free Online Communities

• Low barrier to entry means you might have larger communities that aren’t made up of well-qualified members. I’m part of a few communities but consider myself a casual user rather than a well-qualified lead.
• Engagement can be lower because users might join out of curiosity rather than being eager to engage with your business and other community members.
• If your free community is on a social media platform, you must follow its rules and have limited creative liberties.

Paid Online Communities

A paid online community is a space you create that members pay to join, usually with monthly subscription fees, to access its content and features.

Most businesses create paid online communities to monetize offers, build loyalty, and deepen relationships with audiences.

The exclusivity of paid communities brings higher engagement and more dedicated users eager to interact with the premium offerings of your community.

Many paid online communities use platforms or tools meant for community building, but you have control over what you do with your community.

You set the rules and guidelines, customize it to your branding, and set prices. Most platforms take a percentage of your earnings.

I think Patreon is a great example of a paid online community platform. Users can offer exclusive content to subscribers and vary offerings with tiered memberships. The two plans it offers take a percentage of membership revenue.

Best For

I recommend paid online communities to those who want more control, guaranteed interest from members, and a steady stream of revenue. They’re also best for those who want to offer exclusive content and services.

Pros of Paid Online Communities

• You have complete control over the paid communities you build, from the visuals you use to who can access the content behind your paywalls to the privacy and security measures you use to protect the community.
• Members are willing to make a financial investment, so they’re typically more qualified and interested in what you offer. Users are eager to engage, which provides higher-quality engagement and gives you deeper insight into your ideal user.
• Membership fees are a source of recurring revenue for your business, and you can monetize the content you’re already used to creating.

Cons of Paid Online Communities

• Membership fees can deter people from joining, so paid communities are typically smaller.
• Paid communities experience slower growth, and you need to market the community to draw in users.
• Paying members want their money’s worth and will check in to make sure they’re getting value from your offer. You need to remain committed to providing high-value, exclusive content and keeping members engaged.

As I mentioned above, free and paid online communities are the two main models. Within the two, however, there are also owned and freemium online communities. I’ll discuss the two below.

Owned Online Community

An owned online community is one that you build and manage yourself. You have complete control over your owned community and the content you share, and you can monetize (or not) as you see fit.

This type of community can be as simple as a forum you create on your website or more advanced like a membership website you build or subscription tiers you offer on a community platform site like Patreon.

Be careful to view your social media profiles as an “owned” option. Yes, you create your profiles, but you have to follow the platform rules rather than make your functionality.

Best For

I recommend owned communities for businesses, brands, or creators/influencers looking to create a controlled environment, inspire engagement that helps you meet brand goals, and deepen relationships with members.

Pros of Owned Online Communities

The main pro to owned communities is that you have complete control, like the rules you set for members to follow, the branded color schemes you use, and whether you monetize your community to generate revenue.

You also get deeper insight into your community than you would on non-owned platforms, and you don’t have to compete with the noise of other communities.

Cons of Owned Online Communities

A con of owned online communities is that you create them yourself, which requires time and resources. Organic growth can be limited, and if your community is paid, you must provide ongoing value to keep members engaged.

Freemium Online Community

A freemium online community combines free and paid options. Casual users can stay casual, and people who want more can pay for more.

The paid options typically run on tiered models, where each step up includes the content from the previous tier plus additional exclusive perks.

Best For

I recommend freemium communities to those wanting to attract a large user base with basic offerings and exclusive content for the most interested users.

You’ll attract both those who don’t want to pay and those who do, giving you two separate groups of people to learn about.

Pros of Freemium Online Communities

I think Amy Porterfield, host of Online Marketing Made Easy, gave my teammate Caroline Forsey the best explanation of the benefits of a freemium community:

“When building your online community, your goal is always to leave your followers thinking, ‘If this is what they offer for free, I wonder what their paid content is like?’ So don’t be afraid to give your best stuff away for free.”

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You can continuously build brand awareness and engage with a general audience while also using the draw of premium content to entice interested members to become paid users (revenue generation opportunity).

You can also lower churn rates by downgrading those who cancel subscriptions to basic users that you re-engage and potentially inspire to restart subscriptions.

Cons of Freemium Online Communities

The biggest challenge with freemium communities is finding a clear balance for each tier. You want to engage your free users but not so much that you leave your paid users hanging.

Finding a balance is crucial because your paid members will be waiting for those premium offerings, and users interested in upgrading want to see a key differentiator and value-add for any payments they make.

How to Choose the Right Community Business Model

Now that you know about the different community models, it’s time to decide what works best for you.

To help you through your process, I asked community-building experts to share their top tips for choosing between free and paid communities. Let’s dive in.

Understand the purpose of your community.

In this piece, I discuss how to build an online community in depth, but the first step is determining your goals for starting a community, as these will impact what you create.

So, similarly, one of the most important steps to choosing between free vs paid online communities is understanding why you’re creating a community.

Robel de Jesus, Corporate Communications Group Head at SAFC, agrees with this and told me that this was one of his main considerations when he created an online community at his company.

He said: “At SAFC, when we launched the SAFC Heroes community, our aim was to engage with individuals interested in sustainable business practices and corporate social responsibility. We opted for a free community model because it aligned with our goal to maximize reach and inclusivity, which is essential for fostering widespread engagement and impact.”

He says paid communities are more appropriate for situations where, for example, you’re offering things like exclusive content or networking opportunities, which require more resources and efforts to manage effectively.

Here’s his tip: “Ultimately, the choice between a free or paid community should hinge on the strategic objectives of the community: reach and inclusivity versus exclusivity and specialized value. For brands looking to build a loyal, engaged community, consider how the structure supports your long-term goals and the perceived value you wish to provide to your members.”

Understand your goals for your online community.

Yes, goals and purpose are similar, but I’m separating them because they mean two different things for community building.

Your purpose is why you’re building your community, and your goals are what you’ll accomplish based on that purpose.

“Take it from someone who’s built quite a few successful online communities: Creating a thriving online community involves making a key decision right at the outset—should it be free, or should it require a membership fee? The right choice hinges on what you aim to achieve with your community,” says Jonathan Buffard, Digital Marketing Director at Bottom Line Marketing Agency.

A free community might be your best bet if your primary goal is to build engagement, brand awareness, and brand visibility.

You can attract a large number of users because there are no barriers to entry, and community members are eager to interact with people like them.

Buffard says that there are instances where a paid community might make more sense: “If your community acts as a crucial step within your sales funnel, or if it‘s the main product you’re offering, charging a membership fee could be advantageous.”

Before you decide to charge for access, Buffard recommends asking yourself these four critical questions:

• What unique benefits does your community offer?
• What would you pay for access to such a community?
• Could potential members find similar groups for free on social platforms?
• What exclusive advantages would they gain by joining yours?

Determine whether your audience is willing to pay.

Your goals for your community are important, but you’ll have trouble reaching them if you don’t consider whether your audience can help you meet them.

Given this, who your audience is plays a significant role in the community model you choose because you need to account for their needs, preferences, and willingness to pay.

For example, if you want to create an exclusive community but your audience doesn’t seem interested in more exclusive offerings, a paid community would be a waste of your time.

You’d likely find more success with a freemium model that lets you attract a large group of non-paying users and a smaller group more willing to pay.

Stefano Lodola, Owner of Think Languages LLC, told me he had to make this assessment during his process: “As someone who runs a language-learning website, I suggest carefully considering your brand‘s value proposition and, most importantly, your target audience’s willingness to pay.”

He adds, “In my case, I cater to language learners who need to see improvement in their language proficiency. A paid community may be more effective for them since they want to have access to useful and exclusive content. Ultimately, it really depends on your goals and objectives and whether it will be sustainable in the long run.”

Consider the level of engagement you’re looking for.

I assume you want to foster engagement within your community, so the level of interaction you want plays a part in the model you choose.

Victor Hsi, Founder of UGC Creator, manages free and paid communities and said engagement is an important factor to consider. He says, “In free communities, most members join without contributing. They might join out of curiosity or to access free information and will likely not be actively participating.”

On the other hand, he says that a community with a subscription fee can “Encourage more active, value-adding participation. For example, by establishing a small $1 subscription fee, members are prompted to make a transaction, which inherently leads to increased commitment and participation in the community.”

He adds, “This simple act of pulling out their credit card and being invested in learning what the community has to offer them often makes members more driven to engage and network within the community.”

Consider how exclusive you want your community to be.

Casey Meraz, Owner & Digital Marketing Expert of Casey Meraz, shares his top tip with me: “When you’re deciding between a free or paid online community, think about the level of exclusivity you want to offer.”

Free communities allow for different levels of participation but faster growth.

Meraz says free communities also “Offer accessibility to a wider audience, including those who might be valuable contributors but are not in a position to pay. While free communities might not have the inherent sense of exclusivity, you can still create value through high-quality content and active management.”

Choosing between the two can come down to the exclusivity you want to offer.

You can build a more qualified group of actively engaged members with paid communities since everyone who joins is willing to spend money to reap the benefits. You can create larger communities with free options, but there’s no guarantee that members who join will participate in conversations.

Over to You

Free and paid communities benefit those who use them, but both allow you to meet different goals.

If you leverage the advice from the experts I spoke to, you can pick the model that works best for you and helps you meet your objectives.

Jenny Sowyrda, manager of community strategy and operations at HubSpot, shared a great analogy with me about community management:

“As the community manager, you’re hosting a party. At first you have to welcome everyone, take their jackets, and offer them food or a drink.

But once more guests start to arrive, you can make connections amongst guests who have things in common, and you can slowly pull back … to just being in the background.”

Love it.

It’s also worth noting that the party may look a little different based on the types of community management out there. So, let’s review the top six together.

Table of Contents

• The SPACES Model
• Types of Community Management
• Community Management Strategies

The SPACES Model

You can look at community management in many ways, but the easiest one is through the SPACES model.

No need to take my word for it because the experts agree that this is a pretty solid foundation.

“The SPACES model is a fantastic framework to help brands determine how the community can help the business with a specific focus …” says Christina Garnett, founder and fractional CCO at Pocket CCO.

“… Especially for non-community builders. It helps provide clarity about what the business wants the community to provide,” she continues.

The SPACES model, proposed by CMX, organizes community management strategies based on their primary function and the focus of the community in question.

Sowyrda adds, “The SPACES model makes sense in the fact that you really do have to focus on one thing at a time. It does a good job of highlighting the different ways your company can use a community.”

The acronym “SPACES” represents six distinct community management categories: Support, Product, Acquisition, Contribution, Engagement, and Success.

Now, onto the specifics.

Types of Community Management

Enter: the specifics. Here are the six types of community management to consider based on the SPACES model.

Pro tip: As you start building your community management strategy, Sowyrda recommends focusing on one (or two) of the elements below and mastering those before expanding your approach.

1. Support

Support communities empower members to help each other out by answering questions or solving problems. These communities can be organized as an online forum or discussion board, where members can ask and answer questions.

I’d also recommend offering other support resources like knowledge bases and FAQs, so people can find answers quickly on their own.

Benefits:

• Reduced customer support costs
• Lower workload for your customer service teams
• Quicker resolution of common issues
• A greater sense of community among members

Best for: Brands with in-depth product lines, like software or electronics, where users can benefit from sharing tips, tricks, and troubleshooting advice.

Example: Apple Support Community

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What I like about Apple’s Support Community: Honestly, the simplicity of search is really appealing here. You can type in a keyword or ask a question and connect with Apple customers around the world on related support topics.

2. Product (Ideation, Innovation, and Feedback)

Product communities allow you to create a safe space for your customers to provide feedback on your products and services. They can share thoughts on how to improve your products or ideas for innovation.

This way, you’re basically inviting members to participate directly in your product growth and development process.

For example, at HubSpot, Sowyrda explains, “We have communities of product (discussing HubSpot’s products) and communities of practice which are spaces to discuss professional topics.”

Benefits:

• Improved product-market fit
• Continuous product improvement based on user feedback
• Higher user satisfaction
• Sense of ownership and loyalty to your brand

Best for: Consumer-oriented software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies where user feedback is crucial for iterative product development.

Example: LEGO Ideas

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What I like about LEGO Ideas: They make it super easy (and fun) for LEGO lovers to submit ideas for new designs. Plus, people can see what winning ideas look like from their fellow customers.

3. Acquisition and Advocacy

Acquisition and advocacy communities are typically networks of ambassadors or advocates who help build awareness around your brand.

Members promote your products and services through word of mouth, affiliate programs, and social media.

Benefits:

• Increased brand awareness
• Lower customer acquisition costs
• Higher conversion rates

Best for: Almost every type of company can benefit from acquisition and advocacy communities, but it’s particularly effective for startups and newly-established brands.

Example: Sephora Squad

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What I like about Sephora Squad: The community isn’t officially live until August 2024, but Sephora is already creating some buzz. If you can get people excited before launch, you’re already one step ahead of your competitors.

4. Content and Contribution

Content and contribution communities encourage users to share content and ideas or participate in collaborative projects.

Contributions can range from guest blog posts and media submissions to involvement in open-source software projects on your website.

Dedicated team members typically curate the user-generated content to ensure it’s appropriate, meets quality standards, and aligns with your community guidelines.

Benefits:

• Increased member engagement
• A strong sense of ownership among contributors
• More valuable content for the entire community

Best for: Media companies, creative industries, and open-source projects that thrive from UGC.

Example: Adobe Lightroom

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What I like about Adobe Lightroom Community: I got this example from one of my best photog friends, and it really is great. You can see exactly how the contributor edited their photo in Lightroom — from start to finish.

5. Engagement (External and Internal)

There are two types of engagement communities: external and internal.

Internal engagement communities bring together a brand’s internal contributors. These communities serve as a hub to share internal news and resources with employees, partners, vendors, or suppliers.

These communities can also help align staff members with the company’s goals and values, improve morale and retention, and enhance collaboration.

By comparison, external engagement communities connect individuals who have a shared interest related to a company or brand. Like if I ran a cookie company and created a community for baking enthusiasts.

Benefits:

• External engagement opportunities
• A sense of belonging and stronger connections with your brand
• Organic increases in brand awareness via word-of-mouth

Best for:

• Internal: Beneficial for larger organizations with many departments or teams spread across different regions or countries.
• External: Great for lifestyle brands or companies with strong brand identities based on lifestyle or values (e.g., fitness or beauty).

Examples:

• Internal: HubSpot’s Slack community, which is a platform for employees to connect, share ideas, and ask questions.
• External: Nike Run Club

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What I like about Nike Run Club: This is a smart play for Nike. They emphasize physical activity through their products, and this club allows running-enthusiasts to connect with each other and the Nike brand.

6. Success Community Engagement Management

Success communities are designed to help customers use your product or service, well, successfully. They allow members to achieve desired outcomes by sharing best practices, user experiences, and success stories.

Benefits:

• Greater customer satisfaction
• Reduced churn rate
• Valuable testimonials to attract new members

Best for: SaaS, business-to-business (B2B), and service-oriented businesses where product success is closely tied to continued product use.

Example: Noom Circles

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What I like about Noom Circles: I love how personalized you can get with Noom Circles. You’re matched with communities that reflect your interests (e.g., food, exercise, hobbies, etc.) and the goals you’re working toward.

Community Management Strategies

The strategies you use to analyze your community performance will vary based on the type of community you’re building.

Here are some metrics to consider for each:

• Support: Conversation engagement (e.g., posts, comments), quantity of questions asked and answered, reduced customer support calls
• Product: New product ideas, new feature adoption, customer satisfaction
• Acquisition: Conversion rate, new leads/signups, new customers
• Content: Users creating UGC, new and active users, conversation engagement (e.g., posts, comments)
• Engagement: Conversation engagement (e.g., posts, comments), new member signups, event attendees
• Success: Net Promoter Score (NPS), customer retention, customer satisfaction

Want more? Get the full scoop on community management metrics.

Creating SPACES for Your Communities

Hopefully, this provided some clarity about the different types of communities and what they’re best for. If you’re still having trouble choosing one for your brand, I say start with your audience.

The best communities come to life when your goals align with their needs.

You lost that lovin’ feelin’. Fun to hear on the oldies station. Not so fun to hear from your community members.

But that’s the double-edged sword of scaling community management, isn’t it? The better you do, the bigger you get. And the bigger your group gets, the harder it is to do the things that made it so special.

Below, 5 veterans of community management — from Square, Pocket CCO, HeyOrca, and HubSpot — share some challenges you’re likely to face. And how they overcame them.

Real-Life Challenges from Those Who Have Been There

Some of these challenges are unavoidable, and you’ll just have to cross that bridge when you get there.

But sometimes you can save yourself some heartbreak by listening to others who have been where you are.

In either case, you should keep the challenges below in mind at the beginning of your community-building journey, before you even think you need to.

“My opinion on this is that you should try (as much as you can) to set up your community processes to be ready to scale as much as possible from day one,” says Jenny Sowyrda, manager of community strategy and operations at HubSpot.

“If the process you implement won’t scale from 1 member to 100 members, rethink it before you launch it.”

1. Knowing What Members Care About

“When you first launch a community you will feel like you’re talking to yourself,” laughs Sowyrda.

“The blessing in disguise when it comes to this, however, is that you actually have the time to know all of your community members,” she says. “It makes it easy to build relationships with these folks, get feedback from them, and truly build your community with them.”

Treasure that time, because it won’t last forever.

“Once your community starts to scale, you can’t know every community member in your space, and that is the most challenging part,” Jenny says.

The Solution: Build feedback channels from the very beginning.

When your community grows large enough that you don’t know all of the members, proactively seeking feedback becomes crucial.

It’s not enough to simply watch their conversations, because not every member will contribute.

“You can’t exclusively listen to the small vocal minority (who may be your top contributors),” says Sowyrda. “Because you then aren’t representing the lurkers, new members, or folks who [only] occasionally use your community.”

Instead, be proactive right from the start about seeking the opinions of all members through onboarding questionnaires, member surveys, and ongoing polls.

2. Keeping the Vibe

“One major issue when scaling a community is finding a way to grow it without it feeling too noisy and less intimate to already established members,” says Christina Garnett, founder and fractional CCO at Pocket CCO.

“As more people enter the community, it can lose what made it special.”

Max Pete, community engagement program manager at Square, says this is all about connection.

“One of the biggest challenges that comes to mind is losing the sense of connection and bond that you might find in a smaller community,” Pete explains.

“When it gets too big, some of the original things you did to create that connection might not be as scalable which means less time spent on them.”

The Solution: Keep the connection through group accessibility.

“When the Square community was smaller, I had more bandwidth to dedicate to members calls,” Max says.

“But as we grew and more members joined, I had to scale back my calls. One pivot was to offer more group conversations to reach more members at once.”

In addition to group calls, you may consider holding office hours, sharing personal updates, or even an ongoing newsletter about what’s new in the community.

These things can help members feel like they’re still connected to you and each other.

3. Keeping It Friendly, Safe, and Helpful

“A unique challenge that you may start to notice as your community grows is the importance of moderation,” says Alyssa Martin, community manager at HeyOrca.

“For example, as you scale a Facebook Group, you will start to get a few members who may not follow your community guidelines.”

Anyone who has been in a Facebook argument knows Alyssa is making a polite understatement.

“For the most part, the community is incredibly helpful and positive,” she says.

“But, there are always those times when something or someone needs to be removed and it’s important that you’re on top of it.”

If your community devolves into an abusive environment, it will reflect poorly on your brand. Not to mention that it won’t stay a community very long.

The Solution: Keep moderation scaleable with automation and/or empowering member moderators.

“It’s important to make sure you are moderating the conversation and content being posted to maintain a positive, safe environment for your community,” Martin says. “This is a concept I’ve had to put into action myself as the HeyOrca Community grew.”

But as your community grows, so does the volume of content, and you won’t be able to read it all yourself. At that point, you’ll want to consider moderation software or community moderators (or both.)

Many community management tools will offer moderation features that can flag comments for review or removal, or allow community members to flag them for you.

You may also consider empowering select members of the community as moderators themselves.

4. Sharing Ownership of the Community

One of the best and hardest parts of a community is that it doesn’t belong to you alone.

“At the end of the day, your community members should have a stronger say in the direction of your community than you do,” says Jenny Sowyrda. “Because if they don’t feel empowered and stop showing up, you no longer have a community.”

“As I told someone on my team recently, you should be drawing the map of where you want your community to go,” Sowyrda says. “But your community members are very much helping drive the ship.”

But Jenny also shares a word of warning.

“That said, the top priority when it comes to giving external folks ‘authority’ is ensuring you’re protecting member data and not violating the trust you’ve built with community members.”

So, for example, if you choose to use members as moderators, you should limit access to what kinds of data they can see.

The Solution: Be their advocate, not their parent.

“You should position your community team in a way that makes it seem like you are the genie of your company – that you can make anything happen,” she says.

“Once you’ve built that trust, you’ll be able to give them the authority to feel empowered, while knowing you still have control over the community.”

5. Balancing the Needs of Community and Business

Though you need to be an advocate for your community, you can’t forget that you’re also representing a business, too.

“Building a community for a brand, you are kind of the middle man between the brand and the community,” says Qetsiyah Jacobson, community manager at HeyOrca.

Sometimes that means putting the needs of the company first. But sometimes it means giving pushback on behalf of your community — a difficult thing for many new community managers.

“Knowing when to speak up and push against certain ideas or even bring up product ideas your community will love is a bit harder at times,” Qetsiyah adds.

The Solution: Know your stakeholders’ goals, and how your community connects to them.

“This is why it is super important to have those early conversations with key stakeholders on what is important for them,” says Square’s Max Pete. “What are their goals and what are they looking for in terms of success metrics?”

When you know how your community contributes to those goals, you’ll know when and how to advocate on their behalf.

6. Keeping Up With Changes

“It’s not something that you just nail down once,” says Jacobson. “Your community is made out of people and people evolve, they change, and they have moods.”

That means that if you only get feedback occasionally—or worse, only after events or campaigns—you’ll always be behind on what your community wants.

The Solution: Keep your feedback processes ongoing, not occasional.

“You need to constantly narrow down and reiterate what you want your community to be and understand what works,” Jacobson says. “Once you can identify what your community needs you can see where you can fill the gaps.”

“More tactically,” Jenny Sowyrda chimes in. “You should empower your members to share their opinions and they should know where and how they can do that, whether it be office hours, a feedback form, or a direct line of access to the community management team.”

7. Keeping It All Organized

“As our community grew, we were able to invite everyone individually, we knew who they were, and had fostered great relationships with them,” Jenny Sowyrda shares.

“I had their information to mail them some swag and — since in being a community manager you wear 10 hats every day — I was also in charge of packing up the swag and sending it off to them.”

“Somehow in the process of shipping out the swag, the envelopes and thank you cards got switched up and everyone ended up receiving someone else’s thank you card,” Jenny said. “It was the perfect example of wanting to have our human touch, but also being a bit too big to manage it all on my own.”

The Solution: Accept that you’re going to make mistakes (and also maybe try out a task manager!)

“In the end, it ended up being a great ice breaker as folks pinged each other to find out whose mail they had received,” Jenny says.

“And, honestly, I think they enjoyed getting the wrong card more than they would have enjoyed getting the correct one.”

Turning a mixup into a bonding activity is a brilliant way to recover even stronger. But while the mistake worked out in Jenny’s favor, not everyone will be so lucky.

The real luck is that there’s an abundance of free project management tools that can help you keep it all organized.

8. Not Missing Messages in Multiple Inboxes

This one is a little less existential than the others, but no less stressful.

Some of you are already nodding your heads after checking email, then Facebook, then Slack, then LinkedIn, and on and on.

When you first start a community, chances are that you can cruise through all of your messages first thing in the morning.

But when your community gets large enough, making sure you don’t miss any messages across multiple platforms becomes a pain.

The Solution: Consider a shared inbox.

“If you are managing a social media community, I highly recommend finding a tool that allows you to manage your community all from one place,” says Alyssa Martin.

“I like using HeyOrca’s Social Inbox. It allows you to manage your comments and DMs for Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn all in one place. This helps save time, especially if you’re managing multiple social media communities.”

And if your community is on Slack, email, or chat, you might also consider (shameless plug) HubSpot’s free shared inbox.

4 More Tips for Scaling Community from HubSpot’s Own Team

Lastly, Jenny Sowyrda took time to share some tips that aren’t connected to particular challenges.

If you’re just getting started building a community, you should work these tips into your processes now. But if you’re inheriting an existing community, it’s never too late to work them in.

1. Build queues and priority for what to reply to.

While you should try to reply to all messages, not all of them will be equally as urgent. And trying to triage them in the moment risks letting important messages go unanswered.

Lay out what takes priority from the start, and build your workflows to suit.

2. Ensure you are viewing all content to ensure everyone gets a response, but also to ensure you find new members.

A proper welcome helps to ensure that new members will stick around and get engaged. Community management software can help make sure no one gets missed.

3. Document your processes and create processes when you don’t have them.

As a big nerd, I admit I’m a sucker for well-documented procedures. But having a solid process in place helps to avoid mixups like Jenny’s thank-you-card story from above.

4. If you are on a team, ensure you’re communicating everything you’re doing — from engaging with members, to answering questions, to writing content.

“Your community management team should appear as a united presence,” says Sowyrda. “Though everyone can and should have their unique voice.”

Tipping the Scale

If you keep these tips and solutions in mind, you can scale your community without losing the love.

And when your community feels that love, that’s when it grows best.

Having a hard time finding clear info on community management tools? I’m not even a little surprised.

“Community management” covers a wide range of jobs, and they’re not going to have the same software needs.

After all, if you’re running a B2B product support forum you need a different tech stack than someone modding a Bluey fandom on TikTok, right?

To find the right tools, you’d usually have to get a firsthand recommendation from someone who’s done your job. Well, today’s your lucky day — I did that part for you.

I chatted with a range of community management veterans from Square, Pocket CCO, and our very own Community Strategy & Operations team. Below, you’ll find the tools they actually use, along with their top tips for what to look for.

• How Experts Choose Community Management Tools
• 4 Best Community Platforms the Experts Use
• 3 Best Community Management Tools the Experts Use
• Other Tools for Community Management

How Experts Choose Community Management Tools

Since the right tool is going to be specific to the type of community you manage, I first asked the experts for advice on what to look for when picking software.

Here are four actionable tips that any CM can use.

1. DON’T pick based on name recognition.

It’s normal to assume a well-known company must be doing something right, and in many cases, you’d be right. But due to the extremely specific circumstances of your community, this could be a mistake.

“Choosing tech just based on a name alone will set you up for failure,” says Christina Garnett, founder and fractional CCO of Pocket CCO. “Success depends on your goals for the community.”

2. Make a list of must-haves based on community goals.

And speaking of the goals of the community; let those be your compass.

“Define a few non-negotiable features and find the solution that works best for you based on those,” suggests Jenny Sowyrda, manager of Community Strategy & Operations at HubSpot.

And what should be on that list?

“Align your key tools with what success looks like in your community,” Sowyrda says.

In other words, if engagement is your goal, maybe you prioritize a tool with gamification. Or if communication is the goal, then direct messaging should be a must-have.

Always come back to the needs of your community.

“No one tool does everything perfectly, but if you’re committed to solving for the community member, you can make it work!” she adds.

3. #1 on that list should be user experience.

More than any other type of software, it’s important not to get distracted by bells and whistles.

“Community websites are different from other websites in the sense that the colors and pretty things should come second to an intuitive user flow,” says Sowyrda. “So that folks know how to engage with the community.”

Don’t ignore this one. If your community has bad UX, it’s not going to be a community for long.

4. #1 on that list should be data analytics.

That’s not a typo. There are two #1 must-have features. Any time three experts agree on something, it’s worth bending the rules a little.

“One thing across all communities is having a tool that easily captures the data that you need to report on is key,” says Max Pete, community engagement program manager at Square.

With robust analytics, you can lean into efforts that drive ROI, and change those that don’t.

Without it, you’re just throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping it sticks.

4 Best Community Platforms the Experts Use

A community platform lets you build your community right on top of the tools that allow you to manage and measure it.

That differs from other community management software which just plugs into an existing platform. If you’re starting from scratch, these are the tools that’ll help you build and scale your group.

But if you’re looking to manage a pre-existing forum or social media platform, you might want to skip to the next section.

Either way, here are 4 tools that our experts actually use themselves:

1. Khoros

Khoros is customer engagement software that allows you to build, host, and manage an online community. It offers content moderation and member management tools, forums, feedback, etc.

It’s noteworthy that all three of our experts have used Khoros, despite serving different types of communities. That said, there were pros and cons about this tool.

The good and the bad:

“At HubSpot we run our Product Success community on Khoros,” says Jenny Sowyrda. “Khoros is extremely customizable which has enabled us to scale our community without having to migrate.”

“One of my favorite features is how specific you can be when setting up permission types, and their gamification experience is also intuitive and effective,” Sowyrda says.

“The downsides of Khoros are that because it’s so robust, it can feel outdated and clunky (they are working on a more updated UI), which makes it hard to get things done. The front end, similarly, is going to look like a forum community unless you really style it.”

Recommended by: Jenny Sowyrda, Max Pete, Christina Garnett

G2 rating: 4.2 out of 5

Price: Pricing only available through demo

Free trial: No

2. Bettermode

Bettermode touts itself as an “all-in-one community platform” that includes a code-free site builder.

That doesn’t mean you’re stuck using a boring template, though, as the drag-and-drop builder allows you to build a slick site without a dev– and a developer portal that allows you to build a custom app on top.

The experts say:

“Bettermode, on the other hand, is a much more modern frontend [compared to Khoros], which makes it easy for members to navigate,” says Sowyrda.

“The biggest challenge we have with Bettermode at the moment is the analytics tool, but that is something their team is working on.”

So if you’re comparing Khoros and Bettermode, consider tips 3 and 4 above and which is most important to you.

Recommended by: Jenny Sowyrda

G2 rating: 4.6 out of 5

Price: Starts at free, paid plans start at $19/mo. for up to 3 collaborators

Free Trial: Yes, but details are unpublished.

3. Mighty Networks

Mighty Networks is one of the most highly rated community tools on nearly any list. The ability to host courses, events, and resource libraries make them an excellent choice for education-based, training, or coaching communities.

Their pro tier even offers branded iOS and Android apps, which make it easy to get a service-based business off the ground.

The coolest feature (in my humble opinion) is their own live and on-demand courses about community building— so you’re not alone in figuring it all out.

(The second coolest feature is the integration that automatically adds new members to your HubSpot CRM when someone joins your community. But I may be slightly biased!)

Recommended by: Christina Garnett

G2 rating: 4.6 out of 5

Price: The Community plan starts at $41/mo. when billed annually

Free Trial: 14 days of the Business tier plan

4. Higher Logic Vanilla

If you run a forum-based community, you should definitely be considering Vanilla.

Unlike some tools, which may offer forum features or community features, Vanilla was specifically built for forum communities.

One of their most powerful tools is the federated search tool that can pull answers from internal and external sources.

In other words, your users can see results from your knowledge base, crowdsourced answers, your CRM, and Google, all in one place.

From the expert:

“Vanilla Forums is great if you want a forum-based type of community,” says Christina Garnett. “Comes with a lot of features and the support is great.”

Recommended by: Christina Garnett

G2 rating: 4.3 out of 5

Price: Starts at free, Paid plans appear to start at $24,000/yr. (but details are hard to come by.)

Free trial: No

3 Best Community Management Tools the Experts Use

Unlike the platform builders above, these tools are designed to plug into an existing platform.

This makes them ideal for communities that live on Slack, Discord, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.

These are the ones that have been tried and tested by our expert community managers, and come out on top:

1. Common Room

Common Room is primarily customer intelligence software, but they have tons of features that will make a community manager’s life easier.

The big one is the ability to gather signals from all of your digital touchpoints (think Slack, your CRM, social media, etc.) and use that data to enrich your member profiles.

But it also has tools to automate member verification, flag trending topics within comments, and sync your member lists with your data warehouse.

What the expert thinks:

“If your platform is on Slack or Discord, Common Room can come in handy because of the automation that you can implement such as new member onboarding,” says Max Pete from Square.

“As well as getting access to more data touch points than what Slack offers natively.”

The only downside?

“Their paid plan can get pretty pricey and there’s only so much that you can do on their free plan,” says Pete. “So something to keep in mind as you scale.”

Recommended by: Jenny Sowyrda, Max Pete

G2 rating: 4.6 out of 5

Price: Starts at free, Paid plans start at $650/mo. for up to 2 seats and 35k contacts

Free Trial: 14 days of the Team tier plan

2. Talkbase

Talkbase is the only entry on our list to get a full 5 out of 5 on G2.

The software is mainly community analytics, though their action-based add-ons allow you to onboard, organize, and manage your community en masse.

While that may not sound like much at first, Talkbase can gather and track insights from social comments, GitHub requests, forum questions, etc.

Then it allows you to slice and dice that data into community, segment, or member-level insights … then import those insights straight into your CRM.

And, hey, like Common Room it also integrates with HubSpot! (Though I swear that’s a coincidence.)

Recommended by: Max Pete

G2 rating: 5 out of 5

Price: Starts at free, Paid plans start at $20/mo. for up to 2 seats and 2k contacts

Free trial: 21 days of the Growth tier plan

3. Luma

Luma is unlike anything else on our list, in that it’s built specifically for event management. You can send and manage invites and reminders, register and track attendees, and enable ticket sales right from the platform itself.

Plus newsletter and community analysis tools help foster the community aspect of an in-person group.

Why the expert added it:

“If you’re running a community with an events component to it, I definitely recommend Luma,” says Max Pete. “Especially if you’re using Slack or Discord, this tool allows you to keep track of your community events and keeps everything easy to find for your members.”

Recommended by: Max Pete

G2 rating: Not yet rated

Price: Starts at free, Paid plans start at $59/mo. when billed annually

Free trial: No, but the free plan includes unlimited events and guests

Other Tools for Community Management

If you’re building your community from scratch (or new to community management) there are some other kinds of tools you should consider.

They range from “nice to have” up to “How did I live without this?”

Messaging Services

In order to have a community, your members need to be able to communicate. (See what I did there?)

And if you don’t offer a place for that to happen, they’ll find one of their own.

One of the most popular messaging services for businesses is Slack.

“Slack isn’t a community tool,” says Christina Garnett. “But because so many professionals use it, it becomes an easy and convenient platform if you want professionals as community members.”

Other examples include Discord and Circle.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

At its most basic, a CRM keeps track of all of the interactions between your members and your business.

If there’s a sales, marketing, or support side to your community, you’ll definitely want a CRM to keep it all organized.

Integrating your community management software with a CRM will give you a full 360 degree view of your community and all of the actions they take with regard to your business.

HubSpot’s free CRM also includes live-chat software, meeting scheduler, form builder, help desk tools, and more.

Email Platform

Whether it’s a newsletter, a product update, or an event announcement, at some point you’re going to want to email your members.

And when your community gets big enough, you’re going to wish you had a way to simplify that.

An email platform does exactly that by providing customizable templates, automated follow-ups, and the ability to see who’s opening/reading/clicking on your emails.

HubSpot also offers free email tools with a drag-and-drop editor, A/B testing, and email analytics.

Workflow Integration and Automation

Many community management tools are designed to connect to the rest of your tech stack.

So maybe when a member signs up for a workshop, they’re automatically sent a welcome email, and their profile is updated to match.

But when your software doesn’t play nicely, it can lead to a lot of duplicate work. Workflow automation tools are designed to eliminate that.

The most well-known of these is a tool called Zapier.

Get back to your community.

No matter what kind of community you’re looking to manage, you’re sure to find one of these tools suited to your specific needs.

And if you follow our experts’ tips, you can narrow it down to the exact one. With your search out of the way, you can get back to what you love: Your community.

They say if you can measure it, you can manage it. So how do you measure a community?

That’s not a rhetorical question. If you want to manage a thriving community, you better figure out which community management metrics actually mean something about your work.

I spoke with a panel of four experts — from CCOs and Directors to program managers in the trenches — and asked what metrics they use themselves.

They also shared their thoughts on reporting upwards (gulp) and which KPIs are just a distraction.

Table of Contents

• How to Think about Community Management KPIs
• Top Community Management Metrics
• Best Community Metrics for Reporting Upwards
• The Benefits of Measuring Community Management Metrics

How to Think about Community Management KPIs

Before you jump into the metrics below, pause and think about the twin dangers of data analysis.

1. It’s easy to get misled by the wrong numbers.

In any kind of digital management, you’re more likely to run into the problem of too much data rather than not enough.

“Page views, unique visits, and new members can often be distracting without telling the full picture,” warns Max Pete, community engagement program manager at Square. “For example, say you‘re getting a ton of new members per month, but there’s even more members leaving the community. So while it looks like you‘re in a big growth mode, actually you’re not retaining them.”

To avoid this, keep the goals of your community in mind as you read the list below.

“The metrics you define should be aligned with the business and member goals of your community,” says Jenny Sowyrda, manager of Community Strategy and Operations at HubSpot. “The more you can align your success metrics with what the business cares about, the better off you’ll be.”

2. It’s easy to waste time measuring things you can’t act on — or that you’re not ready for yet.

To dodge this trap, you should also be thinking about what stage of development your community is currently in.

“Depending on the life cycle of the community, I look at foundational, engagement, and impact metrics,” says Christina Garnett, founder and fractional CCO of Pocket CCO. “As a community starts, you will focus on foundational metrics and move out as you mature.”

To illustrate what she means (literally), Christina has shared this fantastic diagram below.

Image Source

While she’s populated it with KPIs that any community could (and should) be monitoring, the exact metrics you fill it with will depend on your community’s needs and goals.

Top Community Management Metrics

Here are the metrics our panel of experts actually use in their own day-to-day jobs.

But note that while each of these KPIs is used by an expert, not every expert uses all of these KPIs.

I bring this up in order to drive home that, once again, it’s important for you to think about which of these metrics actually connect to a goal for your community.

While the panel can point the way, only you can decide which are needed.

Foundational Stage Community Metrics

Community Growth/Membership Growth Rate

In general, a healthy community should be growing. Just how much depends on the type of community, and where you’re at in its lifecycle.

In the beginning, it’s normal to see your growth rate jump up high and then drop down low and back again. Eventually, you’ll want to see it steady out.

When I’ve helped grow newsletter communities, I found it very common to see the growth rate soften after the explosive first few months when promotional efforts were in full swing. But as long as that softer rate remained steady I knew we were still seeing healthy growth.

On the flip side, if this number drops suddenly, it’s a sign you need to investigate your sources of new members.

Formula: (# of current members) – (# of starting members)/ (# of starting members) x 100

Example: (1,500 current members) – (1,200 members at the beginning of the month)/ 1,200 x 100 = 25% growth rate

Churn Rate

This is the exact opposite of your growth rate. Churn rate is the number of members who leave your community in a given period of time.

Obviously, you’ll want this to be as low as possible, but for most communities, it’s unrealistic to aim for a churn rate of zero. People leave a community for all sorts of legitimate reasons outside of your control.

That said, if this number jumps or continuously grows over time, it’s a flashing warning sign that something has gone wrong.

Formula: (# of lost members in a time period)/ (Total # of members at the start of time period time period)x 100

Example: (20 members left this month)/ (400 members to start with)x 100= 5% churn rate

New Members vs Churn Rate

If you want to fill a bucket, you have to pour in more water than what leaks out. Your community is the same way.

Comparing the rate of new membership against your churn rate is a great way to take a glance ahead of your growth rate.

A warning: It is extremely easy to get confused when you’re calculating the difference between rates. To save yourself some stress, calculate them as whole numbers instead of percentages.

In other words, instead of (75% – 25%), just do 75-25.

Formula: (Membership growth rate) – (churn rate) / (churn rate) x 100

Example: (25 growth rate) – (5 churn rate)/ (5 churn rate) x 100 = 400% more new members than churn

Engagement Stage Community Metrics

Active Members

The number of active members you have is a good proxy for the health of your community because communities thrive on activity.

You’ll first have to define what makes a member “active.” Is it posting or commenting? Voting in polls? Attending in-person events? It all depends on the specifics of your community.

Any good community management tool should be able to pull the number of active members and how it changes over time.

Jenny Sowyrda notes that HubSpot tracks this number on a weekly and monthly cadence. You may also wish to calculate the quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) or year-over-year changes (YoY), too.

Some social media platforms famously track this number daily, but that’s likely overkill for most communities.

Just remember that seasonality plays a part in the number of active members, and in how active they are, so don’t get too worried if this number rises and falls over time.

For example, it’s not uncommon for the HubSpot Blog to see weekly readership fall around holidays. As long as it comes back the next week, we don’t sweat it.

Average Posts + Comments per Member

An engaged community member is more likely to stick around, but eventually, your group will get too big to check in on individual members.

Instead, an average of engagements per member can tell you a story about general participation.

Something to be mindful of is that a particularly hot topic or viral post can make this number jump like a frog on hot pavement. When that happens, you’ll need to be ready to explain why it’s falling the next time you report on it.

But pay attention to what caused the spike and you just might have a new content strategy on your hands!

Formula: (# of posts/comments)/(Total # of members)

Example: (120 posts and comments)/(50 members) = 2.4 posts/comments per member

Event Participation Rate

If your community doesn’t offer “events” in the traditional sense, you can probably still benefit from this metric.

Events can mean many things, from in-person conferences to live webinars or even on-demand virtual classes.

Heck, my son attends virtual concerts in Animal Crossing, and you better bet your bottom they’re keeping an eye on participation. (The event organizers, that is. Not the digital doggy DJ.)

Formula: (# of participants)/(Total # of members) x 100

Example: (200 participants)/(450 total members) x 100 = 44.4% participation

Impact Stage Community Metrics

Conversion Rate (CVR)

Conversion is usually talked about in terms of monetization — leads, sales, signups, etc. — but it can refer to a member taking any desired action.

Almost every community will have some sort of conversion event, and you’ll need to define what’s important to yours.

Is it signing up for a demo? Taking a class? Subscribing to a newsletter?

As your community grows, you’ll also want to track conversion rates for different types of actions. Each action will represent a different ROI for your team, brand, or company.

In other words, downloading a whitepaper will likely have a different value to you than signing up for a webinar. Knowing the CVR for each will help you lean into more valuable efforts.

Formula: (# of conversions)/(Total # of members) x 100

Example: (20 conversions)/(200 members) x 100 = 10% conversion rate

Advocacy + Referral Rates

92% of people trust the recommendations of family and friends over any form of advertising, according to a recent Nielsen survey.

Referrals and advocacy are the kind of marketing you can’t buy … but you can earn them by fostering a thriving community.

Not only should you be tracking your overall referral rates, you should also be tracking the referral rates for individual campaigns and events.

You may be surprised to find that campaigns that see low conversion are still super valuable because they drive a lot of word-of-mouth.

Formula: (# of referrals)/(Total # of members) x 100

Example: (10 referrals)/(50 members) x 100 = 20% referral rate

Average Response Time

Response time (and its cousins Response Rate and Resolution Rate) is a metric that will be

important for service or support-based communities.

Simply put, it’s the average time it takes for a representative to respond to a question, request, or ticket.

As your community becomes more advanced, it may also be useful to calculate the average response time by channel or by ticket type.

This can quickly identify choke points in your services, as well as strengths that can be shared with other channels.

Formula: (Total time to respond to questions/tickets)/(Total # of questions/tickets)

Example: (10 mins. + 20 mins. + 15 mins.)/ (3 questions) = 15 min. avg. response time

Response Rate

Just to make things confusing, people will use “response rate” to refer to two different metrics.

• The rate at which members respond to a poll or a survey.
• The rate at which your reps respond to questions/tickets from members.

Depending on your type of community, both may be worth keeping an eye on. Thankfully, the formula is the same for both. (Whew!)

During our chat, Jenny Sowyrda mentioned that HubSpot also tracks the percentage of responses that come from external sources versus those that come from HubSpotters.

This is a great idea for product-centered communities, where it’s crucial that information comes from trustworthy sources.

Formula: (# of responses)/ (# of queries) x 100

Example: (20 responses)/ (30 queries) x 100 = 66.6% response rate

Resolution Rate

Similar to response rate, resolution rate is based on the number of tickets closed or the number of answers accepted.

That last word is key if you want your community members to feel satisfied.

Don’t count a query or ticket in your resolution rate until the member considers it resolved.

Formula: (# of resolved queries)/ (total # of queries) x 100

Example: (20 resolved queries)/ (25 total queries) x 100 = 80% resolution rate

Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis refers to the process of pulling out the emotional tone of content in order to better understand your community.

It can give an idea of how your members feel about your brand, the success of an event, or how happy they are with your support efforts within the community.

This isn’t really a metric you can calculate, but it is a KPI you should consider. Many good community management tools will include a sentiment analysis feature.

Best Community Metrics for Reporting Upwards

It may seem harsh, but chances are, your boss’s boss isn’t going to look at your reports for more than 60 seconds.

That means you need to limit upward-facing reports to only those metrics that show how your efforts impact broader business goals.

“We align our metrics with what the business cares about,” says Jenny Sowyrda. “Which usually boils down to either making or saving the business money.”

That makes Conversion Rate and Event Participation easy shoe-ins. But what about the rest?

“It is super important to have those early conversations with key stakeholders on what is important data for them,” says Max Pete. “What are their goals and what are they looking for in terms of success metrics?”

In other words, just ask them!

In the meantime, here are some other boss-friendly KPIs they may be interested in:

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Want to know how your community feels about your brand/product/service? Ask them!

Net promoter score is a metric almost any executive will recognize. It’s based on asking your members a question like “On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend the community to a friend or coworker?”

You then bucket your responses as Promoters (9-10), Passives (7-8), and Detractors (0-6). Finally, subtract the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters.

Learn more about NPS.

Share of Voice

While Share of Market measures your portion of industry sales, Share of Voice compares your portion of brand awareness.

In other words, when consumers think of your industry, how many of them think of your brand?

It’s usually measured in social mentions, paid ad clicks, or keyword traffic.

As you can imagine, a thriving community full of advocates is a great way to increase your Share of Voice.

Learn more about Share of Voice.

Cost Per Conversion (CPC)

Since communities are gold mines for user-generated content and organic referrals, they’re often more cost-effective than paid marketing campaigns.

The downside? It’s often harder to prove that.

To calculate the CPC of community management, you’ll first need to add up all of the costs associated with running the community. From there, you divide the total expense by the number of conversions attributed to the community.

Now you may be asking, “What if I’m still only tracking foundational stage metrics?”

That’s okay! Christina Garnett recommends being upfront about that during those early stakeholder conversations.

“Setting expectations so leadership knows that KPIs will shift as the community grows is priceless,” she explains.

The Benefits of Measuring Community Management Metrics

Simply put, tracking these metrics will allow you to make decisions that better serve your community and your business.

But data alone isn’t enough. KPIs should always be a starting point for your curiosity in figuring out what works for your community, what doesn’t, and why.

If you do that, you’re almost guaranteed to:

• Turn members into advocates by seeing what they love and doing it over and over again.
• Thrill your stakeholders by identifying what serves their goals and leaning into those efforts.
• Reduce costs by discovering and improving weak points.
• Uncover business insights that almost no other type of marketer gets access to.

And if that’s not enough, they’ll also help you prove the ROI of your community to management. But that’s a blog for another day.

A few years ago, I had to manage a Facebook community for a TV station I was working for as a digital journalist. It was a completely new experience, and there were definitely times I stumbled.

Community management challenges are real and can be hard to navigate if you’re new to the field.

Fortunately, I gathered valuable information from experts, including a fellow HubSpotter, so you can be the best community manager you can be and avoid some of my blunders.

If you‘re an organization looking for a community manager, these challenges and their solutions will help you understand the skills to look for when hiring one. Let’s dive in!

Top 8 Community Management Challenges

Here are several community management challenges and how the experts overcome them.

1. Community managers need to be good at many things.

It takes a lot to build and manage a community around a business, so an excellent community manager will need to have a diverse set of skills.

I spoke about this with Hubspot‘s principal marketing of community (and fellow ’Erica’), Erica Finley.

“Community managers often mediate community conflicts and may be required to draft crisis communications,” Finley says. “They must be curious and adept at conducting research online and via people-centric methods like focus groups.”

And community managers aren’t just managers.

“They are content creators who may be called to create entire calendars based on a specific persona or theme,” she says. “They are public speakers who often serve as emcees and facilitators for community events.”

If you want to become a community manager, consider diversifying your skills. Some valuable skills to possess would be writing and public speaking. You should also be an adept researcher, content creator, and social media user.

2. Some leadership teams won‘t ’get’ what you do.

Community isn’t new, and 86% of social media marketers believe having an active community is critical to a brand’s success. However, community management is pretty new to marketing and less strictly defined in business settings versus sales or digital marketing.

As a result, community managers sometimes encounter marketing leaders who need help understanding their jobs or the value of community management.

“Community pros often have to work harder to prove their value and contribution to the bottom line and should work with other internal teams to illustrate how they amplify their efforts,” Finley explains.

So, track your work and pay close attention to metrics, such as the number of people who visited your company’s website after a community page post or the profits that followed a community management initiative or event.

And, like Finley says, work closely with other teams and get them on board with your vision so you can better illustrate your value.

3. Scaling is hard.

Finley explains, “More often than not, community teams are small, and sometimes, they’re a team of one. As your community grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to respond to each message, nurture your members, think proactively about your roadmap, and report back on your success.”

I can relate to this sentiment as a content creator who spent a few years building my platform on YouTube and social media.

It was much easier to foster community with my audience when it was just a handful of people. However, my community eventually grew to thousands of followers across my platforms, and it became harder to nurture my audience and connect with them by replying to comments, liking their posts, or responding to messages.

“Look for helpers in the community that can be your eyes and ears when you’re not around, and lean into automating tasks that don’t require a human touch,” she says.

For example, consider Reddit moderators. Reddit moderators are users who volunteer to monitor subreddits, enforce rules that keep members safe, and ensure the community is peaceful and user-friendly.

Most Reddit communities have at least two to three moderators and will get more as members grow. So, consider tapping into your audience and relying on moderators for your online platforms.

4. Burnout is real.

Growing and maintaining a thriving community for an organization can be rewarding and draining, especially when you’re building a community in digital spaces like social media.

As I mentioned earlier, I helped moderate a Facebook community page for the station I worked for. Since the page was easily accessible from my phone, I constantly checked it and flagged issues even when I was supposed to be off the clock.

To no one’s surprise but my own, I found myself getting burnt out from constantly moderating, and it became hard to leave the stress of monitoring the group at the office.

“Burnout is real in such a people-centric role,” Finley says. “Community professionals should set proper boundaries and avoid an ‘always on’ approach to their roles.”

5. Creating an engaging community for a start-up has its hurdles.

Fostering community for a start-up or smaller company often means you‘re building community from the ground up, and that can be difficult because you don’t have many resources or metrics to go off.

You’re also laying the groundwork for future community managers who may join your organization.

But there are solutions, according to Harshil Boparai, Community Manager at The Alliance.

“Understanding member’s demographics and preferences is paramount—whether they seek career-centric insights, industry updates, networking opportunities, or other content,” she says. “So initiating dialogue during onboarding and establishing a Customer Advisory Board could help align these community objectives.”

6. It can be challenging to keep community members engaged and active.

“I would say this is probably a challenge for most community managers, and always a big goal to have good engagement,” says Emma Buitendag, Community Manager at The Alliance. Even with larger communities, keeping the engagement up can still be challenging.”

Buitendag says managers should stay focused with increased numbers of community members. You’ll need to keep the momentum going.

“You’ll want to regularly post engaging content, host events like webinars and in-person meetups, and constantly encourage discussions,” she says. “One would think that the bigger the community, the higher the engagement, but you still need to work hard to keep the engagement going, regardless of the size.”

7. Community managers have to know how to handle conflict.

Of course, no community is without its conflicts, and community managers must know how to handle them in a way that reflects positively on their organization.

“So, set out clear community guidelines,” Emma Buitendag says. “It’s very helpful to direct people’s attention back to the guidelines if they are breaking the rules. It’s also important that the rules are written down and clear so there is little room for confusion.”

Buiendah also suggests moderating discussions and intervening diplomatically and privately should conflict arise.

“Don’t try to reason with a member on an open platform,” she says. “I always make sure to privately message the person and resolve the issue between us.”

8. The way consumers communicate is constantly evolving.

There was a time when consumers could only reach a company or organization via phone or email. Now, consumers can reach out via social media, direct messages, text, and more.

“The processes involved in community management are constantly changing and evolving, so one key solution is always to be flexible and open to change,” Alliance Community Manager Millie McCaughrean says. “Feedback from members and internal colleagues regularly is paramount to keeping on top of the changes and adapting in the best way possible.”

So consider hosting focus groups and pay close attention to how your audience speaks of your company and how they communicate.

There are no easy jobs in marketing, and that includes community management. The field has its challenges, but they‘re nothing you can’t overcome with the right tips and tricks.