Category Archives: B2B

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.

If you’re trying to start or grow a community around your brand, these community management best practices might just do the trick.

Good community management requires a little bit of troubleshooting. But you can’t just turn it off and turn it back on (like I do with my almost-10-year old laptop when it freezes).

You took the time to build a strategy to draw people in. Now, let’s work together to get it off the ground — the right way.

Community Management Best Practices

Here are my top 12 best practices for community management, with insights from experts across the industry.

1. Communicate clear expectations from the start.

When you’re managing a community, one of the first things I recommend doing is setting firm rules for all members and contributors.

Without clear guidance, it’s hard to maintain a respectful environment where everyone feels comfortable engaging.

Here are the main elements you’ll want to cover. We’ll use TikTok’s Community Guidelines as an example:

• Purpose: Why was the community created? Example: “TikTok is a source of entertainment and enrichment where you can discover, create, and connect with others across the world.”
• Content: What types of content are (and are not) allowed? Example: “We do not allow misinformation that may cause significant harm to individuals or society, regardless of intent.”
• Participation: What principles guide how members interact? Example: “TikTok has eight guiding community principles: Prevent Harm, Enable Free Expression, Foster Civility, Champion Inclusivity, etc.”
• Enforcement: How will these guidelines be enforced? Example: “Content first goes through an automated review process. If content is identified as a potential violation, it will be automatically removed, or flagged for additional review by our moderators.”

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It’s all about creating a safe place for people to interact with each other and your brand. This is easier to accomplish when you outline what that looks like up front.

2. Get your members involved early (and often).

Max Pete, community engagement program manager at Square, says:

“Involve your members early on in the process, and don’t stop involving them as you evolve. Always have the ‘build with’ vs. ‘build for’ mentality.”

It’s a lot easier for people to invest in something they helped create. And that second part is so important because you want your community to grow with you (and stick around long term).

Collaborate, ask for input, and let your audience show you how they want to engage with your brand.

3. Encourage member-to-member interactions.

Audience interaction is so important, but a community thrives beyond just you and your brand.

As Joe McElligott, Strategy Director at MG Empower, explains:

“Community isn’t solely formed through brand-to-consumer interactions. The interactions among consumers themselves are truly significant elements of a strategy, with the brand serving as the platform or facilitator for these engagements.”

If you’re managing a brand community, give your members the opportunity to build relationships among themselves.

For inspo, Scrub Daddy is really good at this. They’ve created a community of promoters who enjoy posting relatable content to their own audiences about Scrub Daddy products.

And that content often gets a lot of traction — like this TikTok below with 374K likes and 1,550+ comments.

A successful community should be able to hold its own. And this will actually help take some of the pressure off of you, too.

If members are empowered to interact with each other, they’re not only relying on you to drive the conversation. Win-win.

4. Recognize, incentivize, and reward participation.

An important part of community management is showing appreciation for your followers. It shows you value their time and commitment to your brand.

There are many ways to recognize and reward participation. Here are a few steps you can take to show you care:

• Send a personal welcome and thank you note to each new member of your community with a token of appreciation for joining.
• Keep track of the most active members and then acknowledge their contributions via special mentions or gifts.
• Ask members what you can do to make their experience a great one, and reward them for their feedback.

A little effort goes a long way.

5. Personalize your engagements (and be human).

I hate receiving generic responses from brands. Especially when I know there’s a human behind the interaction just waiting to be heard.

Don’t get me wrong, canned responses are great and can be super helpful for teams with limited resources. But that doesn’t mean you can’t show a little personality.

Personally, I like to use a conversational tone in posts and replies to show my audience that they’re talking to a real person. I also address people by their names and try to remember details about every interaction.

But there are many other ways to humanize your brand.

Like this second example from Scrub Daddy when they owned up to making a typo in one of their videos (because, well, it happens).

See the first comment below: “Excuse the typo omg 💀”

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Find a strategy that works for you and be consistent.

6. Stay true to yourself and your brand.

In the spirit of being human, you should also try to be as honest, transparent, and authentic as possible.

Address any negative comments, feedback, or challenges openly and acknowledge mistakes when they happen.

Did you forget to follow up with someone about a product question or concern? Own it, and make things right. Has someone violated your content guidelines? Act swiftly, and acknowledge community concerns.

Being authentic builds trust and can help foster stronger connections with your audience.

7. Use AI and tech to your advantage.

Many community management platforms, including social media, offer features to streamline your workflow. And now that AI is literally everywhere, take advantage of the good things automation has to offer.

You can use social monitoring tools, like HubSpot’s social media management software, to track engagements and respond to comments and messages in real-time.

Or try out some GenAI prompts to help you come up with content ideas related to your audience’s interests.

Use the resources around you to deliver maximum value to your community.

8. Be attentive and respond promptly.

Timeliness is critical in community management.

Make it a priority to address comments, concerns, and questions from your audience as quickly as possible. This shows members you’re active and ready to address their needs.

According to Jan Crewe, a social media community manager at ICUC, responding to incoming comments fast is key for building relationships with your audience.

She says that “this increases the chance of subsequent responses, extending the interaction.” It also allows you to address any pressing issues before they start to snowball.

9. Celebrate milestones with your community.

Your milestones — and those of your community members — are cause for celebration.

For example:

• Did you gain a certain number of followers or members? Shout it from the rooftops.
• Is it the anniversary of your community launch? I’ll bring the cake, you bring the candles.
• One of your members accomplished something big? Let’s all raise a glass!

Sharing moments like these can strengthen the sense of community and deepen the connection people feel to your brand.

10. Maintain your brand voice at all times.

It’s important to keep a consistent brand voice when managing a community.

Your brand voice is what makes your business unique and identifiable to your audience. For example, if your brand is known for being easy-going, this personality should be reflected in all your interactions and content.

(I won’t share another Scrub Daddy example — I think you get the point.)

11. Evolve with the trends.

Community management is constantly evolving. Stay open to learning new ideas and incorporating them into your strategy. You can also expect the best practices on this list to shift as community management trends change.

As a marketer, I try to stay updated on what’s happening across the industry (I’m looking at you The Marketing Millennials) and how those factors affect audience preferences.

I also pay attention to any changes in social media algorithms which ultimately affects how your content is displayed to potential viewers.

This proactive approach allows me to adapt my strategies as needed. And I have a feeling it’ll help you keep your communities engaged and relevant, too.

12. Always be auditing.

Pete is back with one final nugget of advice: “always be auditing.”

He adds, “Community building isn’t a one and done type of thing. It takes constant work and is always a work in progress, but that is what makes it fun.”

Your community is like a puppy. You have to feed it, nurture it, pay close attention to it, and invest in it. And if something’s not working, don’t be afraid to take it to the vet … I mean, review your metrics and make improvements.

Do you hear that?

That’s the sound of hundreds … actually … thousands of community advocates engaging with your content and talking about your brand.

I would say good luck, but I already know you’ll handle it like a pro.

The concept of managing communities may seem straightforward.

But a community management strategy is what separates the ‘omg I love them!’ brands from all the rest.

If you really want to make an impact on your audience, it’s going to require a little bit of planning. Come with me to take your community management efforts to the next level.

Table of Contents

• What is a community management strategy?
• How to Create a Community Management Strategy

Think about some of your favorite brands and how they interact with their audiences.

Personally, I love Duolingo’s approach to community management. It’s authentic, consistent, and human. When you see the Duo owl in the comments section on TikTok, it’s to be expected. It’s almost like they belong there.

Plus, they get an A+ from me on content creation. Posts like these are a big part of why my Spanish-learning streak is still alive. (I’m on day 580, btw.)

While this strategy works for Duolingo, it won’t work for everyone. That’s because your community management strategy is unique to your brand. It all depends on who your audience is and what you want to accomplish.

Jenny Sowyrda, manager of community strategy and operations at HubSpot, says you’ll want to take “the needs of your community members, the key goals associated with your community, and the business goals of your community” into consideration when designing your strategy.

And sometimes, those needs and goals will change as you begin to scale.

But before we talk about growth, let’s start with six simple steps to help you get your community up and running.

1. Define your objectives.

The first step to develop a community management strategy (that actually works) is understanding what success looks like for your brand.

What do you want to achieve?

Your answer may include one or more of the following:

• Increase brand awareness
• Gather product feedback for product development
• Increase engagement
• Enhance customer support
• Build a network of brand advocates
• Increase traffic to a website
• Increase customer satisfaction and retention
• Boost sales and conversions

Defining objectives upfront helps you lay the groundwork for your entire strategy. Every decision you make from this point on — such as choosing platforms and content types — will tie back to this step.

2. Identify your audience.

After you define your primary objectives, the next thing to do is identify and understand your audience.

That means gathering data on your current and target customers, including:

• Demographics: Who are they (age, gender, profession, etc.)?
• Psychographics: What are their values, attitudes, and lifestyles?
• Behaviors: How do they interact with brands and content online? What social media platforms do they use?
• Needs and challenges: What are they seeking to gain from being part of a community? What challenges are they hoping to overcome?

To gather this intel, I recommend starting with market research, social media analytics, and customer surveys.

Taking time to understand the target audience will help you refine your communication strategy and tailor your activities to their needs and interests.

3. Choose the right channels.

Next, choose the platforms where your communities are most active. That could include social media, a forum like Reddit, Slack channels, or even offline meetups.

When choosing the best platform for your target community, consider these factors:

• Audience preferences: Ensure the platform(s) align with the way your audience prefers to communicate. For example, I might choose to focus my energy on TikTok if I have a young target audience or LinkedIn if I’m targeting a B2B crowd.
• Objectives and type of interaction: Remember those objectives we talked about earlier? They play a big role here, and so does the type of interactions you want from your audience. ​​For example, Instagram is great for real-time engagement.
• Level of control: Figure out how much oversight you want over the user experience. For example, you have more control over if you host a community on your own website versus a third-party platform.
• Platform tools and features. Consider the community management offerings for each option. For example, if you’re hoping to engage your audience via quizzes and polls, choose a channel that supports this.

A big part of a successful community management strategy is being in the right place at the right time.

4. Set your targets.

Your targets will naturally flow from your primary objectives.

For example: If the primary goal is to increase engagement, a sample target could be to increase the average comments per social media post by 15% in the next three months.

Or, if the goal is to gather feedback in order to improve a product, a potential target could be to collect and respond to at least 100 customer feedback submissions each month.

My top tip? Set realistic targets. Here’s how:

• Consider industry benchmarks: Look at similar communities from other brands in your industry and set a baseline based on their average past performance.
• Run your own experiments: Design a couple of quick-hit experiments to determine what your average metrics are (e.g., brand mentions, engagements), and use those numbers as your benchmarks.
• Start small: Cultivating a thriving community takes time and consistent effort. Begin with small goals and gradually escalate them as your community grows.

Max Pete, community engagement program manager at Square, also notes the importance of aligning your targets with your company resources.

“Realistically, you have to have bandwidth and capacity. Otherwise, you’re setting yourself up to fail,” says Pete.

“Consider what needs to get done ASAP and what’s going to make the biggest impact — while also keeping in line with budget and realistic timelines for you and your team.”

For example, if you’re a solopreneur, try responding to comments within 48 hours instead of a more ambitious target like 12 hours.

It’s great to aim high, but it’s also important to understand what’s achievable with your current resources.

5. Post regularly and engage with your audience.

Consistent posting and active engagement are crucial to keeping your community vibrant. Make sure you have a steady stream of content flowing so you sustain interest.

Depending on your goals and the type of community, content could include:

• Blog posts or articles: To establish yourself as a thought leader.
• Polls and quizzes: To gather valuable insights.
• Discussion prompts: To spark conversation.
• Contests and giveaways: To encourage/reward member participation.

Regular posting helps maintain visibility in your members’ feeds and keeps your brand on top of their minds.

That said, life happens, and you can‘t be online every minute. Don’t let that silence your community.

Content calendars, as shown in the video below, are a great way to plan ahead.

And tools like HubSpot’s Marketing Hub let you schedule posts in advance.

Aside from posting, remember to interact with your people. Like their comments and respond to their questions or concerns.

Show them that you value their support. In turn, you’re likely to get even more insight into their needs, preferences, and challenges.

6. Measure your results.

Finally, it’s time to see if your hard work is paying off.

Take the time to evaluate your metrics. This will tell you whether what you’re doing is resonating with your audience. If not, you may need to change tactics.

Here are some tried-and-true methods for tracking your success:

• Social listening: Monitor your social accounts for any mentions, keywords, or discussions related to your brand (and your competitors). If the sentiment is positive, then you know you’re doing something right.
• Platform analytics: Use built-in tools, like X Analytics and Instagram Insights, to get direct insights into the engagement and reach of your posts and interactions.
• Third-party tools: For deeper analysis, consider using an external resource to gather data. My favorites are HubSpot’s Social Media Management tools, Google Analytics, and Sprout Social.

My advice? Don‘t get hung up too much on quantitative data. Numbers can’t always capture the magic of a thriving community. Plus, community building takes time. Be patient, and focus on the long game.

Create, Connect, Engage

You now have the ingredients to start a community that your customers, partners, and supporters want to be a part of. When you put them all together into a cohesive strategy, that’s when the magic really happens.

Matthew Stibbe, CEO of Articulate Marketing, told me, “Community is not the cult of celebrity. It’s a reciprocal thing. It is about building connections, true connections, and developing those connections into relationships.”

He’s exactly right: communities help you share your brand identity, engage with members to build and deepen relationships and help you share content with them so they have everything they need to succeed.

That being said, how can you reap the benefits of online communities? I’ll dive into that in this post and walk you through how to build an online community, with advice from experts who have successfully done it themselves.

1. Understand why you’re building a community.

I asked Jenny Sowyrda, Manager of Community Strategy and Operations at HubSpot, her tips for building an online community and understanding your motivations was her first piece of advice:

“Know why you’re building a community (from a business perspective) and who you’re building a community for. You should have a clear goal and mission statement and understand what perspective and expertise you bring to this persona that another community isn’t or couldn’t.”

This makes sense to me because knowing your motivation helps you throughout every step of the process.

My recommendation for uncovering the “why” is building a persona for each community.

It’ll help you throughout every other step of the process, from deciding the platforms you use to how you advertise your community — really any additional steps you go through along the way.

If you’re building multiple communities, I recommend this step for each one, and so does Sowyrda. She says the main factor that changes your community is the persona you’re building for vs. the platform you’re building on.

Her example breaks it down well: “Setting up an email inbox is generally the same for Gmail and Outlook. Setting up an email inbox for a bakery vs. a law firm, however, will look different. The same is true for community — the majority of your changes will be for your members.”

2. Identify the ideal audience for your community.

After defining your primary objectives, the next thing to do is identify and understand the audience.

Alyssa Martin, Community Manager at HeyOrca, says, “My top tip for building a community online is to make sure that you fully understand who your community is before starting.”

“Figure out what they’re passionate about and find out what their challenges are…Once you fully understand who they are, you can then move on to starting to strategize and set up the space you want to create.”

Taking time to understand the target audience will help you:

• Choose the most effective channels for community building.
• Determine the most appropriate style and tone of communication.
• Tailor content and activities to their needs and interests.
• Predict and manage any potential challenges that might arise within the community.

The best way to learn about your customers is by gathering data on your current customers or target demographic, including:

• Demographics. Who are they (age, gender, profession, etc.)?
• Psychographics. What are their values, attitudes, and lifestyles?
• Behaviors. How do they interact with brands and content online? What social media platforms do they use?
• Needs and challenges. What are they seeking to gain from being part of a community? What challenges are they hoping to overcome?

Qetsiyah Jacobson is a Social Media Community Manager at HeyOrca, and she agrees with Martin: You have to put in the effort to really know your community.

Her strategy is to put herself in her personas’ shoes: “Thinking like them, talking like them … I personally like to immerse myself within niche communities to really understand the audience I am trying to reach. Facebook groups and platforms like Reddit are a really good place to start.”

A few tools and resources I recommend to learn more about your audience are market research, social media analytics, and customer surveys.

3. Identify key internal stakeholders for the community.

After you know why you’re creating your community and the platform it’ll be on, you want to identify relevant internal stakeholders. I found that there are three categories to consider:

• Those who will be managing the community: For external-facing communities, this group of stakeholders may include the community manager, marketing department, and/or customer support. The stakeholders may vary greatly for internal communities.
• Those who will be impacted by the community: If your community is external facing, you’ll want to involve marketing teams because the answers you’re seeking will have the most impact on them. If you’re getting community feedback, I’d recommend involving product management stakeholders.
• Upper management: This stakeholder isn’t necessarily someone in the C-Suite or involved in the communities day-to-day; it’s someone who is inforanyand all processes to ensure things are going well, like an operations manager overseeing all digital experiences.

4. Determine your success metrics.

Success looks different for every online community, so it’s essential to decide the success metrics to track based on your goals.

For example, if your goal is brand awareness, tracking the number of followers and new followers will be critical metrics.

Sowyrda says, “We monitor a lot of metrics, from weekly and monthly active members, to number of posts, community growth, response time, and response rate.” She says the metrics you choose should align with business goals.

“The more you can align your success metrics with what the business cares about, the better off you’ll be,” she adds.

If multiple teams are involved in your process, success might look different for each team (which is why identifying your key stakeholders early on is important). Let’s go over some examples of KPIs for different teams.

Marketing KPIs could be:

• Market share
• Customer sentiment
• Mobilizing influencers and advocates
• NPS – Net Promoter Score

Operations KPIs could be:

• Operational efficiency
• Reducing support costs

Customer Service KPIs could be:

• CSAT – Customer Satisfaction Score
• NPS

Product Management KPIs could be:

• Product testing
• Market research
• Beta testing
• Customer feedback

5. Choose a platform for your community.

Christina Garnett, CCO of Founder and Fractional and Pocket, told me, “Don’t choose your community tech stack until you understand what behaviors you want community members to do and what metrics you want to track. This will help you narrow down the best community tools for your needs.”

This is an important step because there are also different community models: free, owned, and paid. I dive deeper into each one in this post, but the type you pick impacts the freedom you have within each community.

For example, if you want a forum structure, you can create a free Facebook Page to entice discussion. Since you don’t own the community (because it’s a social media platform), you’re limited to what Facebook allows.

If you create a forum within your website, it’s an owned community, and you have complete creative liberties and control over how you run your community and what people do once they become members.

A few key factors I recommend considering when making your decision are:

• Audience interest: Any info you’ve uncovered during your research into the platforms they already use and are interested in
• Community objectives: You want to pick a platform that helps you meet your goals. For example, if you want to share exclusive content, one that offers paid membership options is a good bet.
• Features: Consider what each platform offers and the features you need to use.
• Control: The level of ownership and control you want over the community. If it’s owned, you have more freedom.

If you’re having trouble deciding, Camille Trent, Director of Content and Community at Teal, shared a tip I like:

“You should almost always build a community in public channels first. For instance, as an AI resume builder and career tool for job seekers, it made sense for Teal to build publicly on LinkedIn, a social channel built for professionals, and cover career-related questions on the blog before expanding to other channels.”

Trent says the benefit of starting with public channels is that it “Helps you build credibility with a wider audience, increase awareness, and, as a bonus, do some light audience research to inform what type of private community to build later.”

6. Set up your community.

So, the setup process begins.

My first recommendation is to familiarize yourself with the software or platform you use to set up your community.

Play with a demo, go through hands-on onboarding with a sales rep, or spend time on the platform to understand what you can do.

As a basic example, if you’re setting up a forum, you want to know exactly how to create the discussion threads that will form your overall forum.

Below, I’ll go over some setup processes that are useful for all types of online communities:

• Defining the roles of your staff and members: Decide what roles your community will need, such as moderators or super members, and whether those will held internally, done by community members, or a combination of both. Consider who on your staff will be the community’s admin, moderators, or community manager.
• Assigning permissions for roles: You will need to assign and test permissions to the roles you create. For example, you may restrict new accounts from posting pictures or links.
• Implementing your theme: I strongly recommend tying your forum to your brand over impersonal and default settings. For example, use your brand color palette and add other recognizable, personal, and branded touches. If you’re creating a community on social media, your profile pictures and headings should be consistent with your existing branding.
• Review the sign-up process for members: Thoroughly test your sign-up process pre-launch to make sure it works. If you’re using owned platforms, I recommend setting up a single sign-on (SSO) if it’s offered. The easier the process, the faster you build your user base.
• Configuring spam controls: Take advantage of spam controls on any owned communities. You can set filters before launching, test them against a baseline of users, and adjust as needed. Non-owned platforms often have built-in spam filters and controls that automatically handle spam or harmful content.
• Crisis plan: It would be nice if they didn’t, but crises do happen. Thankfully, you can prevent them with social media crisis management planning. Consider all types of probable scenarios, create contingency plans, and prepare yourself beforehand.
• Keeping your community pre-launch private: You do not want outsiders having access to your community until you are ready, so make sure to enable your privacy settings.

Now, I’ll go over set-up tips unique to the communities you own and create yourself.

• Decide which features to enable: You have more creative control over owned communities, so you can choose to enable the features that are most relevant to your needs. Some software offer plug-ins, add-ons, and other features that automatically integrate with your community.
• Create your initial forum categories: If you’re creating a forum, decide on your initial categories that will start the conversation. Avoid creating too many categories at the start — keep it simple and let your categories evolve.
• Set up gamification: If it’s offered, gamification is a great way to build excitement. Think about the perks you want to reward members (like badges or other achievement recognitions), and set up gamification rules that inspire participation.
• Set up your outgoing email: Decide what email address you’ll use for community notifications, and review your welcome and registration emails to make sure they say what you want.

7. Create a promotion plan.

“I would recommend having a detailed promotion plan before you launch to ensure you understand how you’ll get folks into your community. If you build it, people won’t just show up, you need to find the right folks, introduce the value to them, and then really double down on building trust with them,” says Sowyrda.

This makes sense to me: you don’t want the work you’ve done to set up your community to go to waste. A targeted promotion plan lets your target audience know that the community exists and gets them interested and excited to join it.

The best way to do this is to take advantage of your existing online presence.

Promote your launch on your website, through email communications, and by having your sales team and customer service reps tell your existing and potential customers about it.

8. Optional step: Begin a soft launch.

This is an optional step, but you could soft launch your community to a smaller group and use this opportunity to fix any roadblocks initial users might encounter before a public launch.

I think a great example of a soft launch is from BigFish Games with the introduction of their new game: Dungeon Boss. While preparing for the launch, it placed its app in the Apple Canada store and drove users to the community forum in a closed and private environment.

It got a lot of customer feedback, some of which was incorporated into the Dungeon Boss game title. Consequently, when it launched worldwide, it became one of the most downloaded games.

Preparing for the Soft-Launch

Your community should be launch-ready.

Remove test content and fix known issues. Pre-populate your community with quality content (you can use your existing content) that will spark discussion.

Tone is important, so you want to set the right tone before moving on to the internal soft launch.

Internal Soft-Launch

The internal soft-launch will help you identify problems with trusted colleagues before going public.

People testing your community can give you valuable feedback to implement before you move on to a full launch. If you have internal moderators, this phase allows them to learn how to use the tools they’ll use in the forum.

Public Soft-Launch

Your public soft launch should be limited to a select audience that you encourage to give feedback on your new community forum.

To find people, you can request volunteers from trusted customers, create a banner on your website, or include mentions in your company newsletter.

9. Launch your community.

Launching your online community is one of the most essential steps to building it.

You’ll launch your community to your target audience post-soft launch or give it to the world for the first time. Either way, your community management strategy comes to life, and you can start attracting an audience and building connections.

Leverage the promotion plan you created, and watch it come to life. Here are some additional tips that will help you drive the first 100 members of your community:

• Invite your contacts: This doesn’t mean personal connections (unless it’s appropriate), but any professional contacts you have that align with what you’re offering with your community.
• Discuss with everyone and anyone: Get in the habit of talking to people everywhere you go, especially if your community is centered around a broad product or service that has value for many people.
• Enlist the help of new members through gamification: Ask your growing, early group to help you broaden the network by inviting friends, colleagues, and digital connections. You can encourage this through contests or reward systems integrated into your platform.
• Partner with influencers: Collaborating with a related and complementary company can be an effective way to promote your new community and welcome new members who like both products and services. (Pro Tip: Micro-influencers are your best bet here, and they come at a fraction of the cost of mega-influencers)

10. Remain adaptable.

My final tip, which holds for all business processes (but is still worth repeating), is being open to change and ready to pivot. As much as you test, roadblocks that require you to adapt can pop up.

Sowryda advises: “Be willing to pivot. Your community may change as you get to know your members and what they want/don’t want. Be open to adapting to meet those needs, as the end goal should always be your members’ success.”

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Months before Beau was born, my sister — herself a mother of three — recommended we put a “NoseFrida” on our registry.

“It’s this rubber tube,” she said. “One end goes in the baby’s nose, the other goes in your mouth. Then you suck.” I laughed. Being childless at the time, this was a shocking concept. “It’s clean,” she said, “there’s a booger-catcher thing in the middle.” I laughed again. “Nothing goes in your mouth.”

I looked at my wife. “I’m not doing that.” She rolled her eyes and palmed her belly.

Months after Beau is born:

He’s still very small. I’m on the couch, horizontal, lying on my back, holding him above my head. My elbows are bending. I’m moving him up and down. We’re playing, laughing. My mouth is open.

Beau spits up.

My mouth is suddenly full. It’s breast milk — recently consumed and now regurgitated — but I’m not phased, believe it or not. My son is three months old, after all. Strange things happen. I look at my wife. She’s cackling at my misfortune. I get up and pass her the boy and go to the sink and spit.

“Kels—” I call out.

“Yeah?”

“Have you seen the nose thing?” I said. “He’s stuffy.”

The day Beau was born:

Kelsey woke me up early. It was still dark outside. Light from the bathroom poured into the bedroom. “My water broke,” she said.

We drove to the hospital. We went through triage. We met the nurse and the doctor and settled into the delivery room. “This is a process,” said the nurse. “Try to get comfortable.”

We tried. I closed the blinds and dimmed the lights and adjusted my wife’s hospital bed until she said, “That feels good.” The room was dark and quiet, calm. Kels fell asleep. Her back was to me. I was sitting in a recliner, reading something, listening to my son’s heartbeat come through the fetal monitor.

I closed my eyes. The door opened. My eyes opened. “Okay—” said the nurse, “we have a grumpy baby in there—” Kels sat up. I stood up. “I’m gonna have you roll over—” the nurse told my wife.

Then, suddenly, another nurse walked in. And another. And another. Then the obstetrician walked in. Then the anesthesiologist. Suddenly, a dozen people surrounded my wife, shifting her this way and that way, propping her up. “It’s gonna be fine, dear—” said the nurse, “just breathe, dear, breathe—”

I backed up until my heel hit the wall. I was in the corner now. My wife was on her knees and elbows now. I couldn’t see her face anymore. A doctor approached me. “Dad?” I looked at her. “The boy’s heart rate just dropped.”

“Dropped?”

“Yes,” she said. “One-ten to one-sixty is normal in utero—” I looked at the monitor. It was beeping and bouncing: fifty-four, fifty-seven, fifty-two. “It’s in the fifties now,” she said.

“Why?” I said. My palms were wet.

“Probably the umbilical cord—” the doctor kept talking, elaborating, but I could only see my wife and hear the monitor and feel my throat tightening.

Then, suddenly, the beeping stopped. “Heart rate stabilized,” someone said, and the room cleared out as quickly as it had filled up.

Then, suddenly, it was just me and my wife and the doctor, who said, “This can’t keep happening.”

“But what actually happened?” my wife asked.

The doctor repeated herself. “The umbilical cord,” she said, “it’s compromised.” Then she told us if the heart rate deceleration kept happening, an emergency cesarean would be necessary. Kelsey squeezed my hand. I squeezed back. An hour later, it happened again. And again after that.

“Okay,” said my wife, and signed the liability form.

“Okay,” said the doctor, and the nurses began rolling Kelsey’s bed toward the operating room. Before she turned the corner, we signed I Love You to each other.

Three fingers. Then, suddenly, it was just me. I was alone, sitting there, picking the skin off my thumb and tapping my foot. I looked down. My thumb was bleeding. I stopped picking and put it in my mouth.

I’m a secular person, but in that moment, I began to pray. “God—” I looked down. The blood was pooling in my cuticle. I let it go. “Please—” I didn’t know what I was doing. “Please—” I didn’t know how to talk to God. “Please, Lord—” I began bartering with Him. “I swear to you,” I said, “I’ll be the best dad.”

The moment Beau is born:

In the operating room, when the surgeon lifts him up over the blue curtain and I see him for the first time, I recognize him. So much so, in fact, it takes my breath away. I gasp. I know this person. I know his face.

It feels like when you run into an old friend, someone you left behind, and they’ve changed, of course — time has changed them — but you still see them as you once knew them. This is what it feels like the moment Beau is born. It feels like I already know him.

The surgeon passes the boy to a nurse. “Apgar at one and five—” he says.

“Yes, Doctor,” says the nurse.

“And I need suction on the left—” he says in the same breath.

“Yes, Doctor,” says another nurse.

“More—”

“Yes, Doctor.”

Beau is in a small room now, adjacent to the OR. He needs to be cleaned and measured and weighed. I look at Kelsey. “Go meet him,” she says.

A year after Beau was born, I did a writing experiment.

I asked one of the big AI engines a question:

“Can you describe meeting your firstborn child?”

The computer thought for a moment, then produced 88 words:

I read it, then wrote my own version, except I limited myself to exactly as many words as the AI’s passage. I often practice writing this way. Efficiency, after all, is my bread and butter as a copywriter. Word economy is baked into the discipline. Saying more in fewer words is never a bad thing:

When I shared it in my newsletter and on LinkedIn, the response was remarkable. The concept, clearly, struck a nerve. Hundreds of thousands of people saw the experiment, prompting over a thousand comments, DMs, and emails. All that feedback culminated in a consensus: my version is better.

Readers said that despite using only as many words as the AI, my passage created much richer, more vivid imagery: “I could actually see your version,” someone commented. “It felt like a movie was playing in my head.”

“Mind Movies” are a real phenomenon.

Harvard psychologist Stephen Kosslyn calls it “Mental Imagery,” or the “reproduction of visual images in the absence of the stimuli themselves.”

Mind Movies can be self-inflicted — an athlete, for example, might imagine herself making the game-winning shot — or, they can be done to us, prompted by writing.

But how? I’ll tell you exactly:

You can put “holes” in your writing.

In other words, leave things out — details, context — and this will give The Reader a chance to “fill in” that space, to use her imagination, to access her own experiences, or memories, good or bad, painful or pleasant.

Holes invite The Reader to participate in the narrative.

But how do you create holes? I’ll tell you exactly:

1. Anti-description

For example, I don’t need to tell you I’m in a hospital:

You fill in this hole for yourself because I mention “the nurse,” and “masks” and “gowns” and “gloves” and “hairnets.” These context clues are enough to conjure the colors, smells, and sterility of a hospital.

I’m not giving you a description as much as an anti-description — small details that force you to color in the story based on your own experiences in a hospital, creating an image that is invariably more real and believable.

This process of filling in the details for yourself — even if they’re not perfectly accurate — is not only engaging, but can also conjure profoundly vivid imagery, the fodder of a “Mind Movie.”

Another way this phenomenon expresses itself is via The Kuleshov Effect, discovered by film researcher Lev Kuleshov, who did an experiment. He put an actor in front of a camera and asked him to deliver an expressionless look. The actor, someone named Ivan Mosjoukine, did this:

Then, Kuleshov showed audiences a series of shots, followed by Mosjoukine’s expressionless face.

He showed them a bowl of soup:

He showed them a small girl in a coffin:

He showed them a woman on a fainting couch:

In his book, The Power of Film, film professor Howard Suber explains the significance of this experiment.

“Audiences raved at the range of this great actor,” says Suber, “How he expressed how famished he was in front of that bowl of soup. And how heartbroken he was at his child — nothing had identified any relationship between the child and the actor; the audience read that story into it,” says Suber. “And the woman on the couch … desire.”

“What Kuleshov proved is you don’t want theatrical acting in which the actor projects to the back of the house,” explains Suber. “The actor does not need to project. The audience is projecting onto the actor the emotions they think the actor is feeling, even though the actor isn’t expressing any emotion.”

Mosjoukine’s “expressionless look” in film is like “anti-description” in writing: by giving The Reader less, you’re actually giving them more to imagine, visualize, and experience.

2. Dialogue

For example, I don’t need to tell you I’m anxious in this scene:

You fill in this hole for yourself, based on what I’m saying, the observations I’m stating, and the questions I’m asking. This is also known as subtext. It’s the true meaning behind what characters say — and it’s one of our salient advantages as human writers.

For example, I’m not simply saying “Hello” to my son:

Ostensibly it’s a greeting, but it’s actually me becoming a new person. In this moment, the old person, the childless person — the one that wouldn’t even consider using a NoseFrida — is gone. In this moment, my priorities and worldview have changed, irreversibly so. I’ve transformed.

You fill in this hole for yourself by letting the context — the circumstance, the setting — dictate the meaning.

This is in stark contrast to the AI’s approach.

The computer lacks consciousness. It’s not aware of itself, much less the human condition. It can’t comprehend the essence of a person, or the significance of a moment, much less this moment, the gravity and complexity of meeting your firstborn child.

So, instead, the AI spoon-feeds us a series of platitudes and cliches, an amalgamation of some ideal scenario, some version of perfection:

It falls flat, of course, because it’s just not that simple.

“The AI’s version may well be accurate (for some at least), but it lacks the warmth and reality of holding your child for the first time,” explains fellow writer and parent, Katie Murray, in a comment on my post.

“As a first-time parent, I was ecstatic and anxious in equal measure as I held my beautiful baby for the first time. You recognize the thrill and the responsibility of being a parent simultaneously, and nothing quite prepares you for either.”

The AI can’t understand this duality because it’s not alive. It didn’t live this moment, so it can’t relate.

It didn’t just watch the most important person in its life go through 36 hours of hard, complicated labor. It didn’t witness its unborn child struggling to breathe inside the womb of this person.

It wasn’t there during emergency surgery at 4 o’clock in the morning, sitting by its wife, holding her head, telling her everything is going to be okay when there was a very real possibility that it wouldn’t be … that something horrible and unthinkable might happen to its family, to their future together, to their love.

People are the most incredible animals because, every day, we go through life with the knowledge that everything we care about, everything we love, could be taken from us. And yet, we go on anyway. Every day, we persist.

And sometimes, we’re reminded of this reality, and it does something to us, and that’s why I wrote what I wrote. I wrote my truth. And because we all share the human experience, so many people understood that truth.

They related to my version, my experience — and they were equally underwhelmed by the version put forth by the AI.

This is why copywriting will always be a human profession.

Because writing is actually not our work.

“[Writing] a great ad,” said creative director Jeff Goodby,” is [putting] a mirror in front of your audience.”

Writing is important, of course, and hopefully, the dialogue, anti-description, and subtext I created illustrates the enormous chasm between a human’s turn of phrase and that of a machine. But even so, if that chasm were to close — years or decades into the future, if ever — I hope every copywriter reading this finds solace in the fact that writing is just our medium, the vessel through which we put a mirror in front of our audience, and reflect something patently human and imperfect and true.