Community Everywhere

[JoelR]

There's a growing push for Community Everywhere, which means interacting with your audience where they already hang out whether that is Reddit, Facebook, Slack, YouTube, a superusers newsletter, or other third party platforms.  

This is in contrast to Owned Communities, that you own and control and can offer a curated experience.  

As a user, do you actually care that your question is answered on a brand-owned platform, or that your question is answered? As a user into fandom, do you restrict your enthusiasm to only official channels or do you talk about your interests across multiple platforms? 

Community Everywhere presents a broader shift in how organizations think about community - it's more spread out, it's less controlled, but it's more engaging, it's more immediate, and it meets users where they want to be met.  

[Maria]

I have a Facebook group where there are over 10k members. However, I have never owned a forum with more than 1k users. I control my forum but I do not have control over my facebook group. There is no one to dictate me what I should do with my forum, however, in order to continue running my facebook group, I need to follow Facebook rules

[Kane]

The key to becoming successful online is to  build a community. You can build a community through your blog, forums, or social media. Your community will not only help you to build social discussion and social engagement but also market and promote your products and services. This is the reason why there is a growing trend of building  communities.

[Shortie]

Having your community everywhere such as on your community as well as on sites such as Slack, Discord, Reddit and similar places allows you to now only interact with your community wherever they are happy to be but it also allows your community to better be found as well by new people who may very well become active members of your community. 

[Kane]

While building communities through community software is on decline, I think building communities on social platform is a growing trend. One of the reasons why social media communities are growing is because it is easier to build members as social sites boost tremendous amount of users.

[JoelR]

On 3/24/2024 at 1:18 AM, Kane said:

While building communities through community software is on decline, I think building communities on social platform is a growing trend. One of the reasons why social media communities are growing is because it is easier to build members as social sites boost tremendous amount of users.

That's the core of Community Everywhere: the recognition that we should stop trying to force users coming to us (on the platform that we "own and control"), and instead, go to where the users are already located.  

[Kane]

That's very true. Unless you offer something better, you cannot bring people to the communities you control or own. I see a lot of people trying to promote their communities on social media and often interpret social media sites as a threat to communities. I think community owners should try to co-exist and build a platform for those who are interested in text based discussion instead of broadcasting content.

[Destiny]

Community everywhere I feel is essential for the success of your community. Many people want to be part of a community but they want to be part of it on a platform that they are happy to use. Some people prefer Facebook groups over forums and vice-versa and having your community on both places or more than one place can benefit the growth of your community as a whole. 

[Toni]

Interacting with your community wherever they are happy to be is one way to keep all your community users happy, the only issue I have with having community everywhere is that it can be time-consuming for community leaders to keep up with the demand of being active within all places their community is. 

If you can pick two popular places your community prefers to be and stick with those as well as your main hosted community, that is always an option to consider. 

 

[JoelR]

The concept of community everywhere is not that you need to necessarily participate on all platforms for your audience, but that you don't bother with an owned community and you build a community where your members are already gathering.  

For example, if you're a video game developer and if your users are already on Discord, you build your brand community on Discord.