Building a community involves investing in the connections with your customers, growing these connections, and encouraging them to bring in more people.
Community building is a great way of increasing traction. It is basically maximizing your existing users to gain more users. People like the feeling of being part of something especially when it is bigger than themselves. This feeling should be groomed and encouraged to its maximum. To maximize this feeling, you need to provide your community members with a mission bigger than themselves. User research is also very important if you want to build an awesome community.
A powerful mission gives the community a shared sense of purpose and motivates them to contribute.
Products that thrive with community building are products whose core function is the connection of people. For example, a sharing platform or a review platform. These are the best set up to take advantage of community building. Where a product’s main value is bringing people together in a system that makes them its priority, that is where community building can really bring traction.
For it to lead to traction, It is very important to have an existing audience to jump-start the community-building efforts. Having a large audience from the get-go is however not a prerequisite for having a successful community. You can start from where you are. Your friends and family can be your first audience.
Openness with your community is also a great way to get people to empathize with your mission and want to do more to achieve it. Engage with the community members. Listen to them. When you solve their problems and make them feel valued, they will want to push your product to the next user you need.
When you make your user feel awesome through your product, they can’t help but tell others about their secret. Invest in the connections with your customers, and provide a means for your community members to express themselves.
