Over the past week, we’ve studied various content across several communities. This includes announcements, blog posts, member spotlights, challenges, and other articles. Pretty much none of it attracts more engagement or readership.
It’s becoming pretty clear that most of our community audiences are choosing not to consume the content we spend a lot of time and resources creating.
That’s because our approach to creating content hasn’t changed with the times – it’s long overdue for a revamp.
What Is Community Content?
First, let’s clarify what we mean by ‘community content’. We’re not talking about discussions and group chat. We’re talking specifically about the primarily static content that’s published for an audience to consume in a community environment.
By community environment, we mean both a hosted community experience and environments which enable members to engage directly with one another. You can see a breakdown of many of the common types of content below:
Community content includes two types:
- The content you create for members. This is all the (primarily static, non-discussion) content you create for members of your community. It includes everything we’ve just covered. This is the content which gets published on a content calendar and is mostly ignored.
- The content members create for each other. This is the more traditional user-generated content which members can create either on a community platform or, far more likely, on their platforms. However, it’s becoming increasingly rare to find members doing so in the communities that enable user-generated content.
This isn’t a comprehensive list – but it gives you a good overview of the most common examples.
Why Is Community Content Performing Poorly?
Perhaps one obvious problem is people generally aren’t looking to consume content in enterprise communities. Most people visiting enterprise communities simply seek a solution to a problem. They’re not looking to stick around and browse. Once they find the answer, they leave.
But this has always been the case; it doesn’t explain what’s changed.
What’s changed is the bar for content has risen so much higher, and those creating content for communities haven’t kept up. This includes:
- Problem 1: It’s the wrong type of content. The content people want to consume differs from the content most organisations create. Organisations pump out endless member spotlights, announcements, and obscure knowledge-base articles. But this isn’t the type of content people want to consume. How often have you read through any of these kinds of articles?
- Problem 2: It’s poorly designed (and in the wrong medium). Too much content is published in a forum-style experience, not a dedicated CMS. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to persuade people to consume content from dreary-looking channels when they are used to consuming content from high-quality CMS platforms. This places severe limits on how it can be presented. Worse yet, most platforms make sharing content in the most popular mediums today (videos, images, podcasts, etc.…) very difficult.
There are some exceptions. DigitalOcean hosts content that looks good is well displayed, and is well organised.
Communities hosted on Gradual also tend to feature content pretty well. But for the best part, the content on hosted communities looks terrible.
- Problem 3: It’s not engaging. The bar for engaging content has been raised beyond belief over the past few years. We’re way past the ‘listicles’, ‘how to’ articles, and wiki-style posts. If we want people to engage with content, we must embed engaging elements. We must learn to tell powerful stories, write compelling hooks, and create an emotional payoff.
- Problem 4: It’s poorly promoted. Too often, organisations publish or send out a few messages on social media and think the job is done. Nope, it’s not even close to being done. There’s a whole new game being played regarding the distribution of content, which few communities have mastered.
If these are the problems, how can we go about fixing them?
Kill Your Content Calendar
The old approach to creating content was simple.
An organisation decides they should create content for the community.
They ask members what they want, collaborate with experts to create the content, and publish it as blog posts, knowledge base articles, and videos on a regular calendar. You can see a list of the typical kind of content below:
The logic behind a content calendar is it builds predictability, and the audience forms a habit of regularly visiting your content.
In theory, this works fine, and many major media publications do precisely this. But they have the resources, expertise, and motivation to ensure every item of content they create is excellent.
Community professionals generally don’t.
After investigating several organisations and speaking to members who engage in these communities, it’s clear the content calendar is doing far more harm than good. Community folks often churn out substandard content to meet an arbitrary and self-imposed schedule.
It’s far better to spend your time creating one really engaging piece of content and publishing it when you think it’s excellent than trying to churn out several weekly articles to meet a pre-determined schedule.
(Aside: There also isn’t much evidence to support the idea that people prefer the predictability of a regular schedule vs the interest/excitement of an irregular schedule.)
Focus On Helping Members Creating And Discovering Content For Each Other
You spend far more time consuming (business) content from people than large brands.
That’s because people can create the kind of content brands can’t. They’re typically better trusted than brands. The content comes across as more authentic. It’s even often more informed than the content published on community sites. So, focus most of your content efforts on motivating members to create content for each other – and finding what has already been made.
- Make a list of your top questions and generalise the key topics using AI tools. For example, without any access to internal data, I can use Jonova.ai to pull together an example of the top questions being asked in each category in the FitBit Community and subreddits. I’ve cut this table down, but it gives you an idea of some of the common questions by category.
2. Find the best member-created answer for each of these. Now, you search for the best community-created answer for each of these and find the best answer members have created for each topic. This might be a discussion post, YouTube video, or blog article.
This is a win for people creating answers because they get your validation and additional traffic to their work. This, in turn, will encourage them to make extra content. You will be sending people to an external platform, but the results will be much better.
Alteryx kind of does this at the moment – the community features blog posts published elsewhere to be featured in the community. But I’d argue it would be easier to drive people to the source itself. This is a bigger reward for the author.
3. Call out for the content you want to see created. Now, put a call out for the content you want to feature in the community based on the community’s needs.
I’d suggest looking for a mix of ‘how to’ articles, case studies, personal stories, breakdowns, industry analyses, etc.…
Constantly share the best examples in a community. Highlight the kinds of information you want members to create and how you will feature it. Encourage members to use a specific hashtag when creating content so you can track it and link to the best examples.
Now, you’re motivating your entire community to create far more content. If you help your members build their audience, you will get more content in return.
If You Still Want To Create Your Content, Make It Much, Much Better
Content Has To Begin With An Engaging Hook
You need to have a hook that will catch the audience’s attention.
You need to consider why people will read and share your content. And the only way for that to happen is if you’re writing something which:
- Provokes surprise.
- Reinforces an existing belief (especially a minority belief).
- Stokes controversy.
- Hooks someone’s ego etc…
I.e. Five years ago, this article would’ve been titled “How To Write Content For Your Community – Five Great Tips”, but today it’s “You’re Wasting Time Creating Content Nobody Reads”
The former was written for a search algorithm, and the latter for a social algorithm. Aside – it’s far more enjoyable to write titles for the latter category than the former.
When you’re creating content, the hook is key.
You can always browse around and find helpful information. MrBeast is clearly a leader in this approach – so feel free to borrow any ideas that work.
Just reviewing this, I can imagine writing articles like:
- Which will be the last community platform left standing?
- This organisation created a thriving community in just five days.
- $100 community platform vs. $100,000 community platform.
Notice how each of these has a more powerful hook than ‘The Top Five Community Platforms’ or ‘How To Start A Community’
Or compare the MrBeast example above with the examples from a typical corporate brand account below:
They’re still making drab promotional and explainer content when it’s pretty clear that’s not why people visit YouTube. The titles are so tedious that few people are clicking them.
The hook matters – and it matters a lot. Even on something as simple as LinkedIn post, the first sentence greatly impacts whether someone reads it.
And we’re not just talking about clickbait here – we’re talking about the single idea you orientate the entire content item around. If the concept isn’t engaging, people won’t read.
How To Create Better-Designed And More Engaging Content
Even beyond the hook, we can compare the typical content created by brands to the content produced by the top creators in that sector. Despite the resource imbalance, the content created by creators will be much more engaging.
That’s because the financial bar for creating great content isn’t high. But the time, skill, and motivation barrier is a lot, lot, higher.
Organisations typically have a lot of the former but none of the latter. This often results in content with high production values but is tedious to watch/read.
It also helps that those who don’t work for free are free from the restraint that naturally comes from working with brands.
This is important because the best content is usually a little edgy and risky – not exactly the forte of many organisations that must worry about staying within brand guidelines.
If you want to create better content, you have to deliver something unexpected. You need to surprise, tackle the problem in a unique way, explore different formats and ideas, or be willing to do things which will be interesting for the audience to see.
I can’t stress enough the bar is so much higher today than it was five years ago. If you’re going to create content, you need to surpass it.
A Better Way To Distribute Content In A Community
Even if you’ve created the:
- The right type of content.
- On the right platform.
- Which is engaging and well-designed.
…you still have to get it in front of people.
The old approach was to promote the content through channels that would help you reach the audience. You would feature it on the site and promote it via links in social media channels. But this doesn’t work so well today. Social media algorithms seem intent on keeping people on their platforms and appear to reduce the reach of any content, including links.
This means you have five key approaches.
- Create and nurture pods. This is a group of people within the community who help each other’s content do well by sharing, liking, commenting, and otherwise promoting posts. Bring the top authors/creators in your sector and create a pod where you all benefit.
- Optimise for zero-click content. You have a core feature article/video, but then you slice and dice it up for distribution on each social media channel. You accept you won’t get traffic back, but you will get much more reach.
- Feature the people you want to promote it. My buddy Charlie taught me this when I was writing my second book. Interview and feature prominent people in your content who you will later want to promote it. This is the ‘school play’ tactic.
- Collaborate with known advocates to create the content. Develop brand partnerships to co-create content with influencers within the sector. They already have an existing audience who like, trust, and have chosen to read what they write. Distributing messages through this approach is incredibly effective.
- Nurture employee advocates. Create a group of employee advocates who have built their own audience of customers who can both publish and promote content to their audiences. Over the past few months, we’ve spent a lot of time helping Intel turn their employees into passionate advocates. The key is to ensure they share each other’s content, too – essentially turning them into a ‘pod’ of their own.
Have A Community Page To Feature The Best Member Contributions
I suspect almost every community would benefit from having a page to feature the best contributions from members each month.
Members can submit relevant links to articles/features they’ve created. If they are good, they will appear in the community.
A handful of organisations do this already:
- ASOS: As Seen On Me. Created a dedicated section on their website called “As Seen on Me”. Links directly to customer photos from Instagram using #AsSeenOnMe. This motivates members to use the tag with a chance to be featured on the site (and in turn attract a bigger audience).
- American Express: Open Forum. Hosts a dedicated website and app featuring content from customers. They also publish user-generated blogs and articles from small business owners.
And this is the key idea – there’s no reason why you can’t have a list of member-submitted content to a central community page which people.
This aligns directly with what creators want and encourages people to create the content they need.
Summary
Most community content fails because it’s outdated, uninspired, and poorly aligned with what audiences want.
Key problems include irrelevant topics, poor design, low engagement, and ineffective promotion.
The solution?
- Scrap the content calendar: Focus on creating fewer, higher-quality pieces that truly engage.
- Enable member-created content: Highlight and promote authentic, user-generated content rather than pushing generic corporate articles.
- Make content engaging: Start with compelling hooks, embed emotional storytelling, and take risks to stand out.
- Improve design and medium: Use better platforms and prioritize modern formats like videos, podcasts, and visually appealing layouts.
- Optimize distribution: Leverage social media pods, zero-click content strategies, and collaborations with influencers and employee advocates.
Shift from creating mediocre content to amplifying high-value, member-driven contributions that resonate with your audience.
p.s. Don’t forget we cover these skills in depth as part of our Advanced Community Skills course.
