It seems every couple of months someone comes up with a seemingly great idea; ‘let’s organise our community by interest!’
This is when you structure the community not by the product or activity people are engaged with, you structure the community by what you think they’re trying to do/achieve/the broader interest.
For example, a company which provides HR products might structure the community by ‘getting started, managing a team, handling payroll’ etc…instead of product 1, product 2, product 3 etc…
The problem with this approach is it ignores how people think and, more importantly, behave (it’s also bad for SEO).
It’s like if your supermarket organized shelves around the type of meal you were trying to create and put chicken, onions, curry powder, rice, tomatoes, rice, and garlic in one area.
You can kind of see the logic to it. But it just isn’t how people think.
There are many places to be clever when building a community, how you structure the categories and interests isn’t one of them. Keep it simple and follow how your members behave today.
