This happens most often when you’re launching (or reviving) a community for a topic in which the community manager isn’t an expert.
Some things help:
- Attend half a dozen meetups (or online webinars) for the topic and see what questions people are asking (and which answers people give)
- Run a survey and find out what problems your audience faces.
- Read the trade press and see which discussions are coming up most often.
- Ask your customer support team what questions they’re getting every day.
- Look at the trends happening in related sectors and ask if it might too happen in yours.
- Send emails out to a dozen known figures in the field, explain what you’re trying to do, and ask what questions they come across most often.
- Follow the topic on social media and see which questions people are asking.
If you can’t build a list of 50 questions quite quickly, repeat all the steps above until you can.
There are many reasons why launching a community in a field in which you’re not an expert can be difficult, a lack of questions to ask shouldn’t be one of them.
