Community Strategy Insights

The latest insights on community strategy, technology, and value by FeverBee’s founder, Richard Millington

Don’t Get Sucked Into The Community Tactics Quagmire

Richard Millington
Richard Millington

Founder of FeverBee

A quick reminder this is the final week to sign up for our Strategic Community Management course. We won’t be running this course again this year.

If you’re not sure whether you should sign up, consider how many tactics you’re engaging in today.

If your community strategy is any good, you should be working on just 3 to 7 tactics each week.

That’s it.

Your goal is to commit all your time, resources, and energy to executing a tiny number of tactics extremely well instead of lots of tactics badly.

This is how you delight your members and make your community completely unique.

 

The problem is most people aren’t even close to this.

Most people are engaging in a dozen or more tactics each week. One community manager last week gave me a list which included:

  • Initiating new discussions.
  • Replying to current discussions.
  • Creating the newsletter.
  • Writing new blog posts.
  • Organizing AMAs.
  • Organizing webinars.
  • Removing spam.
  • Updating the gamification system.
  • Running the MVP program.
  • Welcoming newcomers.
  • Chasing up lost members.
  • Collecting and analyzing community data.
  • Presenting the community to bosses.
  • Escalating problems to the product team.
  • Writing a new onboarding series.
  • Updating the FAQ with new questions.

That’s 16+ different tactics.

You’re never going to make any real progress if you’re dividing your time into tiny chunks while hoping for big results.

When you’re constantly jumping from one tactic to the next, spending a few minutes on each every day, you’re undermining your own community efforts.

 

Real progress comes from doubling down on the tactics which really matter.

Much of our work with clients is explaining what tactics they can stop doing to double down on the ones that move the needle.

This is the trick to making immediate, remarkable, progress towards any goal. All things being equal, when you commit more resources to something you can achieve much more.

For example, do you think your members prefer to join a community where they can get answers to questions or a community which is systematically building the biggest database of expertise in that field.

Do you think your members prefer to join an MVP program which sends them swag or which gets them on a call with the CEO to discuss their concerns once a quarter?

Do you think your members prefer to join a community which shares useful tips, or one which publishes a book containing the best advice from your members each year?

Do you think your members want another hour-long expert webinar to go to or a professionally filmed and edited list of the top 5 tips shared by your community’s top experts from that webinar?

Do you think your newcomers want to be included in an @mention list or get a personal mentor, a private call, and someone who takes the time to find out what they need.

The list goes on and on. Once you start spending 10 hours per week on a tactic instead of 1 to 2, you can build a completely unique community.

 

The problem is most people aren’t even close to this.

There tend to be three reasons why most people don’t do this today.

1) You don’t know what your members want. This happens when your audience research is bad, you haven’t properly segmented your members, and you don’t know what tactics to focus on.

2) You don’t know what’s working. This happens when you haven’t built dashboards to check what’s working/not working. Most people keep adding new tactics without removing those that don’t work. You have less time to spend on each tactic.

3) You’re scared. Perhaps the most common. You’re worried about killing a tactic because a small group of vocal members like it. You don’t want to make anyone upset.

Getting Strategic About Tactics

If you sign up for the course, we will help you escape this tactics quagmire by building proper audience segments to know what your members need, developing dashboards to know what’s working, and equipping you with the mindset to face down the vocal minority.

If you want to join us, click here.

This is your final week to join us.

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