Someone asked if the best place for interactions was on the forum?
Or should they be in comments on news posts?
Or via in-person meetups?
Or through social channels like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat?
The answer is quite simple. What kind of interactions best suit your strategy?
For example…
If your goal is customer support, you almost certainly want to be answering questions on social channels and possibly on a specific forum platform too. This allows you to answer as many questions as possible and document the best information for others to easily find.
If the goal is innovation, you probably want feedback on news posts and possibly a reddit-style platform that lets people propose and vote on the very best ideas.
If the goal is emotional support/building relationships, you probably want to encourage and tag answers in social and invite discussions in a private, highly-moderated, anonymous, space.
If the goal is retention, you probably want a platform that makes it easiest to share and read the best tips or advice about the product. If you don’t have that, you might lean towards comments on advice shared.
If the goal is community advocacy, it makes sense to use a dedicated advocacy platform – complete with leaderboards, tasks you can set, and simple methods of tracking rewards earned.
So many of the decisions we wrestle with every day are solved once we have a very clear strategy in place.
You’re going to be pressured to be everywhere and respond to everyone. Resist that pressure.
It sounds obvious, but you’ll get a lot of mileage out of using the right platform for interactions in the first place.
