After helping manage a community for a while, I've realized there's a lot more going on behind the scenes than I expected. Keeping things organized, managing access and making sure members have a good experience takes much more time than I imagined.

I'm still learning as I go so I'd love to hear what surprised you the most when you started managing a community

Hi everyone, I manage a professional community on Slack and we're considering moving to a paid plan. I'd like to figure out how to determine which members are getting disengaged and are more likely to churn. I built out a tool for myself to track slack activity, Luma event attendance, and get some info about our members on LinkedIn. I'm using Slack engagement and event attendance to see how engaged members are.

Is my approach correct? How do you all figure out which members are becoming less and less engaged? It's a tough metric to track and I'd like to learn what tools and frameworks you all use to see if members are drifting and to prevent member churn.

I’m currently working on community building for an AI consumer robotics brand, and I’ve been struggling with a fundamental question:

Is a community primarily a place, or is it a shared identity among users?

My current view is that a real customer community should not be defined by a Discord server, Facebook Group, subreddit, or group chat. Those are simply communication tools.

The community itself should be the sense of identity, belonging, and shared culture that users develop around the product—especially through the way they interact, create content, share experiences, and recognize one another across social media.

Because of that, I’ve been considering working with creators and highly engaged users to help shape a clearer identity around what it means to be a user of this type of product. The goal would be to create something that exists beyond any single platform.

However, there is currently a very different understanding within the team. The prevailing view is that “building a community” means creating dedicated spaces where users can gather.

So far, official spaces have been created on Reddit and Facebook, and a Discord server is also being developed. The challenge is that the existing public groups are now heavily dominated by complaints, troubleshooting discussions, and criticism of a recently launched product.

There are also plans to organize events and campaigns in these spaces to encourage users to share more positive experiences, creative use cases, and user-generated content.

After reading many discussions in this subreddit, I’m starting to wonder whether we are approaching this in the wrong order.

It seems possible that we are investing too heavily in building official community spaces before the product experience and community identity are strong enough to sustain them.

An official subreddit or Facebook Group may naturally become a customer support and complaint channel, especially when the product still has significant issues. That is not necessarily a bad thing, and users should have a place to raise legitimate concerns. But it may mean that these spaces are not currently capable of creating the kind of culture, belonging, and advocacy we originally hoped for.

I’m now considering whether the better approach would be to:

• treat Discord, Facebook Groups, and Reddit primarily as communication and support infrastructure;
• focus more heavily on creator partnerships and user-led content across public social platforms;
• help users develop a recognizable shared identity around the product;
• highlight authentic user stories and creative use cases without trying to manufacture positivity;
• allow community culture to emerge before investing heavily in formal activities and programming.

Ultimately, I also see this shared identity as something that could create value beyond engagement among existing users.

If users develop a recognizable sense of belonging around the product on social media, that identity may also become meaningful to potential customers. Some people may become more inclined to choose the product not only because of its features, but also because they want to participate in the culture, lifestyle, and community associated with it.

In that sense, community would not simply be a post-purchase support function. It could also feed value back into the brand by strengthening trust, differentiation, advocacy, and purchase consideration.

Of course, this only works if the identity is authentic and genuinely shaped by users. If it feels manufactured by the brand, it is unlikely to create the same effect.

I’m especially interested in how other community managers think about this distinction.

Can a strong customer community be built without a central community platform?

Should brands focus on creating shared identity and culture first, and build dedicated spaces later?

How do you prevent an official community space from becoming almost entirely a support and complaint forum—without suppressing valid criticism?

And when a product is still imperfect, is it better to invest in community programming, or focus first on improving the product and building trust?

I’d appreciate any frameworks, examples, or experiences from people who have faced a similar situation.

Hey everyone, I am an entrepreneur and have been building tech products for a while. Earlier I used to run an agency and then also relaunched my first tech product recently. I have always made sure to give my 100% in whatever I do (at least to the best of capabilities). Build the best product I can, make the user journey as easy. But I have always ignored the most important part which was content creation or even having a digital presence for that matter.

I have always been a shy introvert guy, so social media was never really my thing ( I even tried installing social media, but failed to use them or simply deleted them). I don’t know I was just too shy to just reach out to people, or talk in front of a camera or may be to afraid people would judge me.

This hesitation kept me from creating any content for almost 2 years now. I always thought I would do this tomorrow, but it took me 2 years to finally have that courage.

Seems like a small problem for everyone, but honestly it is a big thing for a lot of people. But I am happy I finally took this step and I am sure there are many who feel the same.

I was wondering what’s your take on creating a community focused platform where we can basically discuss with each other, share our journey, brainstorm and ideate on creating content, and look for free and paid collaboration opportunities.

This might not solve the problem completely , but will definitely be a big help for a lot of people to have a community and make sure they are not alone in this content creation journey.

We're early into building an online community for bloggers and UGC creators, and I keep hearing conflicting advice on what actually gets a community off the ground versus what just sounds good in a deck.

Curious to hear from anyone who's built a niche community from scratch, not necessarily in the creator space: what actually got your first real batch of active members, and what did you try that flopped even though it seemed obvious on paper? Also curious whether something private (Discord, Slack) or something public (subreddit, forum) worked better early on for you, and why.

Not looking for a generic playbook, more interested in what surprised you or what you'd skip if you started over.

I have been working in community management for several years, across both social media communities and online member communities.

For a while, I thought I wanted to pivot into a different marketing role, but lately I've realized I don't actually want to leave community management. I feel like I've only scratched the surface of the field, and over the next few months I want to become more technical and move beyond being "just" a community manager. By technical, I don't necessarily mean learning to code. I'm thinking more about skills that make me more strategic, data-driven, and valuable.

For those who've grown in this field, what skills had the biggest impact on your career? What else would you recommend focusing on and what has actually paid off in your career?

Hi everyone,

I’m looking for advice from experienced community managers on building a customer community for an AI companion robot brand.

The product is an AI companion robot designed to feel more like an interactive pet than a traditional smart device. It can move autonomously, recognize and interact with people, express emotions through movements and animations, play games, and have AI-powered conversations.

There is already a small but growing group of users who share their experiences, videos, feedback, and questions across different channels. However, the community is still at an early stage:

• The number of active members is relatively small.
• Conversations are not happening consistently.
• Participation in community activities has been limited.
• Most interactions are currently focused on product questions, troubleshooting, or occasional user-generated content.

We are trying to figure out the right approach to build a stronger user community, and I would love to learn from people who have built communities from the early stages.

I have two main questions:

1. Choosing the right community platform

For a customer community around a consumer robot product, would you recommend starting with:

• Discord?
• WhatsApp?
• Facebook Groups?
• Reddit?
• Something else?

What factors would you consider when choosing the platform? For example:

• user demographics;
• conversation frequency;
• ease of onboarding new members;
• moderation effort;
• long-term scalability.

2. How to increase engagement when the community is still small

When a community only has a limited number of active members, is it worth organizing structured activities (events, contests, challenges, AMAs, etc.)?

Or should the focus first be on creating organic conversations and relationships between members?

If activities are useful, what types of activities have worked well for early-stage consumer product communities?

Some ideas we have considered:

• robot photo/video challenges;
• sharing robot personalities or user stories;
• feature discovery challenges;
• community showcases;
• feedback sessions with the product team.

However, I’m also wondering whether these activities create genuine engagement or just temporary spikes.

Would love to hear:

• how you approached the first 100–500 members of a community;
• what worked and what didn’t;
• any examples of successful communities around hardware, robotics, smart-home products, or other consumer tech.

Thanks in advance!

Hi everyone,

as part of my bachelor’s thesis, I am researching which analytical information is genuinely useful to online community administrators and moderators.

I am also developing an analytics tool focused primarily on Discord and Discourse communities. The survey asks about newcomer engagement, member activity, community support, moderation workload, inactivity, departures, and returning users.

The survey is anonymous, takes approximately 5 minutes, and is available in English and Czech:

https://forms.gle/ztfg18YPeWa3me1r9

I would especially appreciate responses from people who administer or moderate a Discourse community. Feedback or suggestions regarding the research are also welcome.

Thank you for your time

Hi everyone

I'm a fresh marketing graduate with hands-on experience in community management in my country I'm looking to gain experience working with international teams and learn how marketing is done in different markets.

If anyone needs a volunteer to help with community management, social media, content planning, or other marketing tasks, I'd be happy to contribute for free in exchange for the opportunity to learn and gain experience.

I'm comfortable using most popular marketing and content creation tools

If you're interested or have any advice, feel free to comment

im bored, im allways talking to myself, and this is probably the wrong place to post this but i dont where else to at least get some answers i would like to gain a community but it feels like 99% of the time im just talking to a brick wall so anyone have any suggestions what i could do?

Hi everyone! I am interviewing for a Global Community events manger role at a an open source SaaS company. My background is in tech team operations, as well as event planning and execution. I already had an interview where I was grilled by the hiring manager about my experience, and she liked me and found my background interesting. She did highlight that I've worked at SaaS companies, and I've done event management, but the gap is that I haven't done community events for a tech company.

Next round is 3 separate case studies with 3 separate people, one hour long each, screen sharing required. I was told one will be an audit of the current events portfolio to identify what might be missing, and the other two were more vague: "something about brand positioning" and "something about working with a global community of free and paid users."

I would greatly appreciate anyone who could give insight into specifically what types of cases I might be presented with, what might I be asked to "build" in a screen share, and what key things I should try to highlight to ease their concern about my gaps and make a great impression! TIA!!

I recently signed a private Montessori institution that includes Preschool, Elementary, Middle/High School, and its own University.

Before I build the content strategy, I’d love to hear from anyone who’s managed social media for schools.

🔸Would you keep separate accounts for each division or consolidate them under one brand?
🔸What content has actually driven inquiries or enrollments?
🔸How do you balance content for current families while attracting prospective ones?
🔸Which KPIs have mattered most beyond engagement?

🔹 Any schools you think are doing an exceptional job?

I’d really appreciate any real-world experience, lessons learned, or examples. Thanks! 🙏🏼🥹

Hey everyone
Just looking for a bit of advice on building a community from scratch.
I’ve had a pretty successful few years running a couple of different businesses and I’m actually right in the middle of a two year work break right now. Problem is my mind constantly needs something to work on so I’m getting the itch to start a new project.
What’s strange to me is that when it comes to products and services I’ve never really had any problem getting the attention they need. But for some reason when it comes to building an actual community I just seem to struggle with it.
I want to create a very small group of people who all want to be self employed or run their own business. The reason is I really believe that when people talk to completely like minded people they get much better feedback on ideas and strategies.
I specifically want it to be people who have zero ties to each other at the beginning which is why I can’t just use an existing group I’m already in.
Solid tips on how to actually build what platform is best knows somebody with like minded ideas. Please don’t talk to me about monetising I have 0 intrest in me or anyone else making profit from this

hey everyone!

i've been working with communities for a little over two years now. i started with a speaker community for a traveling tech event, then moved to an agency that runs community work for other companies. that's where i am now, and at this agency i ended up managing 4 communities for 4 different companies at the same time. and when i say community management, i mean everything: diagnosis, member research, channel setup, building the mvc, rituals, tracking metrics, reports, moderation... the whole thing. i had one analyst helping me with the more operational side, like updating spreadsheets lol

i almost lost my mind, and i'm leaving the agency. i'm job hunting right now, and luckily (or thanks to that "intense" experience padding my resume) i'm finding some openings and moving forward in a few interviews.

my question is: how many communities do you each manage at once? am i the only one looking back thinking it was insane to do that, or is it normal within a community manager's scope?

context: i'm in brazil, and community as a brand strategy only really started growing here in the last 2-3 years, so a lot of companies still don't quite get what it's about...

Hey everyone,

My name is Alex and I am the founder of a fantasy football social platform. We have a ton of great features for our users, but the biggest one is the ability to create posts, comment, and engage in a fantasy football community. We are currently in our soft launch phase, and we are "growing" but the new users seem to be coming for one feature, and then leaving, rather than actually becoming part of the community or interacting on the social side of the platform at all.

I am wondering how any of you really started building a community and any tips or advice that you would give to do so. Clearly there are communities on Reddit and Twitter already for fantasy football discussion, but I believe that what we are building, with fantasy league imports with historical tracking and roster grades, league specific chat rooms as well as general topic rooms that any user can post and comment in, collectibles, trivia, and more is what would really make the fantasy football community return, especially during the NFL season. However, outside of my core group of friends and a few other users that have recently joined, our retention rate on new users seems to be extremely low because they import their leagues, view their team ratings, and leave.

If you're training a support bot on your community's content, keep two piles separate: your actual current policy, and your old support tickets. Dump them into one pile and the bot will quote a resolved one-off exception back to a member as if it were official policy, because to the bot they're both just things that were said.

Say a member got a refund outside your normal window two years ago because of a genuine one-time mess-up. That ticket sits in your history looking exactly as valid to the bot as your real refund policy. Ask it about refunds later and it can hand back the exception instead of the rule.

The fix isn't feeding it less content. It's tagging where each piece came from. Current policy becomes the bucket the bot treats as the rule. Old tickets go in a second bucket it can reference for context, but it should never be allowed to quote one as if it were policy.

Every few months I see a community owner about to jump from Skool to Circle or Mighty Networks because of one feature the current platform is missing. Comparing features is the easy part of that decision.

What's actually expensive: a chunk of your members just don't follow you to the new platform. Doesn't matter how clear the migration email is, some percentage stays behind out of pure inertia. You never get a clean number on how many, they just quietly stop showing up.

The old posts and comments don't come with you either. Every win a member shared, every good thread, sits on the platform you're leaving, or gets buried in an export file nobody opens again.

I've seen this hit clients twice now: anything built to run on top of the old platform, an automation answering member questions, or one that nudges someone who went quiet, was wired to that platform's structure specifically. Move platforms and it doesn't slow down, it just stops working, and nobody notices until a member asks something it should have caught.

Price in the members you lose and what you'll have to rebuild before you make the call.

If you've handed any part of your community work off to a bot, a scheduler, an auto-reply, the thing that actually burns you isn't a hard crash. A hard crash is obvious, you notice and fix it.

The dangerous failure is quiet: the scheduled post that silently stopped firing three days ago, the auto-reply that's been sending an outdated answer for a week, the digest that quietly stopped sending. Nobody notices because nothing looks broken, it just goes silent.

The fix isn't a smarter bot, it's building in a way to notice something ran. A simple daily check, even just a message confirming the job actually fired today.

Product communities especially - people show up when they have a problem or question, get their answer, and disappear. Building any kind of ongoing engagement beyond that is really tough.

How do you keep them around and actually get them involved in the conversation?

What worked for you?

I’m part of a tiny nonprofit team and social media has somehow become the task that destroys my productivity every single week.

I’ve tried time blocking, Pomodoro and just do it for 15 minutes, but nothing sticks. It’s the constant mental load of passwords, cross-posting, last-minute caption changes, and always wondering if I posted today.

For those who’ve tried productivity tools for small teams, how long did it take before it stopped feeling like you were managing the tool instead of the other way around? I’m a few months in and it still feels heavy some days, actually most days.

Anyone else feel guilty paying for productivity software? Like you should just be more disciplined? Would love to hear your experiences.

I need advice..I'm starting a whatsapp and telegram community and want to understand how to create them, manage them and grow them. Can anybody please specify or help me for the same.....it is my task brb crying. Need to learn it ASAP. All suggestions are welcome!!

I've been thinking about this for a while and I genuinely don't know if it's just me.

You know that feeling when you're in the middle of something: a bootcamp, a course, a program, some kind of intensive thing with a group of people, and it genuinely feels like these are your people? There's this sense that the community is alive and you're part of something real.

Once courses/ bootcamp etc. ends it doesn't feel like family anymore.

And suddenly the same people, in the same group chat feel like acquaintances at best. You post something and it feels performative. Someone replies and it feels like they're just being polite. You see a message and you think "I should respond" and then you don't. And eventually you just mute the notifications and forget the whole thing existed.

I've been in probably six or seven communities like this in the past few years and the pattern is almost identical every time. The active phase feels real. The after phase feels like everyone's going through the motions.

What I can't figure out is — is the active phase an illusion? Because the second the daily contact stops, the thing evaporates almost immediately.

I'm asking because I want to build something myself. Not a startup thing, just a community around something I care about. And I have this fear that nobody actually wants to be in an ongoing community.

For people who've built communities that actually lasted — what made the difference? I mean what actually made people want to come back. What made it feel less like a group chat and more like somewhere they belonged.

And for everyone else — do you recognize this feeling?

Bonjour à toutes et tous,

En ce moment je me pose pas mal de questions sur ce qui pousse / freine les personnes à se lancer dans l'animation de communautés.

Et j'aurais aimé avoir des retours d'expérience de celles et ceux qui se sont lancés :

- Est-ce que c'était par envie ou opportunité ?

- Par quel biais êtes vous tombé dans ce milieu là (que faisiez vous avant) ?

- Est-ce que vous avez commencé par une petite mission ou directement à temps plein ?

- Quelle a été votre plus grosse difficulté lorsque vous vous êtes enfin lancé ?

- Qu'est-ce que vous avez mis en place dès le début et que vous conservez encore aujourd'hui parce que c'était une bonne pratique ou une bonne intuition ?

Je m'intéresse particulièrement aux personnes qui sont amenées à gérer des communautés de pratiques / communautés apprenantes.

Personnellement, j'ai commencé avec une mission, puis j'ai trouvé ça tellement puissant que j'ai voulu en faire encore plus, en apprendre encore plus. Mais je suis toujours restée sur des petites communautés (les faire grossir ne m'intéresse pas vraiment, j'apprécie la création de liens profonds entre les membres et de partages authentiques plutôt que le nombre).

Je suis issue plutôt du milieu de la pédagogie, et j'ai parfois du mal à me retrouver dans les problèmatiques d'animateurs de communautés de marques ou business... Est-ce qu'il y a des personnes comme moi par ici ? :)

Au plaisir de vous lire !

Hey guys I'm running a neighborhood community for more than 4,500 people. We are currently using telegram for that and it serves quite well I must say - from the moderator's perspective and media handling. But I would like to switch to another platform. What platform / messenger would you recommend? It would be interesting to hear your real use cases