After deciding to launch a private community, one of the first questions organizations will grapple with is:
What the heck are we gonna post in our community?
It’s a pretty interesting question because in the beginning it matters a lot, but long term, it doesn’t matter much at all.
I always recommend aligning your community content strategy with your overall association strategy. I’ve developed a process to help organizations determine which of their strategic goals can be supported by implementing a social community. In the beginning, the community’s content should flow out of the strategic goal it supports.
Community content: Got Milk?
Think about your community content as the milk in the back of the grocery store. It’s the thing that draws people into the community. Once inside the community, your goal — like the grocery store’s — is to get people to impulse-buy. In a community, impulse-buy means things like add contacts, respond to discussions, upload resources, and so on.
This may sound obvious, but it’s important to put the community’s content in the community. I’m a member of several online communities in which communications to group members happen outside the community. Normally this is a staff training and change management issue. The staff is used to posting documents where they’ve always posted them, not in the community. The staff is used to sending communications by email, not through the community. It’s crucial to develop procedures for where to post content, and ensure staff follow them.
So in the beginning, content matters a lot. Your organization’s staff will post most of the content at first. Make sure the content is relevant, on-topic, and most importantly, that you drive people into the community (not Facebook, Linkedin, or your website) to get it.
But members don’t engage with content. They consume it.
Members engage with other members. Your community content is only the hook that gets members coming to the community to do other, more important things. Things that nurture a community. To sustain community for the long term, content becomes less important than fostering a sense of community.
Content has been dethroned: Conversation is king
People come for content, but they stay for community. As time goes on, you should spend less time writing content for your community, and more time writing content about your community. Think of this content as if it were a newsletter about what’s happened in your community, and what’s coming up.
As time goes on, your content should be increasingly focused on getting members to connect with each other, engage in conversations, and do other things that build the community. These are the activities that sustain engagement, not consuming association content.
As long as engagement isn’t dipping dramatically and you haven’t deviated drastically from your organization’s strategy, you should allow the community to choose its own path.
