Community building ideas to steal

Content is everywhere. It's unfortunately not so much as a differentiator for your product anymore.

Community, on the other hand, is not a commodity. It's an asset. Something that feeds into your brand value, that a user will come back for and that will make you different from other publishers producing similar content.

What's more, when audiences aren't on your site, they're spending a great deal of time on social media, growing accustomed to certain experiences and features that keep them coming back for more. They can…

Interact with content
Comment
See other user's opinions
Join events
Like and share content
Follow topics and authors that match their interests

These experiences have become user expectations, making traditional digital publisher sites seem passive with very little direct interaction.

In short, we're social beings who want to react and have human experiences – and it's this that makes community so powerful. Publishers therefore need to build a bridge between user expectations and experiences on their sites.

The challenge with community building

All publishers with a reader revenue strategy aim to subscribe their audience. The problem, however, is when they try to go from 0 to 100 – from unengaged to a loyal subscriber.

We can compare it to dating – you wouldn't immediately ask someone to marry you (unless maybe if you're on ‘Married at first sight'!), you'd ask them to dinner first.

Community helps to provide these intermediary steps, building engagement before trying to get value from your audience. I.e. Community-led conversion.

Not only this, but community has been proven to correlate with engagement metrics, bringing readers back on a more frequent basis, consuming more content and staying on site for longer. This naturally supports engagement, as well as conversion, retention and, ultimately, lifetime value.

The goal of this article: benchmarks to build a solid community strategy

WhatsApp channels
Commenting
Learning from social media platforms
Bringing IRL communities online and vice versa
Registration and membership

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> You'll also enjoy: Developing community beyond commenting, strategies from The Telegraph and The Times

This piece has been written by Madeleine White

Madeleine is Co-founder of The Audiencers and VP Marketing at Poool. Having worked with a variety of publishers from across the globe, Madeleine's developed a deep understanding of reader revenue, engagement and conversion strategies.

All articles written by Madeleine White