Building an online community sounds like an attractive idea on paper. A group of enthusiastic, engaged users working on their own to boost your brand? What's the hitch?
Well, building a thriving online community takes a great deal of effort, often with little return for a very long time. And there are other considerations: do you build your own platform, participate in an existing community, or a little of both? What are the benefits from a brand, SEO, and content marketing perspective? In this edition of Whiteboard Friday, Rand answers all your questions about building yourself an online community, including whether it's an investment worth your time.
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Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week, we're chatting about how and whether to invest in and structure online communities.
I want to say a thank you to @DaveCraige on Twitter. Dave, thank you very much for the question, an excellent one. I think this is something that a lot of content marketers, web marketers, community builders think about is, "Should I be making an investment in building my own community? Should I leverage someone's existing community? How can I do that and benefit from an SEO perspective and a content marketing and a brand awareness perspective?" So we'll try and tackle some of those questions today on Whiteboard Friday.
Strategy first!
First off, before you go and invest anywhere or build anything, I urge you to think strategy first, meaning your business has goals. You have things that you want to accomplish. Maybe those are revenue growth or conversions. Maybe they have to do with entering a new sphere of influence or pursuing a new topic. Maybe you're trying to launch a new product. Maybe you're trying to pivot the business or disrupt yourself, change with technology.
Whatever those business goals are, they should lead you to marketing goals, the things that marketing can help to accomplish in those business goals. From that should fall out a bunch of tactics and initiatives. It's only down here, in your marketing goals and tactical initiatives, that if online communities match up with those and serve your broader business goals, that you should actually make the investment. If not or if they fall below the line of, "Well, we can do three things that we think this year and do them well and this is thing number 4 or number 5 or number 10," it doesn't make the cut.
Online communities fit here if...
1. A passionate group of investment-worthy size exists in your topic.
So if, for example, you are targeting a new niche. I think Dave himself is in cryptocurrency. There's definitely a passionate group of people in that sphere, and it is probably of investment-worthy size. More recently, that investment has been a little rocky, but certainly a large size group, and if you are targeting that group, a community could be worthwhile. So we have passion. We have a group. They are of sizable investment.
2. You/your brand/your platform can provide unique value via a community that's superior to what's available elsewhere.
Second, you or your brand or your platform can provide not just value but unique value, unique value different from what other people are offering via a community superior to what's available elsewhere. Dave might himself say, "Well, there's a bunch of communities around crypto, but I believe that I can create X, which will be unique in ways Y and Z and will be preferable for these types of participants in this way." Maybe that's because it enables sharing in certain ways. Maybe it enables transparency of certain kinds. Maybe it's because it has no vested interest or ties to particular currencies or particular companies, whatever the case may be.
3. You're willing to invest for years with little return to build something of great long-term value.
And last but not least, you're willing to invest potentially for years, literally years without return or with very little return to build something of great long-term value. I think this is the toughest one. But communities are most similar in attribute to content marketing, where you're going to put in a ton of upfront effort and a lot of ongoing effort before you're going to see that return. Most of the time, most communities fail because the people behind them were not willing to make the investments to build them up, or they made other types of mistakes. We'll talk about that in a second.
Two options: Build your own platform, or participate in an existing community
You have two options here. First, you can build your own platform. Second, you can participate in an existing community. My advice on this is never do number one without first spending a bunch of time in number two.
So if you are unfamiliar with the community platforms that already exist in interior decorating or in furniture design or in cryptocurrency or in machining tools or in men's fashion, first participate in the communities that already exist in the space you're targeting so that you are very familiar with the players, the platforms, the options, and opportunities. Otherwise, you will never know whether it's an investment-worthy size, a passionate group. You'll never know how or whether you can provide unique value. It's just going to be too tough to get those things down. So always invest in the existing communities before you do the other one.
1. Build your own platform
Potential structures
Let's talk quickly about building your own platform, and then we'll talk about investing in others. If you're deciding that what matches your goals best and your strategy best is to build your own platform, there are numerous opportunities. You can do it sort of halfway, where you build on someone else's existing platform, for example creating your own subreddit or your own Facebook or LinkedIn group, which essentially uses another community's platform, but you're the owner and administrator of that community.
Or you can actually build your own forum or discussion board, your own blog and comments section, your own Q&A board, your own content leaderboard, like Hacker News or like Dharmesh and I did with Inbound.org, where we essentially built a Reddit or Hacker News-like clone for marketers.
Those investments are going to be much more severe than a Facebook group or a Twitter hashtag, a Twitter chat or a LinkedIn group, or those kinds of things, but you want to compare the benefits and drawbacks. In each, there are some of each.
Benefits & drawbacks
So forums and discussions, those are going to have user-generated content, which is a beautiful thing because it scales non-linearly with your investment. So if you build up a community of people who are on an ongoing basis creating topics and answering those topics and talking about those things in either a Q&A board or a forum discussion or a content leaderboard, what's great is you get that benefit, that SEO benefit of having a bunch of longtail, hopefully high-quality content and discussion you're going to need to do.
Mostly, what you're going to worry about is drawbacks like the graveyard effect, where the community appears empty and so no one participates and maybe it drags down Google's perception of your site because you have a bunch of low quality or thin pages, or people leave a bunch of spam in there or they become communities filled with hate groups, and the internet can devolve very quickly, as you can see from a lot of online communities.
Whatever you're doing, blog and comments, you get SEO benefits, you get thought leadership benefits, but it requires regular content investments. You don't get the UGC benefit quite like you would with a forum or a discussion. With Facebook groups or LinkedIn groups, Twitter hashtags, it's easy to build, but there's no SEO benefit, usually very little to none.
With a Q&A board, you do get UGC and SEO. You still have those same moderation and graveyard risks.
With content leaderboards, they're very difficult to maintain, Inbound.org being a good example, where Dharmesh and I figured, "Hey, we can get this thing up and rolling," and then it turns out no, we need to hire people and maintain it and put in a bunch of effort and energy. But it can become a bookmarkable destination, which means you get repeat traffic over and over.
Whatever you're choosing, make sure you list out these benefits and then align these with the strategy, the marketing goal, the tactics and initiatives that flow from those. That's going to help determine how you should structure, whether you should structure your own community.
2. Participate in existing communities
Size/reach
The other option is participating in existing ones, places like Quora, subreddits, Twitter, LinkedIn groups, existing forums. Same thing, you're going to take these. Well, we can participate on an existing forum, and we can see that the size and reach is on average about nine responses per thread, about three threads per day, three new threads per day.
Benefits & drawbacks
The benefit is that it can build up our thought leadership and our recognition among this group of influential people in our field. The drawback is it builds our competitor's content, because this forum is going to be ranking for all those things. They own the platform. It's not our owned platform. Then we align that with our goals and initiatives.
Four bits of advice
1. If you build, build for SEO + owned channels. Don't create on someone else's platform.
So I'm not going to dive through all of these, but I do want to end on some bits of advice. So I mentioned already make sure you invest in other people's communities before you build your own. I would also add to that if you're going to build something, if you're going to build your own, I would generally rule these things out — LinkedIn groups, Facebook groups, Twitter hashtag groups. Why? Because those other platforms control them, and then they can change them at any time and your reach can change on those platforms. I would urge you to build for SEO and for an owned media channel.
2. Start with a platform that doesn't lose credibility when empty (e.g. blog > forum).
Second, I'd start with a platform that doesn't lose credibility when it's empty. That is to say if you know you want to build a forum or a content leaderboard or a Q&A board, make it something where you know that you and your existing team can do all the work to create a non-graveyard-like environment initially. That could mean limiting it to only a few sections in a forum, or all the Q&A goes in one place as opposed to there are many subforums that have zero threads and zero comments and zero replies, or every single thing that's posted, we know that at least two of us internally will respond to them, that type of stuff.
3. Don't use a subdomain or separate domain.
Third, if you can, avoid using a subdomain and definitely don't use a separate domain. Subdomains inherit some of the ranking ability and benefits of the primary domain they're on. Separate domains tend to inherit almost none.
4. Before you build, gather a willing, excited crew via an email group who will be your first active members.
Last, but not least, before you build, gather a willing, excited group of people, your crew, hopefully via an email group — this has served me extremely well — who will be those first active members.
So if you're building something in the crypto space, as maybe Dave is considering, I might say to him, hey, find those 10 or 15 or 20 people who are in your world, who you talk to online already, create an email group, all be chatting with each other and contributing. Then start your Q&A board, or then start your blog and your comments section, or then start your forum, what have you. If you can seed it with that initial passionate group, you will get over a lot of the big hurdles around building or rolling your own community system.
All right, everyone. Hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday, and we'll see you again next week. Take care.
A fascinating topic, and while building a new active community is very challenging, it can be very rewarding as active community members are usually highly engaged, and can potentially be the best brand ambassadors you can dream of.
In 2003, I opened my first online business, it was a vBulletin forum for musicians. Besides the fact that (eventually) it went very well, it was a great learning experience. I truly believe that the only reason it went well, is because both me and my partner were musicians back at the time and we were very passionate about the topic. I think it's crucial when starting a community.
While the technology has maybe changed over the years, people and the concept behind building a strong community are exactly the same.
The way I see it, the two biggest challenges from what you've mentioned Rand are:
1. Getting an excited first group of active members to stay active over time.
I think that finding these people can be (relatively) easy at first, but as it takes more time than people think, they often leave. And I think it's the reason why there are so many abandoned forums on the web today.
2. Offering real unique value when there are so many communities out there. It’s a tough one, and most definitely don’t even think about starting a community if your unique value isn't very clear to you.
Hi, Igal. I think the begginning is the most difficult moment. Once you have a community it is easier to generate movement, but the beginnings are very difficult
Great stuff here Rand, I absolutely recommend participating and positively contributed to a few online communities before you start your own. This will give anyone started from scratch a good feel for what is liked/shared and how the different online communities operate. Solid WBF sir!
Thanks Rand for your advice.
I consider point 1 to be the most successful of all. When you work on an online project, the most important thing is always to work from your main domain, because this way you will be promoting it and it will acquire more authority.
Logically, the first step is to get to know the Internet world and train on external platforms. And little by little you will be working to strengthen your own domain.
I don't know why many marketing professionals in Spain call me for advice to hire their services. Curiously, they never work on my domain, when in fact it is something essential to promote the project you have online.
Fantastic post Rand. More and more companies are creating communities on Facebook and other social networks to promote their business and products. Actually, since the change of Facebook algorithm, the pages have lost a lot of organic traffic so many have opted to create a community or group on Facebook.
Thank Rand for sharing your experience
Very cool, we haven't really dipped our tops into online communities yet, but looking at the strategy and "fit" I think we should start! Appreciate the insight and tips Rand, and we are looking forward to finding some that can match up with our biz goals. Great article sir!
First of all, thanks for this fantastic post, Rand Fishkin.
I quite agree that before creating a virtual community of your own we have to participate for a long time in an external one.
If you do not mind I will share our experience.
In our case, for years we were participating in social network communities, until we created our own community, once we gave ourselves accounts that we could provide true value to our users.
In Spain we created an online newspaper that allowed us to contact many users who did not find what they needed in other media. The beginning was difficult, I will not cheat you.
We started with a small team of about three people but we quickly grew and thanks to our users we now manage a successful community.
We rely on platforms such as YouTube, Facebook or Twitter, but we are already a channel of our own.
In short, the ideal is to take experience in other communities and then create your own correctly.
Great Whiteboard Friday, as usual. I don't often write comments or ask question, but I do read Moz and I love it. Thanks!
I have a quick question. Many business start new, separate from their main website blogs that eventually grow into a nice little (or big) active community. And this type of separate domains / blogs often become an authority of their own, build rankings and eventually become a nice little website that supports the main website. And I am talking about blog or Q&A boards that take real effort and years to grow. If this is possible, then my question is Rand, why wouldn't we want to try and build something good as a sub-domain or a separate domain? Why we shouldn't use a sub-domain or a separate domain? Did I miss something or misunderstood? Because this is what you said in your bits of advice.
Thanks!
Vassi
Nothing shaky about the info provided. Stellar presentation as always Rand. Can't say the same about the camera today. While most are working on building a community, I can build a new tri-pod for that camera ;).
Great Post Rand!
For me, Participating in existing Groups / Communities as this let you connect with other friends from similar industry / topic. Also with a continue contribution, you can be in core team of the group. ** sometime
Great explanation, Rand. Nowadays it is fashionable to create facebook groups for anything, maybe because everyone is in that social network, but I also think it is much better to build the community on your own site, even if it is harder at first.
Thank you for advice to start a community, very useful and true, no doubt.
Totalmente de acuerdo, una estrategia es básica para cumplir los objetivos, incluso si van a crear una comunidad. La publicación es una gran contribución a la comunidad que hemos planteado para crear una buena comunidad en línea
Hello Rand,
One lovely content and very helpful. Thank you for providing excellent SEO tips and tricks which have really help me benefit the most for improving my overall ranking.
Thank you.
This is a facet of SEO I did not know, absolutely worth to investigate more.
I am now trying to learn a little but more about this, are there any good resources to improve my skills? Big organizations probably are already running big businesses around this
thanks
Amazing video. How does using existing communities help your website's seo bearing in mind that the links you get from these sites are nofollow?
Great explanation, Rand!
An interesting topic to be looked into and in terms of looking for SEO value from the online communities I recall a whiteboard friday on the topic of comment marketing which spoke about earning links from such communities. And your second bit of advice on using a platform which doesn't loose credibility when empty, I think this is a major issue which many SMEs face when they simply launch a blog purely for "SEO" reasons without considering about the content produced for it and its target audience and more often than not it soon becomes a graveyard
Good post Rand! I´m not really used about take profit of communities, but as soon I´ve read your post I had an idea for a costumer that I can use it Foy his business ;-)
Thanks for the inspiration!!
This is a tough topic, there are so many successful examples with polar opposite approaches.
I think you can learn a lot from the Google+ launch which tried very hard to integrate itself into peoples lives immediately. Personally I think it tried to be too much too quickly, I found myself without a reason to visit often so just fell back on the usual.
If they had started smaller and built a real reason to visit regularly growth would likely have been more organic and sustainable.
Nice post about how and whether to invest in and structure online communities!
Build your own platform, BUT use other online communities to build it, especially LinkedIn (if you're building a professional network)
We set up a linkedin group that grew by itself. People subscribe to it without any marketing whatsoever. And now we use the announcement feature which consistently gets us 40-50 new subscribers to our community on a weekly basis. Effective... and FREE.
I am working with a non profit to build an online community. This is a resourceful post as I can now give some considerations from the stakeholders. They are an industry leading entity in their niche however I am not 100% sure they understand the dedication from the organization they will need to dispense into the community once in is in place.
Very good post, communities on Facebook can be a great opportunity to expand our product and make it known.
Always dropping that sweet science Rand. I really do not have much thought on this but all your points made sense. I recently was reviewing some competitors for a client and noticed that their approach was a LinkedIn group which scared me in terms of competing with something like that, and although that brings brand awareness you are right there is no SEO value outside of just that. Also when doing a competitive audit I find worry when I see my client does not have a solid blog but their competitors do, one odd part is most of the time the posts are really thin and not implemented on a regular base.
Last is you pointed out 3 main fundamentals for marketing and start and it all comes back to that. I do not think I will be creating an online community anytime soon but contribute to them all the time, and this gave some great insight on how successful ones can work.
I think Moz is stalking me. Every time I am faced with a problem I come here and it is the blog of the day. I was looking at a writing community I have been building, was speaking to one of my writers on how to debug the graveyard issue, and then I come here and Moz has this for me. I built stuff before and had no issues generating tarffic, but I was building into a different environment where Facebook wasn't so prevalent.