What Makes an Online Community Successful (and Why Most Fail)

Creating an online community is simple, create a space, invite people to join and you’re away! Still, 90% of online communities are abandoned in their first year. Let’s face it: whether you’re one of social media girls or an established brand, most businesses fail to create a thriving ecosystem where audiences and members engage in a meaningful way.

The success of communities that thrive vs. those that die off is based on how well we understand what motivates our behavior in digital places. And most of them only care about growth metrics (X # new users this month!) In contrast, good communities focus on real value creation and having great people get to build meaningful relationships. This guide outlines the key factors that distinguish a winning community from the myriad forgettable forums which litter the web.

Defining Purpose and Target Audience: Your Foundation for Success

Before selecting a platform, before building the features, successful communities define a crystal-clear purpose that appeals to an individual audience. Without this base, even the most advanced community platforms end up as ghost towns or zombie towns.

Establishing Community Purpose

The product for your community has to meet a need or solve a problem not addressed by current solutions. Starbucks didn’t invent a place for coffee lovers to gather, they invented a space that brought an entire community together around the shared act of engaging in coffee culture. Likewise, Lululemon’s community is about wellness and athletic achievement, not simply servicing active wear.

All the best climbing communities don’t cater to everyone per se but rather fill a niche. “LEGO Ideas is successful because it serves a single master: the encouragement of creativity and innovation within LEGO building. This level of specificity draws in passionate members who actually have something to say.

Understanding Your Target Audience

A successful community requires deep understanding of the audience, beyond basic demographics. You must know their struggles, how they prefer to communicate and what motivates them to engage in those discussions online.

Profile members with as much information you would like such as:

• Professional challenges and goals
• Preferred communication styles
• Time availability for community engagement
• Technical comfort levels
• Motivations for joining communities

HubSpot Community works because they realize who their audience is: busy marketers looking for actionable advice and peer-to-peer learning possibilities. This is borne out in their content and constitution.

Choosing the Right Platform: Alignment Drives Engagement

Choosing the right platform can either make or break your community from the very start. What’s most important is aligning feature sets to the specific requirements and member preferences of your community.

Platform Options and Considerations

There are different platforms that benefit different communities:

• Facebook Groups are good for casual conversation and more generic audiences
• Discord is great for games and real-time conversations
• Slack is for professional networks needing a little (or a lot) less formality than email.
• Private platforms like Circle or Mighty Networks that offer flexibility, and more control over your branding
• General websites Forums work well for communities where knowledge is being shared and supported

Twitch is a great example of how to align their platform completely (their streaming capabilities fit in line with the community’s desire for entertainment. PlayStation Community is riding on Microsoft’s console forum style that comes with fully-fledged gaming discussion threads and user-generated content.

Critical Platform Selection Factors

Choose platforms based on:

• Member accessibility: Can your audience easily use this platform?
• Feature alignment: Do platform features support your community goals?
• Scalability: Will the platform grow with your community?
• Integration capabilities: Does it work with your existing business systems?
• Monetization options: Can you generate revenue if needed?

Encouraging Active Participation: Beyond Basic Engagement

Engagement is what separates strong communities from consumption platforms. This calls for deliberate curation of content and active enthusiasm from community organizers.

Content Strategy for Engagement

Growing Communities engage members with different forms of content:

• Discussion starters:Questions that provoke discussion
• Instructional material Videos, Tips and Tricks, How-Tos and more.
• User-generated Content: Member spotlight and success stories
• Interactive elements: Polls, quizzes and competitions
• Q&A sessions: AMAs and webinars on learning topics

Sephora Beauty Insider Community thrives on user generated content in the form of reviews, makeup how-tos and beauty challenges. This method turns passive consumers into participatory community members.

Building Conversation Culture

To foster candid forums you will need to set communication norms that inspire true sharing. Prosperous communities sustain the cultures that encourage members to be brave enough to speak honestly about their own realities.

The Community Center on Airbnb works because hosts are willing to share both the good and the struggles in order to learn. Such an authenticity fosters trust and validates meaningful connections between members of the community.

Community Success Data: What the Numbers Reveal

Community metrics tell us what makes for successful engagement and sustainable growth.

What we’ve been seeing from this information is that successful communities keep active rates high, through sustained interaction and valuable content production. The vast disparity between these response times is a sharp indicator of what community management can do to keep its members happy.

Research by the University of Michigan shows that customers spend 19% after joining a brand’s community while Wix data has proven that community enabled websites generate 3x more revenue than those without.

Learning from Community Failures: Common Pitfalls to Avoid

I think that most product failure comes down to the obvious mistakes that good builders know not to make.

The Growth-First Trap

Too many places favor speed over depth and value, leading to both shallow discourse and discouragement amongst members. Touching the right base is more important than having a big bat.

Inconsistent Leadership

Communities need consistent, visible leadership. If the founders or moderators are gone for weeks, member engagement can tank fast. HOG chapter succeeds because they have ongoing and consistent leadership in all touch points of the community.

Platform Misalignment

Friction is created by not using platforms that appeal to a member. Professional groups that leverage gaming centric platforms have difficulty with adoption and in following certain user communities.

Lack of Clear Guidelines

Discussions are a mess in the absence of explicit community guidelines. Good communities have expected behavior written in and enforce it on from day 1.

Building Your Community for Long-Term Success

Online communities that work require planning, regular maintenance and constant adjusting to meet the needs of members. Work on producing real value for real people, not everyone.

Begin with an articulated sense of purpose for your community and a deep understanding of who you’re building your community for. Select social networks that cater to your objectives and also the tastes of your members. Then you have to post regularly and create valuable content for your audience while genuinely engaging them.