Simon Owens’s Media Newsletter

Online communities are the holy grail for content businesses because they create a self-reinforcing flywheel: members begin generating value for one another without requiring constant involvement from the company itself. In many ways, it’s the same kind of network effect that powers large tech platforms, just on a much smaller scale.

The problem is that these communities are really hard to jump start. It’s not enough to merely get your audience commenting on your own content — you need to spur them into communicating with each other without being prompted to do so. Achieving that requires you to overcome several logistical hurdles.

The first is habit formation — quite simply, you can’t expect robust conversation if a significant portion of the community isn’t visiting the forum regularly. Lots of media operators solve this problem by hosting their community on a platform that already has millions of users — places like LinkedIn, Facebook, or Reddit. The thinking there is that people are constantly visiting LinkedIn anyway, so they’re likely to see new forum posts in their feed.

The second logistical hurdle is just getting the community members to talk to each other. Even though my Facebook group once had decent engagement, I was mostly the only one posting. I never tried to get my audience primed to start posting themselves.