Why Smaller Communities Are Better
Tags: Community Management, Community Development, Community, Community Building, Community Engagement

Introduction

The word ‘’community’’ has seen growing popularity recently as platforms such as Discord, Slack, WhatsApp and Facebook have been created. But what is a community really? According to the Oxford dictionary, community is ‘’a group of people being in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common.’’ While most of the communities in the web are #technicallythis, they ultimately end up failing. According to Gartner, 70% of online communitites are destined to fail. In this article, we will outline the reason why communities fail and the way to go.

The Problem

The problem is quite simple. They lack engagement and personalization. Let’s just first define those two words. Engagement means the amount of people who engage regularly in the groupchat divided by the total number of members in the community. Personalization, said weirdly, is the community-person fit — how much is the community tailored to individual people. But that must be impossible, right? How could you possibly tailor a community to 1,000 people? How about 10,000?! The answer has been in front of us the whole time. Split them into smaller, more personalised mini-communitites where people can engage between each other freely and feel more psychologically safe to contribute to the conversation as well as to introduce a pathway for people to build real relationships (more on that later.)

Commercial Break

This seems like a good time to introduce Waves. We at Waves have suffered large impersonal communitites to the extend that we believed it’s almost impossible to make connections or friends in an online community. This is why we created Waves — your personalised mini-communitites built for you. What we do is that our future users submit a form in which they say what kind of community they want to be a part in — they speak about their interests and hobbies and we use match them with other 8 to 12 people who share the same passions. For more information, visit meetwaves.com. Did I mention it’s free?

The Solution

But that’s not it, really. Dividing people is not only the magic behind smaller communitites. Although it is harder to manage (unless you have it all set up with Waves), you can yield long-term results and a very engaged community. As I mentioned earlier, the larger communities do not really offer a pathway for people to build real relationships. There needs to be something more than chatting. An example is meetup.com, living up to its name, which offers community-building activities by meeting up in real life and engaging in conversations. But what if the community is more split geographically? Video calls are viable too. You would be surprised to find out that people are willing to get on a video call with other people they have never met as long as they are sure that they are like-minded. At Waves, we hold video call sessions every week between our members to get to know each other and it has worked wonders.

Conclusion

Whether you are building the next billion-dollar SaaS tool or just a friendly community of dog lovers, a thriving community is what will keep you going forward. With this article, I hope to have showed you that total number of people may not be a vanity metric but it is not the only metric to look for in an online community. If you are currently struggling with your community or feel like there is room for improvement, contact us.

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