Building Community Through Content: A Cheat Sheet for Content Creators

Intro

Building a business backed by a thriving community isn’t just smart. It’s a more sustainable way to not only achieve linear growth, but also scale a brand. And this is all possible with the right positioning which happens with the creation of community building content.

This guide includes a framework for producing content that’s engaging and community building. You’ll see how to set your brand up to produce the kind of content that always gets engagement, what types of content to lean into, and how to get the most of community engagement after you’ve hit publish.

Understand Your Audience

Some of the most compelling research for creating healthy and thriving communities points to a handful of intrinsic and extrinsic benefits for members. These include:

• Fostering a social identity that’s aligned with a member’s interests
• The desire to form interpersonal connections and feel welcome and heard
• Information-seeking and sharing
• Entertainment, and
• Self-discovery

We’ll refer to these with the acronym “IWHIES” from here on out.

Bundled together, it’s not hard to see how successful communities have grown to become what they are today. Fiverr Enterprise is a prime example of how you can create a space for your community to feel welcome, heard, and learn and share.

This post about freelancer tax, a painful experience for many in the gig economy, hiring managers included. It empathizes with the community, then offers a solution in the form of an informative blog post about how to navigate tax. It also poses a question that gets followers to participate.

Fiver’s post garnered 150 likes and 21 comments (responses from Fiverr Enterprise included) that share follower insights.

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Wins like these are only possible with a clear understanding of what your** **audience wants to get out of being part of your community.

A good place to start is by developing a persona that includes “jobs to be done”. Popularized by the book Competing Against Luck, its authors expand on the reasons for customers choosing a product. Job-to-be-done theory suggests that people chose products that best achieve a result.

And a smart way of making people feel welcome, heard, and as if they are learning and able to share is to figure out what makes them feel that these objectives are being met.

Here are 5 questions you can use to identify what your community is after in these areas:

Goals/Jobs to Be Done:

What is your audience trying to accomplish in relation to the product or service your brand offers? (list all goals - check your persona document for what you may already have gathered.)

**Feeling Welcome: **

What could you do to make new members feel welcome?

**Feeling Heard: **

What can you do that would make members feel like their voices are heard and appreciated?

Learning/Information-gathering:

• What topics can we explore and provide more information on?
• What depth should we explore when providing information to help our members feel like they are learning and growing?

TIP: Your persona should already include details on goals and challenges your community members have. Use these as guides as you seek answers to these questions.

With answers to these questions, you can begin creating content by using an AI text generator that addresses each area. But don’t create just any content. You’ve got to apply a few key ingredients to make sure what you produce is good enough to grow your community.

Produce Compelling Content

To build community with content, you’ve got to know how to create stuff that pulls a crowd. And this applies to forums, Facebook groups, and even Youtube memberships. The good news is that applying once you understand what your audience wants, you only need to play to their interests.

Take Fiver Enterprise’s tax social post. It addresses a specific and real problem hiring managers have -- how to complete taxes without missing a key detail, so they can achieve tax compliance.

Fiver’s hiring manager persona would include this as a job to be done (see question one of finding answers to what your audience wants), making it a smart issue to address, and you can do the same too.

Start by listing all problems and challenges your persona(s) experience. Next, dig deeper and establish the emotional associations your audience has with these issues.

TIP: Emotions are key elements of how humans experience the world. The closer you are able to draw a connection between a problem and an emotion it elicits, the more compelling an idea is.

Question to answer to elicit emotional connections include:** **

• What emotions does this problem stir?
• What are the consequences of not solving this problem?
• What are the emotions that could be felt by not solving this problem?
• What’s the upside of solving this problem?

Back to Fiver’s post on tax, you’ll see that it begins by painting a picture of what navigating tax is like for hiring managers. It “can feel like walking through a maze, at night, with a map covered in weird acronyms (1099-NEC?)”.

That’s enough to create a sense of discomfort at minimum, and distress as an extreme.

It goes on to address these emotions by offering a solution that empowers hiring managers. “We've compiled a quick and handy guide to help hiring managers understand the rules and steer clear of nasty surprises.”

Can you see how identifying emotional connections to problems helps you create content that gets engagement?

Diversify Content Types

Variety really is the spice of life and that adage bodes true for content format too. Using different formats to share your messaging makes it more appealing and compelling. Different formats are also valuable because they cater to different learning styles and preferences.

To position itself as an authority, in the Fiver Enterprise launched a video series on LinkedIn called #AskShar. It features Fiver Enteprise’s CEO sharing his insight through answers to some of the most challenging questions businesses and freelancers face. Note the engagement this video received.

Produce a mix of blogs, videos, podcasts, and social media posts. Share examples for content types with comments on why they worked.

Here’s an example of how to use long-form social posts promoting a blog post. It touches on specific, in the form of stats, from a recent survey. This pulls together hardcore data and insight, the perfect combination of elements for a great learning experience for followers.

Consider Leverage Multiple Platforms

Being everywhere has its perks. You’re able to reach more people and share your message far and wide. Personal blogs, social media, and forums are great places to publish community building content.

Each platform has unique strengths. Blogs are ideal for in-depth educational content, social media and forums are ideal for community discussions.

This may not sound like news, however, the practice of showing up for your audience with content that they find compelling is most important. It’s also important to find places where they spend time and to cater to their needs on those platforms.

A note for brands starting out: Focus on one platform and perfect the process of producing and sharing content. Once you’re comfortable with the system you’ve built, add additional platforms.

Growing a community involves being present to reply and manage your audience. Diving into multiple platforms all at once can spread your efforts thin and lead to lower quality content that your community and prospective members don’t find appealing.

Encourage Interaction

Engagement-driven content builds communities because it requires participation. And what makes interactions easier is by treating your content like a conversation between two friends.

Most brands dismiss the idea of talking directly to their audiences. Instead, messaging talks over their communities, and away from them. When this happens, information becomes boring and bland, and your audience is less likely to feel like a community.

Components One and Two: Emotion and Interaction

We’ve covered the power of emotion elicitation. It’s the first of three core components for generating interactions. The second other is framing your message for interaction.

When you speak directly to your audience with content about issues that really matter to them, they perk up and listen. They want to respond to what you’re saying.

Fiver’s a great example of how well-structured social posts designed to generate interaction can be successful at building communities. Most of its social posts ask followers questions. Fiver wants to hear what community members think about topics that matter to them.

This LinkedIn post promoting a guide with best practices for working with external workers achieves three important objectives:

First, it educates followers by sharing a compelling stat. Second, it offers a solution to the problem of getting the most out of working with freelancers. Followers will learn how to identify 4 different types of external workers (helpful for anyone who didn’t know there were that many).

And lastly, Fiver asks its community for advice they think companies managing external workers would benefit from.

Smart.

The comment’s thread was filled with feedback that answered the question and brought other perspectives, like these:

Component Three: Responses

Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed some Fiver does well. It replies to every comment. Why? Because that shows its community that they are heard and appreciated. Use this tactic with your community and they’ll feel just as involved too.

TIP: Don’t reply with a simple acknowledgement just to say “thanks for participating”. Treat each response like a genuine and value-based engagement where you want to share that you heard your followers and their input is important.

Ways to Engage Members with Content

There are several ways to get members to interact with your content. You can incorporate regular Q&As, and use passive interactions like polls and surveys to boost engagement and learning.

Optimize Resource Usage

Community building requires resources. You’ll need time, skills, and a budget for content production (unless you’re able to handle that in-house). Access to these resources may be challenging when you’re starting out, so focus on quality over quantity.

Here are tips on how to leverage resources:

Focus on Major Problems:

Identify your communities biggest problems and product content around them. Big problems don’t go out of style and when you can help solve them, people will feel that you’re the best source of information on that topic.

Repurpose Your Stuff:

Ideas can be repurposed and so can content they are packaged in. Your top-performing blog posts, guides, and other content and splinter them into smaller pieces you can share on social platforms.

Batch Create Content:

Time is likely to be the one thing you’ll feel overwhelmed by when diving into building a community with content. Spend your wisely by batch creating content. Brainstorm blog post ideas for the next month or two in one sitting. Perform research in the next.

Create social posts for the next two to three weeks in one sitting. Batching will create more structure in your content production process and make you feel less overwhelmed about producing stuff.

Schedule Content and Interaction:

Set time each day to engage with community members. Carving out 30 minutes or an hour a day to focus on interaction will streamline your productivity. If needed, you can split your time into two sessions for quicker responses to community interactions. This structure will help you move from a reactive state to a planned and effective communications model.

Track Success Metrics

When you start applying this framework, you’ll begin to see changes at a glance. And while the small wins will offer a dopamine strike, tracking specific metrics will make these wins feel less like flukes and more like predictable and strategic development.

Monitor content engagement, web visits, dwell time, and comments to gauge the effectiveness of your strategies and adjust as needed. With a set of metrics in place, and result, you’ll be able to graduate to setting goals and KPIs.

Foster a Positive Community Culture

Research by J. Amoah on the way brands engage with communities show a direct impact on the level of engagement returned and the loyalty and trust developed by members. To foster the right engagement, establish a set of values that members must accept and commit to when joining your community.

A strong set of values worth considering include positivity, inclusivity, creativity, support, innovation, and learning. Values are often aspirational, but they can be practiced, and not in a way where you post a reminder of a value daily. You can demonstrate them through your interactions and content.

You’re One Step Closer

You’ve just consumed a framework designed to build community for your brand using content. When applying these, remember that It takes time and consistent effort, along with attention to feedback and KPI that show what’s working and what isn’t. But the upside is worth it. If you take action, you’ll find it easier to apply this framework, see results, and build the community of your dreams.