In my previous blog posts on introduction to community management and community promotion, I had talked about the various roles of a community manager. Here is a picture to chart out the scope of the jobs that comes under community management:
In this blog I will talk about managing content for your community. It is important to understand that your online community has to be either content focussed or people (relationships / activities / profiles) focussed to be successful. (via @2020social slideshare channel) I have not seen communities surviving without a focus on any one of them. Content can be one big reason for people to return back to your community. If you see some popular social platforms like Wikipedia, digg, delicious or many blog blog based communities like mashable, techcrunch etc; they live and thrive on their content.
Broadly your community will see two types of content: the internal content that your community management or online marketing team, guest writers and community manager writes and the external content that your community members add. However both content types trigger responses from each other. Your internal content might trigger response from your community members and vice versa. Many a times one form of content does not trigger response in form of more content but also actions.
What to write?
This is a big challenge in form of a community manager. What content should be added? Ideally your upcoming week’s or month’s content should be charted out in a content calendar so that you can ask your team members to start writing well in advance and get time to think of relevant topics. In fact @gauravonomics has a social web content strategy framework that I have often used for solving the ‘what to write’ problem:
What you write on your community, also depends on what type of community do you have. Supposedly if you have a very content focussed blog based community platform, maybe engaging people on #4 and #5 is not that important. However if your community is a young mommy’s community focussing on child care, you would like to focus on #2 to #5 and might not be interested in #1.
Where to write?
Depending on the type of your online community, you might like to divide your content among channels like blog posts, discussion forums, your outposts like Facebook, Twitter and your email campaigns (if you are planning to have one). Also it is a good idea to have an overall strategic objective for each channel depending upon the competencies of that channel.
For example, some time back, when I was managing an SMS based app developer’s community, we used their blogs as a channel for establishing market thought leadership, their Facebook page for engaging consumers of SMS based apps and promoting the apps and their discussion boards as support forum for the community to solve app related problems for each other.
When to write?
A typical answer is – ‘at a regular frequency’ but I think that like us, our community also has good and bad days. So in the good times of your community (like launch of a new contest / campaign, great PR coverage etc, you might like to show more activity to your new visitors.
However at rest of your working days, a regular frequency is always the best idea that you can plan from your content calendar.
Please do share your own content management tips and experiences for making this post better.
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