Thursday, August 24, 2023

With special guest star Tami

A message from Mat
We're doing something a little different this week! I've handed over the keyboard to Buffer's Tami Oladipo to tell us all about customer communities. I love the way Buffer thinks about their business, and I think you will too!

Sign up for the weekly Buffer newsletter for more practical tips and links from Tami, and I will be back here next week.

Beyond community-as-customer-service

There's a lot of value in having a platform that allows users to interface directly with your team. So you create a Discord or Slack channel, announce it on social media, and get thousands of signups.

A month later...crickets.

Building a truly engaged community (i.e., people who are active and excited about your brand outside their daily use of your product) isn't easy.

At Buffer, the latest iteration of our community is focused on our Beta testers and also quickly became another place for customer advocacy requests — as a result we have quite a few team members from customer advocacy spending time in our community every day.

The idea behind expanding your community beyond customer service is that it becomes a space that people feel comfortable coming to you with their concerns.

If your community is just support ticket after ticket, you might as well close it down and stick to optimizing your Help Center.

Whatever your reason for starting a community, here are some tactics that can help you foster a vibrant and engaged community based on what we're exploring:

Encourage your colleagues to join.
Even if you have a dedicated community manager, get other people within your company to join and participate in the community. This'll go a long way to bringing the brand closer to earth. We have people from across Buffer (if not all Bufferoos) within our Discord community, and we encourage everyone to engage with members.
Connect with people.
Treat your community like you would a classroom. Get to know them, encourage them to share about their work and their lives, celebrate their wins and have your team reciprocate. A win shared by a Buffer community member inspired a case study on the blog.
Share content frequently.
Share content that clarifies your product or even your overall industry. What's happening that might concern your customers? Start those conversations or join them. Rachel Karten's Link in Bio newsletter has an accompanying Discord with a channel dedicated to talking about the latest issue of her newsletter.
Show use cases.
Not every part of your product is completely clear to users, so highlight specific use cases on a regular, maybe even automatic, cadence. I've shared a prompt for Buffer's AI Assistant in the community and our weekly newsletter.
Host regular Q&A sessions.
Or hold Office Hours to encourage direct dialogue. You can set up a specific time on a weekly or monthly cadence with your team to answer questions about your product, company, and industry. We're exploring how to incorporate this tactic into our ongoing community engagement strategy and make each session valuable for our members.