Every Community is made up of a whole host of different people. Whilst each Community is unique, there are certain elements that you can expect to remain the same.
Community management is can sometimes require navigating through some tricky waters, so it's important to identify the different categories into which your Community fits.
Types of Communities:
Think about the type of Community you’re trying to grow. There are a few different types – check them out below to work out which category resonates most with you.
- Brand Community: This Community helps foster relationships with current and prospective clients.
- Learning Community: This Community excels at sharing knowledge and resources with its members.
- Insights Community: This Community shares qualitative and quantitative data to inform business decisions.
- Interest Community: This Community brings members together who can share the same passions, interest, geographic location etc.
- Monetisation Community: This Community is designed to create a level of financial return.
Types of Members within Communities:
There are a few types of individuals you’ll come across within your Community and each will have different levels of contribution.
Not everyone in your Community will contribute at the same level. Perhaps some members don’t have the time to contribute a lot, while others might be a bit shy and prefer to absorb your content rather than post their own.
There’s nothing wrong with this., and as your Community grows you’ll see your spectrum of members expand with it.
We’ve distilled member types into these 5 categories:
- Community Managers: Platform managers and moderators – individuals you trust to look after your Community space.
- Positive Dominators: These members tend to be your brand ambassadors, good samaritans and brand cheerleaders.
- Negative Dominators: Trolls, hawkers or individuals with general negative behaviour.
- Lurkers: These members consume information but tend to not to interact or make impressions.
- Newbies: Generally inquisitive and interested, but can be quiet characters initially.
Nurturing your positive dominators, newbies and lurkers is all about your content. That's what they joined your Community for.
Managing negative behaviour from your Members is one of the more nuanced parts of leading a Community. You can find out more about moderating your Members in our guide.
Level of contribution from community Members:
We work with Communities all the time that have a member contribution structure like this:
A healthy Community is a melting pot of members with different personalities and approaches to content. For example, if you think you have a lot of Lurkers in your Community, don’t worry – they just enjoy your content without feeling the pressure to contribute.
If you’re keen to boost your proportion of heavy contributors, then maybe you can start thinking about monetising some content or your whole Community.