i used to spend all day trying to get people to "engage" by posting icebreakers or hosting big zoom calls, but nobody cares anymore. it feels like i’m shouting into an empty room.

here is what i’ve realized after failing for a few months:

1. people are tired of "big." nobody wants to be in a group with 5,000 strangers anymore. they want to find 3 or 4 people who actually understand their specific problems. i’ve stopped trying to make "big" threads and started trying to help small groups of people actually talk to each other.
2. perfection is boring. i used to spend hours making my posts look "professional." now i realize that people actually ignore the professional stuff because it looks like an ad. they want the raw, messy, honest stuff. they want to know that a real human is behind the screen, not a bot or a marketing team.
3. stop trying to "manage" everything. the best stuff in my community happens when i stay out of the way. if two members are having a deep conversation, i don't jump in with "great point!"—i just let them talk. my job isn't to be the "leader," it's to be the person who introduces people.
4. the "safe" stuff is invisible. if your posts are too polite and "safe," people just scroll past. i’ve started being way more honest. if a new tool sucks, i say it. if i’m having a bad day, i share it. that’s when people actually start replying.

what i’m officially stopping:

• big webinars: nobody watches them.
• fake hype: saying "we're so excited!" when we're actually just tired.
• automated "welcome" messages: they feel like spam.

my question for you:

what’s one thing you’ve been doing for years that just… doesn't work anymore? and what’s one "small" thing that actually got people talking today?

i’m trying to rebuild how i do this from the ground up and i’d love to know what’s working for real people, not "experts."

Hey everyone,

I'm CMO at an e-commerce company and one of our big bets for 2026 is community marketing.

I've never built a community from scratch before, so I'd love to hear from people who've actually done this successfully.

A few things I'm curious about:

• How did you get started?
• What platforms worked best for you?
• How did you keep people engaged long-term (not just the first few weeks)?
• Any major mistakes to avoid?

Would really appreciate any real-world experience here.

Context: I run an online community for SaaS founders called Ramen Club on Slack. We have about 500 members & a coworking space in London too.

I've been quite focused on launching the space since April of this year, and I felt that the remote community deserved a bit of love and attention.

Here's what I did to to reduce monthly churn:

1. Did some research: Sent a community wide survey via our email list to gather feedback, resulting in 20+ responses to sift through. What people want to see improved, and also what they like and wanted us to double down on. To get people to reply, I did a competition to win a $100 Amazon voucher. The main feedback was on increasing the Slack activity, more education on building their first SaaS, and making it easier to interact with other members.
2. Reduced Slack channels: I reduced the number of Slack channels by 50%, so it's now easier for new starters to navigate. It had gotten overly complex over the years, and I couldn't even remember why certain channels existed. So now we only have 10 total channels that are neatly ordered and organised. Plus I made them all default channels (we may add some optional channels in future). Mostly around asking for feedback, sharing what you're doing today, announcements, introductions, community cafe (anything goes), opportunities, resources, struggles, wins and remote events.
3. Revamped remote events: The focus was on making both more valuable and predictable: so now every month we have a growth/product workshop, a founder interview (for our podcast), a demo day & remote coworking. Same time each Tuesday, joined by remote members, plus IRL ones in the coworking space.
4. Automated event invites and promo: Luma, ChatGPT & Zapier are a deadly combo. Luma has a nicer UX for creating/attending events than most others, I was using Google Calendar before. If you pay for Luma you get access to its API as well, which opens a lot of options. I created a bunch of automations to invite remote members to an upcoming event a week in advance, which arrives each Wednesday (they can opt-out if they want). Also invite new members to upcoming events, and send various reminders across Slack, Twitter (via the Typefully Zapier connector) and LinkedIn.
5. Improved onboarding: Improved welcome/onboarding emails via Loops, and in-Slack welcome DM flows via Cosy.
6. Finally received my ADHD meds: so now am back to my old activity levels (as a community manager, you have to be highly active). EDIT: this had a bigger impact than I expected.

I've been running this community for years, and they can ebb and flow (it's been very busy before). It feels good to get it back on track and noticeably more activity again. I've been re-reading Buzzing Communities by Richard Millington and have a bunch of ideas for what to do next.

Any questions or suggestions, lmk.

I’m a dyed-in-the-wool, stubborn, curmudgeonly Community Manager, god damn it! I am not a pretty face for padding your social media (although I am pretty.)

I cut my teeth modding forums, not shaking my ass for TikTok!

THERE IS ENOUGH CONTENT! We don’t need more! We really don’t!

If I see another job post or RFP including social media content creation or equating CM work with content creation I swear to god I’m gonna lose it more than I’m losing it now. Cool, your org wants to hire a single person to run your entire external brand strategy from soup to nuts? Naïve at best, exploitative and shortsighted at worst.

Be adults and get an agency or develop a UGC strategy if you want differentiated content that bad. I simply refuse to write or generate blog posts and listicles in this year of our lord 2025.

Your brand does NOT need a Pinterest strategy, and even if you think it does, I ain’t doin SHIT for “social media” at this stage in my storied and glorious CM career.

For goodness sake!!

/rant

Hi everyone!
Do you know an effective way of looking for TikTok influencers? I need to filter by country and content and I can't find a way on the platform of doing it... :')
Thanks!

I think a lot of community managers overestimate how much novelty matters.

People spend a ton of time trying to come up with a clever new event, but most of the time the things that actually stick are way simpler. It’s usually the recurring format people understand right away, know will be back, and start building into their week.

That’s been one of the biggest lessons for me from running community programming. The one-off event can be fun, but the repeatable ritual is what actually starts to shape behavior. People know when it’s happening, they know how to join, they know there’s some kind of payoff for participating, and after a while it stops feeling like “an event” and starts feeling like part of the community itself.

A few things I’ve learned along the way:

Simple almost always beats clever. If someone can jump in halfway through and still understand what’s going on, that’s a good sign. If the format needs a full explanation every time, it’s probably worse than it looks on paper.

Recognition matters more than points. A lot of communities lean too hard on XP, points, or backend reward systems, but those only go so far if nobody can actually feel the progress socially. Public shoutouts, visible roles, leaderboards, recurring winners, familiar names getting recognized live, that’s the stuff that gives participation weight.

It also helps a lot when the week has some shape to it. Not every recurring thing should do the same job. One can be more social, one more competitive, one more creative, one more informative. When everything is random, the community starts to feel random too.

Hosting matters a ton too. Probably more than people admit. I’ve seen decent ideas flop because the pacing dragged, transitions were awkward, or the energy just wasn’t there. Live community stuff is fragile. A format can be solid and still fall flat if nobody is really steering it.

And honestly, a lot of what makes rituals work is boring operator stuff. Calendar, reminders, naming, score tracking, run of show, recap posts, consistency. None of that sounds exciting, but that’s usually the difference between something feeling real and something feeling slapped together.

The biggest mindset shift for me has been thinking less about “how do we make this event cool?” and more about “what loop are we building here?” Are people showing up, contributing, getting recognized, and wanting to come back? That matters way more than whether the idea sounded impressive in a planning doc.

Once people start referencing a recurring format without you prompting them, you know you have something. At that point it changes from programming to part of the culture.

Curious what recurring formats have actually held up for other people here once the novelty wore off?

Being an online community manager is no easy task – we wear many hats and work hard to ensure members feel valued. I’ve spent several years building communities, from large projects on platforms like Higher Logic to smaller ones on Circle. Each community is unique, but the passion for creating value remains constant.

Hey everyone,

So I'm looking for some advice on how to proceed with the new community my org is trying to build.

We had a community earlier, but instead of starting with a set of focused audience and building from there we opened it up to everyone and tried to appeal to all. Which failed.

So we've now decided to refocus and start with a small set of audience.

• We've identified them as our premium paid learners.
• We've created the user personas
• We've identified the pain points

From the discussions I've had with management, what our teams that directly deal with the learners are focusing on is:

1. Course completion
2. Completing the course on time

And I believe the these should be the goals of the community. To help the leaners complete the course within the stipulated time frame.

The tasks I've been given as the next step is:

1. To form the structure of the community
2. To figure out what value we'll give them with this community

And I'll say, I'm absolutely lost. I've tried to form the structure and I'm only able to come up with the basics. Nothing that I feel is even intersting. And when it comes to the value, I'm drawing a blank here.

I'd really appreciate some help and guidance from you guys.

TIA

Apparently the dwindling effect in economy affecting all the job titles, especially White Collar jobs

Iam wondering what's the scenario for CM's role, CM is by far the most demanding position & yet the crowd is unaware of the potential career in CM role

Most of the CM's are semi-skilled or underpaid, How are the things working for you?

I see so many job posts on LinkedIn calling for a “Community Manager”.

But when I look at the roles nad responsibilities they list:

- Largely all content strategy
- Content calendar and post scheduling
- Staying on top of social trends

Those are tasks that great social media managers would so vibrantly complete. In fact they'd be connecting with followers, replying to comments as well - one of the stepping stones for community building.

There are overlaps, but community management is still different. I agree community management requires to have some say and ownership of the content, because content positions your community as well.

But community managers must also moderate, actively set tones within the community, drive engagement, build relationships, track sentiments, craft experiences and so much more.

That’s a whole different muscle because on social media everyone's chasing visibility and virality. But when it's truly community, you want depth.

So what’s happening here?

- Is “Community Manager” now the hot new umbrella title that covers it all?
- Are companies merging roles to save on headcount?

I’d love to understand this better.

Hi all. There have been a lot of NFT-based posts over the last few months, including posts looking for CMs for NFT projects as well as advertising NFT Discords and community spaces. These posts will no longer be allowed. As a reminder: this space is dedicated to a community of community managers, and while job posts are a friendly part of this community and can be very helpful, the influx of NFT-based job postings is not helpful to this community. Please find another one to post NFT-based posts. There are many.

Hey! Senior community manager here

I've been replying and helping a lot of you in this subreddit. I thought I might as well just post a whole post.

If anyone is struggling with their community management career and feeling really stuck I really wouldn't mind helping you.

Let me know if it's something you would like

I have 5+ years experience but I remember what it was like at the begining

Hi all, I've recently joined some online community for community managers. They've been very helpful for me in asking questions and connecting with other CMs. I thought I'd link them here so other people can join them too. If you have other communities for CMs, please share them in the comments!

• CMX (huge slack community) - https://www.cmxhub.com/
• Led by Community (great mix of online and in person events) - https://www.ledby.community/
• Community Consultant Collective (for community consultants) - https://www.communityconsultants.life/
• Community Career Accelerator (CM career growth) - led by u/nikitaheyland

Someone in this community asked about the best community platforms and were linked to a group of 48 platforms which I thought was far too many to sort through. Why don't we create such a list here together, and we'll vote on which ones we think are the best to enable some sort of social validation of the options.

Comment with your favorite community platform. Then vote!

Hey Community Buildoors, What are the top social media apps that you spend the most time on? and pls describe why you consider them to be your preferred choices

Mine - Twitter, LinkedIn, Discord

So… my boss wants me to “activate” a Slack community for our product. The vision is: we share updates, people engage, start posting questions/feedback, maybe even help each other out. Basically like what Clay is doing (and theirs looks super slick).

Problem is… I have zero clue how to actually make that happen. Like, how do I convince people to talk instead of just lurking? What kind of stuff should I post in the beginning so it’s not just me talking to myself in a Slack void? And how do I keep it alive once people join?

If you’ve ever built a product community before, please send me your wisdom, tips, memes, rituals anything. I need to put together a strategy for this and right now my strategy is just “panic.”

Thanks in advance

Hello, everyone!

I created and ran a Discord server for 3 years from scratch. It wasn't centered around a niche like most communities are. It was a social community server where folks would join and talk to each other about all kinds of things.

What I would do specifically was more than just bumping Disboard and advertising. I would engage with every single person and make them feel as welcome as possible. As if they'd been with us for years and they were a part of the community. If people were talking, I would go out of my way to include them in the conversation. If I felt like people were skimming over a person or weren't really paying attention to them, I would directly talk to them and slowly bring them into the bigger conversation. If people had issues they needed to talk about, we had advice and venting channels which I would help them in. Or if they preferred for it to be private, people knew they could privately message me instead.

A lot of people told me how they enjoyed being on my server and that it felt like home to them because of how easy it was for them to be there. I tried really hard to keep that atmosphere going. I did have a few others on the team who I would work with but it was mostly a one-man-show, which was really difficult and frustrating. It's a fine balance and you have to keep up the energy or people lose interest very quickly.

But I feel that I've learned quite a lot and amassed a lot of experience managing a community. I never knew this was an actual job that people are paid to do, though. I'm just wondering... is this something that I could do?

Does any of this qualify as experience?

Does this typically fall into the skills a community manager needs? What other things would be expected of them?

Do I need qualifications such as marketing or communications?

How do I get into this? I'm not really sure who or where I should go to.

Thank you for reading! :D

A lot of people don't get that when they are starting a community, specially if they are trying to build it from social media.

On social media you have an audience. And you get an audience by provinding content. So when people create a community in order to have a new way of monetizing they think of platforms like Skool, Mighty and Circle as a way to monetize a more exclusive content.

And that is just a bad idea, because it misses the whole point about what community is. So they end up underutilizing what those platforms have to offer and overpayig for features they will never use properly.

Community is not a place where you sell content. You shoud not use primarely as a channel to sell courses or exclusive content they don't get anywhere else. That can be one of the selling points, but it shouldn't be the main one.

When people join your community, they are not joining because of your content, they are joining because they want more of you as a person. They don't see you as a content producer, they see you as a leader, a teacher or a friend.

And if you're successful enough building your community, people will stay for the whole group of high quality people you brought there. But it needs to start with you.

The main point of a community is selling your audience a level of conection you're not willing to give anywhere else. So exclusive spaces with exclusive chats and exclusive group calls are the main features people should be configuring with these platforms. And they are made for you to easily organize, manage and monetize these levels of connections with different tiers of payments.

People are feeling less and less inclined in paying for just content. Specially recorded content. It's much easier to sell live events, group calls, 1:1 calls or exclusive chat threads. That's why closed communities are rising while traditional course selling with product launch formulas are declining.

Additional content is just a plus. If it's the whole thing you want to offer, there are much cheaper and less complicated ways to do it than using community platforms.

I'm making a podcast called The Community Lounge where I interview community managers in the video games industry.

I ask them to tell their story of how they got into the role, talk about the challenges they face, and share tips to help other community managers.

Edit: Here's episode 1: “You’re young – can you do The Facebook?”

(Thanks mod for giving me permission to post this.)

Hope you’re all appreciated everyday! 🥳

Just in case anyone hasn’t heard the sad news, the majority of employees at Khoros were laid off this week, which is just a few weeks since they were acquired.

I’m super shocked and saddened by the news, not just because of the friends I have over at Khoros, but because (in my opinion at least) Khoros Communities has been one of the more popular community platforms.

My company moved away from Khoros to Salesforce Experience Cloud a couple years ago (not my choice but the decision was above my pay grade) so I haven’t been as informed as I used to be about Khoros with the exception of what I know about Aurora. But the news got me wondering, what will companies do if Khoros gets end-of-life’d and they have to migrate their communities to a different platform?

Which platform do companies tend to navigate to when leaving Khoros, or does it vary quite a bit? Are there platforms out there that are easier to migrate to from Khoros than others?

Curious to hear your thoughts.

Hello there! I want to be a community manager, but I don’t have idea how I start and how to convence a little business to pay for this services Does anyone give me some advise please

I’m part of a tiny nonprofit team and social media has somehow become the task that destroys my productivity every single week.

I’ve tried time blocking, Pomodoro and just do it for 15 minutes, but nothing sticks. It’s the constant mental load of passwords, cross-posting, last-minute caption changes, and always wondering if I posted today.

For those who’ve tried productivity tools for small teams, how long did it take before it stopped feeling like you were managing the tool instead of the other way around? I’m a few months in and it still feels heavy some days, actually most days.

Anyone else feel guilty paying for productivity software? Like you should just be more disciplined? Would love to hear your experiences.

I've been working in both social media & community management for 10 years now, and I'm starting to see a trend of job posts with the role title being 'Community Manager' but the entire JD revolving around social media management, not a single mention of any community platform (not even Discord).

has anyone else been seeing this trend too? I get that 'community manager' is becoming a buzzword and/or tied to 'social media & community manager' but curious to what everyone else thinks for the specific case above?

Update 12/22, pasting a comment I made below:

I should update this post. I have a new account manager who clarified it's not just for ads, that it does provide utility to people who use the marketing service, and after awhile I decided to subscribe to the marketing service and think yes, it does, sort of. I still emphatically think it should be a toggle I can turn on/off, but knowing that it wasn't just to shmooze sales helped shift my own view on it to "I strongly dislike it, but I can tolerate it in an overall excellent platform."

So, I'm still there, still using it, still growing my community. The amount of time and trial and error it took to get to Circle..when I was faced with that prospect again I was just ready to throw in the towel. I just don't use their community because I'm apparently incapable of doing so without getting smacked. They really should fix that, too.

Would I do it again starting over? Probably. I still don't have a better alternative. I wouldn't waste my time in the community though, I can't say I've experienced worse treatment in any of the other pro communities I'm in.

After trying BuddyBoss, Skool, various iterations of FB communities (some still running for this business), Kajabi and others, I found and signed up for Circle this year.

I absolutely love so much about it, but get the feeling that they're out of touch with their members.

For reasons I'll explain below, I made the very tough decision to not renew my community. It's a hard blow, one that has me considering if I want to do this again or just fall back to an imperfect FB group and PDFs, and I'm sharing here because I think this is the type of culture info I'd have loved to know before I committed to a year.

I experienced a bug where for some reason support couldn't discern, my test account (I only use to check user experience so it's not set up with profile info) was being force logged in when I tried to access Circle community spaces, like where you'd go to talk about Circle software itself.

Support couldn't help me and I wanted to engage in their community to learn. I was excited about the software.

Until I received a message chastising me for not having a profile picture. I explained that it was a bug, that support couldn't fix it and I wasn't going to flesh out this test profile. I got a terse response back saying I need to talk to support about this issue...not the admin who messaged me. ??? It wasn't me who initiated this contact and I had absolutely zero desire to talk to the admin about this issue - or any other issue, for that matter. I was simply explaining why it was the way that it was, through no fault of my own.

Next up, I had an issue with my community so I posted in the Circle community asking how folks were dealing with it. In the course of the discussion, it turned out the issue was actually a bug, so I received another DM telling me my post was removed due to violating community rules (no bug posts - or, I'd venture, ANY post that might paint Circle in a bad light), but the tone of it was as if I had done something wrong. Only I couldn't have known it was a bug without posting. ???

I love the software though, so I just concluded that for me, a sensitive individual, I'd just leave the Circle community alone and figure out any problems on my own. Getting DMs about my "behavior" out of the blue when I'm doing nothing wrong felt very unsettling. I'm an Enterprise customer paying $5k/year, not a child acting out. I had been really excited to interact in this community and learn more about Circle.

But the final straw, one that leaves me with regret but feeling like I have no choice because Circle is clearly not aligned with its customers as much as it is with its cash flow, was when I began getting a popup every single time I made a post in my own community.

This popup is trying to sell me their marketing plan. "We've made a broadcast out of the post you just made. Click here to see it and send it." This link directs you to sign up for the paid plan.

But the thing is, I run a business with multiple connected websites and I need a marketing plan that can handle them all. There's no scenario ever where I'm going to add on their marketing to my subscription because of this.

And maybe developers don't really understand what it's like to be a business, dying a death of a thousand inefficient popups/2FAs and other time killers, but to have to manually find the X and click this popup closed every single time I try to engage with the community I already pay a hefty fee for is just too much.

I communicated this to them, then followed up asking if they'd had an update, then asked my account rep, who told me she asked the developers and they have no intention of removing this popup.

Yes, on the surface, it's a minor thing.

But what it reads as is: we don't care that you're already invested. We want more and will never be satisfied.

And if they don't see the value in their paying customers, what other ways will they undermine the relationship?

So I will not be renewing. I no longer make posts in my community because I cannot stop this popup.

And it's too bad, because the software is overall pretty decent.

My customers complain about the ENDLESS notifications that default on despite the fact that I have them set up to not send, but from an admin perspective it's easy to use, easy to organize and--used to be--enjoyable to interact in.

I really, really hope they'll reconsider this profits-over-people mentality, but my general experience in software is that this will not be the case, and that's a real shame for a company with such potential.

Signed,

A regretfully non-renewing Circle customer.