Every day we are bombarded with content: emails, newsletters, social media posts, blog posts. The question is, how to create tech community content that stands out in this context?
Imagine what could happen if your community‘s content appeared in this surge of content. What a great opportunity to grow and promote your project!
The ABC of tech community content
Tech communities are generally made up of developers and budding programmers, but also technology enthusiasts who work with other things in their day-to-day life. These are people hungry for specialist content on the most popular languages and technologies, as well as on project management.
The potential of Content Creation lies precisely in this aspect of community life, because creating specific content, tailored to the needs of this particular audience, will allow you to both attract their attention and nourish the ranks of your community.
These will not be just any old new members, but high-quality new additions, because they are really interested in what you do. Over time you will build a close-knit community that will look forward to discussing and commenting on your next piece of content.
These are just some of the advantages of investing in Content Creation. By doing so, you can achieve important goals that will determine the success (or otherwise) of your community, such as:
- generating and building relationships with the people who are part of your community;
- sharing experiences that people identify with and want to join in with;
- generating interest around the topics you deal with;
- demonstrating your authority when it comes to the themes you tackle.
Communities are spaces where people come together, and they thrive on lively exchanges and discussion between their members. Your task is to stimulate the community with content that is always new, interesting and useful to talk about – maybe even something that solves their specific problem.
A Content Creation strategy helps you do just that, and consequently be perceived as an attentive and authoritative community manager.
The term Content Creation is used in the context of Digital Marketing to indicate specifically the activity of content creation (website, newsletter, e-book, guide, social media etc.) carried out by brands and companies to promote themselves across various channels.
However, in order to be effective and generate interest among the target audience, this content must be useful, accessible and relevant.
It is immediately clear how closely this concerns the world of offline and online community management. As community managers, we are called upon to manage the social channels and platforms our community is present on, send newsletters detailing upcoming events, and perhaps to have a website with a dedicated blog.
Above all, our job is to keep our communities alive, active and interested. We can do this not only through the events we organize meetups, webinars, YouTube live streams etc.—but also by paying careful attention to the content that we put out on our channels.
This strategic task starts with understanding what is really interesting for the people who follow the community. The outcome of that understanding is the process of planning of content to be published on your channels – a process that basically never ends.
The content-related activity does not end with publication but continues with the analysis of what went well and what did not in order to further improve your content offering. Let’s analyse in more detail why a technology community should invest time in this activity.
Tech community content is about relationships and interactions
Creating content is an activity that allows you to build and generate relationships between members of your community, and to attract new members. If the content is deemed worthwhile and interesting, people will be more likely to recognise its value and share their opinion on it.
This creates the atmosphere of exchange and networking that keeps the community environment alive and active. To create incisive content from this point of view, you can leverage:
- Stories and emotions. Engaging with emotions is a way to build lasting bonds and create conversations. For example, sharing experiences is very effective because people tend to identify with the story and, if touched in real life, to share their direct experience. They will leave a comment under your post and create conversations.
- Usefulness. Content that provides practical solutions to be tried out in everyday life is among the most successful. You can tell the story of how you solved a technical problem or how you faced a challenge: for example, how you created a web application with a particular technology. Developers and enthusiasts are eager to discuss techniques, languages, projects or technologies, and this will encourage them to share their point of view. Read the create interactions section.
Be remembered thanks to your content
There are many communities, and making yourself memorable is not easy, but it has to be one of your main objectives. Adopting a few small tricks will help you worm your way into people‘s memory. For example, you could take advantage of recurring items.
Create recurring content which repeats over time and with the same frequency. This will help members of your community get even more attached to your project, and above all to remember you.
The concept is the same as when organising a meetup: you tend to choose a day of the week which will, in principle, always remain the same. An example?
If you decide to plan an editorial calendar for your social channels, you can choose to dedicate a day of the week to a specific topic or specific content: “The Thursday video tutorial”, “The Tuesday technical article”, and so on.
Give free rein to creativity, but above all sound out the needs and requirements of your community and don’t be afraid to ask those directly concerned.
Creating valuable tech community content
To sum up what has been said so far, the key to success with content is to generate value for people. This happens when your content successfully has a direct and positive impact on the life of a member of your community.
A technical blog post can help a developer understand how to implement a feature in a project.
The story of an experience can inspire a member of your community to undertake a new project, or arouse an emotion and generate a wave of other shares and comments that will keep your community environment alive.
Some useful advice
Plan a content calendar
You have identified the needs of your community and gathered some ideas. That’s a good start; now, with a calendar in hand, plan when you want to publish each idea. This will help you to make moves in advance—you can schedule content month by month—and better organise your presence on your channels.
A very useful tool to help with this is Trello. You can combine a calendar template with a bulletin board and create a card for each post you want to publish. On each card you can attach links, graphics and above all the text of the post.
Trello facilitates collaboration, so if you are a team of community managers, you can divide the posts to be made and review those already set live, through comments, for example. This tool helps you design and develop content, while other tools are used to publish or program content on social media, including Buffer (actually, we have an interview with Buffer on creating a highly connected digital community that you might find insightful), PostPickr, Hootsuite, and Later, just to name a few.
If you want to learn more: Essential tools for Community Management
Investigate hot topics among members of your community
We have repeated ad nauseum that understanding what your community‘s needs are is the starting point for creating valuable content. To achieve this understanding, don’t be afraid to ask the people who make up the community directly.
If you manage a community within a Facebook group, for example, you can take advantage of surveys and sound out which issues your audience would like you to tackle.
Do you have an Instagram account? Use the “Questions” feature to collect requests. Google Forms to be filled in are also a very useful tool in this regard. Operating in this way allows you to give your community exactly what it is looking for, and to have your precious work recognised for paying attention to the needs of those who follow you every day.
Give yourself a clear visual identity
Creating content means not only writing a post on social media, a blog post or your experience as a developer, but also giving a visual identity to your community. This is another way to ensure that those who follow you will remember you better.
Create a logo, and use it on each channel. Choose a color palette to form the basis for the graphics of your website, your posts on social networks and the posters for your meetups. Recurring colors, shapes and graphics will give you an immediately recognizable visual identity.
Help from an expert would be ideal but, if you don’t have the resources, there are many online tools that offer a lot of help, for example Canva. This online tool helps create graphics from preset templates with reasonable results: certainly excellent for social media or a meetup poster.
Experiment, and don’t give up on your first try.
To find the right content, you need to experiment. This means that you shouldn’t give up after your first unsuccessful attempt–you have to keep getting to know your community more and more to find out what really works.
Observing people’s behavior carefully is essential. Have you published any content that generated a lot of chatter? Comments and shares on social media? Analyze why the content resonated so much and offer similar content again, omitting content that leaves community members more indifferent.
The analytics of your site or your social channels (Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics etc.) can be excellent allies for this activity. Observe, experiment, and keep the experiments that hit the target.
Creating content does not mean having to be present across all channels.
Dedicate yourself to curating your content, but don’t overdo it with all existing platforms. Doing so is a waste of energy, especially if your community is taking its first steps.
You don’t have to be on every social network and platform in existence, not least because some of them might not be right for you or might not be populated by potential members interested in your activity.
If you’re starting out, choose two or three channels and use your communication skills to cultivate them well. When you have achieved a solid footing, and perhaps found other community managers available to help you, you can increase the workload and start thinking of being present on other channels.
Think about how much time you can devote to your project, and choose which platforms to manage. Being on all social networks is a big responsibility and means taking care of every page or profile by providing content for each of them.
A social channel left to itself gives your community little interest in wanting to maintain a relationship with those who are part of it, so think carefully!
See also: How to reach a wider audience for your tech community using Social networks
One piece of content, many lives
Be creative! The potential to create content exists in every resource you have available. From a technical talk that took place during a meetup or online you can create a tutorial, a guide, a blog post or small social media nuggets on the most interesting content.
If your speaker created slides for the occasion, ask them if you can create posts for social media platforms by quoting some salient passages, obviously citing the source and therefore their work. You will intrigue those who were not able to see the talk, and maybe you will create conversations between those who watched it and were enthused by it.
Remember that content can exist in many forms, with which you can quench your community’s thirst for content.
We have come to the end of our journey through the world of Content Creation. It’s an activity that requires commitment, energy, study and analysis, but one you need to invest in for a community project to be successful.
Give it a try, and take small steps. One step today, one tomorrow, and you will end up with valuable content that will give your community a big quality boost!
If you want to move forward with your community, make sure you also know how to measure its performance to boost growth. Learn to use the most popular analytics tools and what are the metrics for measuring community management. This will help boost your tech community content!
