CCW #8 - The 2020 Community Industry Trends
Highlights from the CMX State of Community Industry 2020 Report
CCW is a newsletter about building and growing communities, featuring collected tweets, posts and thoughts from various community leaders.
❓ Question of the Week
How many hours do you spend each week on your community?
Feel free to reply directly to this email, or join our Slack community (linked at the bottom of the email) to chat with us and other community builders.
📚The State of the 2020 community Industry
Every year, CMX publishes a research report on trends in the community industry. The report is mainly geared toward corporate community managers, but many trends are highly applicable to independent community owners as well.
The Community Chat Weekly team sunk our teeth into the newly released 2020 CMX report, and pulled out some of the best insights for you all below! Enjoy 😊
For companies that have a community, the majority have both an online and offline presence.
For In-person communities, Eventbrite and Meetup are the two dominant platforms of choice for community managers and organizers.
For companies that manage professional communities digitally, Facebook Groups and Slack workspaces are by far the two most popular platform choices.
Engagement and manual processes are the biggest challenges that community managers face.
Only 1 in 4 companies that have a digital community presence are able to connect it back to their customer CRM.
And our biggest takeaway is that there's never been a greater time to be a community builder. The world is quickly waking up to the fact that community is the future of social interaction!
🐦 Tweets
Although the definition of a 'digital community' can sometimes be blurry, social media management and community management are two very different skillsets. Do you agree?
When it comes to intra-company communication and "internal" corporate community, Slack adoption versus Microsoft Teams is a popular comparison. Although Slack has a smaller daily active userbase (12m vs. 20m), their users generate 5B weekly "actions" as compared to 220M by Microsoft Teams users.
Is community building analogous to product building? David Spinks seems to think so.
📝 Posts
A handful of recommended readings from the past week.
Thank Your Members! (2 minute read)
In the spirit of the Thanksgiving holiday for those in the US that are celebrating – a post highlighting the importance of thanking your most engaged members, plus a few tips and tricks for doing so!
What are the best tools to use for your Community? (3 minute read)
A thriving discussion on the pros and cons of various community building tools over on the Maker-forum Indie Hackers.
💬 Join the Community!
Did you know that Community Chat is more than just a newsletter? We have two communities, one on Discord and one on Slack, where community leaders and builders connect with each other and share tips and tricks.
Have a suggestion for a piece of content we should include next week? Email us and let us know!