Your Growth is your community

Before I begin, I just wanted to express my immense gratitude to both my subscribers and premium subscribers. You have truly made my year.🎉🎉 I am thoroughly enjoying writing these posts.

Just a friendly reminder also, if you reach out to me via Twitter DM, please make sure to nudge me as those messages tend to get lost among the latest DMs. Your support means the world to me, and I am eager to emphasize the importance of building a community.

While the main focus of these posts is productivity, I will also be sharing a variety of content, including specific posts on AI leveraging, automations, and crypto/NFTs. However, for now, let's concentrate on personal growth.

The Growth Factor

As someone on X (Twitter), your engagement directly reflects your growth. You need to consider your goal and what you are trying to achieve on X. A valuable goal to strive for is trust. Let me explain.

If your aim is to gain 1K, 5K, or 10K followers, what do you hope to gain from that? Be honest with yourself. If you're unsure, it's likely that you haven't yet defined your brand and are struggling to grow as a result. Your brand goes beyond the colours of your banner, personal profile picture, and the font you choose to identify with. It encompasses what you want to build around yourself and includes various elements, which does including visual identifiers, but it's also about reputation. A brand's reputation sets it apart from others. It represents the values, promises, and mission of the entity it represents, shaping how it is perceived by its target audience.

For example my brand around this newsletter’s values include authenticity, expertise and integrity. The promises include consistency, improvement and responsiveness and its mission, simple, to give an informing, inspirational, valuable newsletter using insights and knowledge through storytelling.

So, when you are looking to grow, consider what goal to focus on. For example, if you want to increase your followers from 1k to 5k in a sustainable and accelerated manner, you will need to establish trust between yourself and your audience. Building trust is not only crucial for your personal development but also shapes your overall image. It's a winning formula because as you grow your account through trust, it also fosters trust in what you are doing.

Your audience is the driving force behind your content and helps spread it to others outside your immediate twitter bubble, resulting in conversions to followers. Essentially, you are growing by reaching out to an audience who then reaches out to potentially new audiences. Marketing funnels, commonly used in retail, refer to the process of guiding potential customers through a series of stages to eventually convert them into paying customers.

Audience/Community Funnel

An audience/community funnel is a marketing concept that illustrates the stages individuals go through, transitioning from passive observers to active and engaged members of a community. Many prominent brands excel at implementing this strategy. The crucial aspect is to cultivate loyalty and a dedicated audience that actively interacts and eventually forms a community.

I have employed this technique to foster the growth of communities, primarily within the gaming industry, but it can be applied to any community-driven entity. Therefore, the initial focus is on an Audience Funnel, often referred to as a sales funnel. In this particular example, we will substitute customers with potential readers. There are 3 stages:

Awareness: The reader becomes aware of your brand, product, or services.

Consideration: The reader shows interest, scrolling through your timeline or reading other posts.

Conversion: The reader takes an action and subscribes.

Community Funnel is slightly different and the intention is for them to become an active member more than a casual observer. These are your loyal members and follows a similar 3 stages.

Awareness: subscriber becomes aware of the communities existence and its values.

Engagement: subscriber actively participates in community twitter spaces and replies to the newsletter post on the website.

Advocacy: Subscriber becomes an advocate for the community, promoting it to others and encouraging more people to join.

Its actually that simple. This method can also be upscaled and the best example is the recent journey to mint for Cre8ors that I had the pleasure to be part of the team for. Audience/Community Funnel is used to attract new member, engage them, and turn them into dedicated advocates who contribute to the growth and success of the community or brand.

Social presence

Let's discuss social presence. In order to establish social presence, we need to start thinking from the perspective of an audience or a community member. Building this takes time, but consistency and engaging content, effective utilization of brand identifiers, collaboration and networking, and analysis and optimization are key areas to focus on. These factors help attract the audience through recognition, personalized engagement, cultural integration, networking, and collaborative challenges and events, ultimately leading to the development of a strong community.

There are numerous NFT communities that serve as good examples of this. One noteworthy example, which is relatively recent, is A Kid Called Beast. The initial launch of this project was quite disastrous and left many people, including myself, frustrated. However, what kept the project alive and united was the existing members of the community. Their strength carried them through, almost unbreakable. The founder could say anything (and he did), but the community was too resilient to be shaken. Although I was not a community member, I was intrigued by the foundation the founders had laid to earn the trust needed to cultivate their community.

So how do you know if you have an audience or a community as part of your following? Easy if you stopped what you do consistently what will happen? Simple. Don’t stop. 😂 Jokes aside, you need to understand that an audience passes through. They will continue doom scrolling content. A community will spend their time to continue the conversation and react and engage with what you have to say. They are part of it. Your brand also dictates if people will stop to listen to you or read what you have written.

So far I have mentioned a few integral things that identity what an audience is to a community but I have not provided yet any juicy life changing / meaning of life stories yet. 😂😂 Well this is where the story begins.

Community almost destroyed me 🤯

I ran a gaming community that gained notoriety for being both a relaxed and semi-hardcore community. It was a challenge to build because most gaming communities are one or the other. Normally with gaming communities, being away a few days without mentioning it on a discord could result in finding out you have been kicked from the server. Commitment plays a big role in some gaming communities. Being let go so easily after a few days also made me question if you could consider them communities?

We were able to establish our community by implementing a clear and comprehensive Staff manual, as well as a strong governance system. Our system was based on federal semi-direct democracy, where each game had its own governance structure. The key difference was that the council, instead of being elected, acted as servants to the community. This set us apart from other gaming communities, as decisions were made by the council and staff members based on their areas of expertise.

The idea was to have decisions made by the most experienced and responsible individuals in each role. If there were disagreements, the decision-making process followed a hierarchical system. For instance, if directors disagreed with a decision, it would be passed down to the associates for discussion and voting on. This system worked well, and very few decisions had to be made at the member level because generally things were resolved pretty quickly and agreeably. We even had an effective grievance system in place.

However, when I and another council member decided to step down from our positions, the community began to collapse. It was disheartening to witness, as I had mistakenly believed that the community would govern itself utilising the systems we had built and continue to operate as we had established it. I believe that the strength of the community lay in the foundations we had laid. The truth was without us, it lost its values, promises, and mission. The brand we preached dissipated, and consequently, the community dissolved.

My stepping down from my position was a decision I had to make for health reasons and unfortunate. I think how things would have been different If I had never made the decision to step down. This is why it is important to look beyond oneself and one's team and engage advocates of the community. These advocates may have been able to sustain the community. I do feel now that advocates of a community are actually massively underappreciated and it can come in the form of a staff or a member from the community. The key is that their voice is heard and acted on and appreciated.

Silver lining

It’s ok! The essence of what we built in the gaming community still carried through to other gaming communities. They are much smaller and concentrating on just a few games but strong nonetheless. I also recently found our old staff manual recently and had this written in it in.

Its a poignant note for me because of how people reacted when i stepped down. Its why its detrimental when building communities the need for strong advocates that also live and breathe the values, understand the promises and the mission. Reflecting back it was a great period of my life and actually made some lasting friends and connections. Learning about what leads to communities collapsing in the past can help us make better choices now. History teaches us things that mean we can use insights that can be of value in the present, even communities that are well organised are fragile constructs that can fail. There are always lessons in all situations.

So hope you found this helpful in building your audience but make sure to convert them in a community and find your advocates.

Keep Exploring and Learning,

Chewie (Chewie On This) ✏️

100% written by human

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Chew on it 😋😋or Spit it out? 🤮🤮

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Absolutely not fair! Spit it out 🤮🤮 

Disappointed in Elon Musk. I think the original owner of @X should have been compensated. I see from his timeline he is a footy fan. Reckon a lifetime membership to his teams games should have been offered. Elon!!! Make a dream happen!