Community building tools: which are the best and how to use them?

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Building a community is part of an advanced Content Marketing process . The creation of an internal team should be encouraged, made up of users trained to replicate valuable content, promote debate, and make editorial decisions for the brand. There are different applications that facilitate the task, but we will focus on two tools: Slack and Meetup . Identified in two specific cases such as #recoMedium and Hacks/Hackers (Bs As) .


Slack
The internal team communication platform. It is one of the vk database best tools for building community, used by three million users who participate in chat rooms organized by topic (called channels ), where they also interact through direct messages and private groups. It has a search engine that allows you to track all the content distributed in the application.

Part of the Spanish Medium community , it is part of a group on Slack called POMQA . A space to think of ideas, discuss measures taken by the blog, and share articles from the platform. Among the actions carried out in the group, there is the “community recommendations” section , where users recommend publications that went unnoticed. This task has two basic rules:

One article per user may be recommended.
It must be more than 20 days old
The weekly activity is divided into two days:

Tuesday: Users must recommend third-party articles
Thursday (called self-promotion day): the user must recommend their own articles
In turn, from the Twitter account of Medium in Spanish (@mediumespanol ) using the hashtag #recoMedium, the publications chosen by POMQA will be announced . In addition, the official blog will publish weekly compilations of community recommendations. The content is stored on-demand and available to readers.

Meetup

This app is a demonstration of how community building tools should be used. The social networking platform for groups has diametrically opposed characteristics to S lack . The groups that make up the app turned to meetup with the idea of ​​creating meetings. The tool makes it easy to organize an event, contains no advertising, and has a basic design that allows it to be used by any user.

Hacks/Hackers is an international network of software programmers and journalists. Argentina is part of this organization focused on the study of data journalism. Through meetup , they organize the event called Media Party (the largest in the world) , which brings together around four thousand members. It has more than 30 workshops and international exhibitors on technology and journalism.

Since the Hacks /Hackers Buenos Aires meetup , more than fifty meetings have been organized. Members of the group can choose which event to attend, as well as learn all the details of the meeting, ask questions, and suggest ideas. There is a multimedia archive where photos and videos of past events can be found. The site offers an internal messaging system for private conversations.

What community building tools should I use?
The only ones who can answer this question are the members of the brand itself. Every measure taken in a Content Marketing strategy must be compatible with the company. Each company has different objectives, different needs, and opposing modes of communication. The decision to incorporate a tool to create a community is a gamble. Nothing and no one can guarantee success when choosing an application.

However, by adopting an Inbound Marketing strategy , we will obtain the information necessary to build a community. The basis of the Online Marketing phenomenon is loyalty through the creation of valuable content . By activating a process with simple internal actions, we will obtain specific information from our loyal consumers. In exchange for this data, we must provide the user with educational content, guaranteeing a constructive experience for the reader. This information can be reused in other instances within a Content Marketing strategy .