No, the new WhatsApp community feature hasn’t been rolled out for us in this part of the world yet.
Thought I should share what it’s like now and whenever the new one rolls out, I’ll get to share that as well.
In my journey as a CM, I have managed 2 communities hosted on WhatsApp, and in summary, I’d say WhatsApp is not the best community platform.
My first experience was with an artiste’s fan community. And currently, I manage a community of practice.
How it went/how it’s going:
The fan community
This was a space for the fans of an artiste to connect with themselves and the artiste himself.
The community also helped to promote the artiste’s music.
Onboarding:
The community was very exclusive and quite private as there was no promotion for people to join. It was open up to people on very specific occasions like the artiste’s listening party and so on.
Engagement:
My role was to keep these fans engaged and it was quite fun pulling that off.
We had weekly activities 3 times a week and it worked out beautifully- engagement averaged at 60%. People popped up even at random times to catch up with each other.
We also had times when the artiste will pop in to say hi to everyone and they loved that so much.
Every 3 months, the engagement programs are surveyed, reviewed, and tweaked if necessary.
One thing I enjoyed too was the support from everyone on the team. They assisted me by lending their time to moderate some activities in the community.
Thinking of those days as I write this is quite exciting. I’ll say YES to a fan Community anytime.
The community of practice
The founders choose to host the community on WhatsApp because of the target audience. Also, since the community isn’t generating revenue yet, WhatsApp was the right fit.
Being that they are a community, and not just a brand with a community, using WhatsApp to host the community is a NO for me. A platform that can provide all-round community support would be preferable.
There’s no pressure to prove the value of the community, but it still matters to me that I’m able to measure the progress.
Onboarding:
We try to keep this simple and at the same time on brand. We didn’t want people just clicking a link and boom they are in the community.
Our onboarding process looks like this…
When they join, I welcome them and ask them to introduce themselves to the entire community. And I share some info like upcoming events, a recent event they can catch up on, etc.
For next year, I’m switching up the onboarding process with an automated process. I’ll be using MailerLite for that.
Engagement Programs:
The driving program for the community is events. We hold weekly conversations with industry leaders around trending issues in the industry. Usually the weekends, and most times a community member is our guest speaker.
We tried putting in a weekly check-in activity but that didn’t pull through. At first, I felt bad but eventually came to terms with the fact that this community just flows differently.
Yesterday, I talked about it in Max Pete’s tweet about quiet communities 👇
The community didn’t go the way we mapped out but it’s going well regardless. As long as the members are satisfied.
General thoughts on hosting a community on WhatsApp
Don’t!
1. In this part of the world where I come from, the way we interact with WhatsApp groups is very different - they are draining and come off annoying sometimes. You can’t even begin to imagine how many WhatsApp groups a person is a part of.
I don’t know if it’s the same for you in your part of the world. I’d be very glad to hear your thoughts. Hit reply or comment below.
It’s this mindset we have about WhatsApp groups that make me cancel the idea of running a community on WhatsApp.
I know people who don’t open WhatsApp group messages in weeks. It’s either they already have a lot of pending personal chats or the number of messages in the group is freaking them out.
2. You can’t track so much with WhatsApp groups.
When I have to give an analytic report, It’s a struggle ’cause I have to manually get some metrics sorted.
This is the biggest limitation of WhatsApp groups. I am hoping to see how the community feature will address that.
3. For a community of practice, WhatsApp doesn't just meet the mark
You will toggle a lot of tools just to get things organized for easy access.
4. WhatsApp is quite personal to a lot of people and having a community on WhatsApp can be just too much for them to handle. In my case as a community manager, WhatsApp is slightly becoming a work tool… and I’m not sure how to feel about that yet.
Have you managed a community on WhatsApp before?
Do you agree with this or you’ve had the best of it?
Hit reply or drop a comment 😉
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I’m yet to get the thought process of the team on how and why the feature and what makes it different from the familiar group chats. But even though upon still 😂, I’m not sure I’d love to be added to any more groups on WhatsApp than the ones I already have. Why? It’s personally tiring to deal with personal messages and that of several groups especially on a platform that already felt like a confidential social home space for me.
If I have to build and scale a community there, it means I’d have to log off the internet totally even WhatsApp so that I can have some free time.
But would the feature come with some in-built tools for measuring success? If it does, would it not increase the complexity of the platform?
I have the same questions and concerns. And I’m really looking forward to what it will turn out to be...
And looking forward to where I’ll be chatting with people next cause WhatsApp might be a work app I don’t want to open when resting from work 😂