The rise and boom of social media communities, like Facebook groups underline a crucial pattern. With social media’s evolution in the last two decades, communication modes have undergone a radical change.
Starting 2010s, the advent of Facebook, Twitter, and launch of similar platforms made it viable and possible for folks to connect with anybody sharing public content. These avenues eventually built newsfeed features that disseminated both global and personal updates and content in real-time.
- However, in recent times, many marketers have started to wire out from the real-time grind and firehose. People are now more alert about their social media span, many joining niche groups that share their experiences and interests.
- People are craving more meaningful and intimate connections through social media. You’ll find that some of these niche spheres are public. Take the hashtag groups on Instagram as an example.
- However, you’ve numerous closed communities via email lists, online portals, or Facebook and WhatsApp groups.
- Regardless of the platform, individuals join communities to build a deeper connection with fellow users.
- You share information, advice, and even plants to meet and greet each other.
Influencers, publications, and brands have tapped into public desire for more compact and intimate experience eon social media. You create groups and act as administrators and moderators.
Table of Contents
A reality-check
Sorry to break a bubble, but social media is a lost case for most people. The myth of social being a meritocratic and democratic system isn’t passing scrutiny. Everyday, we get to learn that it’s not the ideal place to initiate and vet new ideas, start meaningful discussions, or find intricate solutions and to compound and niche problems.
- There’s no denying that social media is a stupendous sphere for serendipitous dynamics and snark between world leaders, celebrities, stars, and the public. However, the majority of people are mere spectators.
- Banding together will help earn a foothold and voice. With stiff competition, it requires more advanced and polished ideas and presentations with solid proof to reach your target audience.
- It could be your FB followers/fans or followers for Instagram. In communities, you band together to create and obtain ideas, harness and polish them, nurture the message, produce memorable content in the form of videos, stickers, and memes and collectively introduce them into the world wide web.
The conversions keep migrating to niche communities. These groups broadcast the best and most pivotal narratives to a more diverse and larger eco-system.
Journalists continue to play the role of story tellers and translators, reporting on niche conversations. They can help the world fathom the importance of communities.
Spike in group-chat procedures and apps
Instead of interacting on traditional and threadbare social-media apps, countless people use group-chat applications for discussing interests and end goals with fewer disruptions. Countless apps are mushrooming to build communities among those who seek to connect with others that have similar interests.
There are group-chat apps that surfaced last year. Users can join the concerned conversation with other folks by underlining their camera at the globe around them. Use artificial intelligence to capture them. It will suggest topics and group chat that matter to your followers. Base them on familiar locations and similar interests.
- Another chat app called Wisdo help you connect with others and share life experience. It boasts of over 70 communities, where anyone above 18 years can join.
- Topics range from job losses and illnesses to how to prepare for exams and purchasing a house.
- The group apps can connect you to a community with people that have the same experience. It encourages you to share beneficial advice by asking them to build a timeline that underlines their experience in a stepwise manner.
- On the basis of those steps, the app develops a neat outline for every life experience.
Behind the viability
Apart from providing a space to belong and connect, encouraging respectful and meaningful conversations, and fostering that community feeling, social media platforms also command hundreds of millions of users, regardless of their size or location, to be in their most authentic domain and selves. Communities promote mutual respect and love.
- One of the biggest reasons is people’s trust. That’s another vital aspect of social communities.
- Nobody judges you on the basis of your profile picture or friend count. There’s less pressure to cultivate and maintain a high or positive image.
- Anonymity and privacy, which are part and parcel for countless online communities, eliminates a lot of pressure.
- Research shows that most 55% of US netizens either don’t bother about the anonymous trait of online communities, or/and 40% believe it’s generally a great thing. Only 6% think it’s a bane.
- Out of that 60%, two-thirds think that people tend to share things in groups, which they will not share without anonymity.
They also tend to think that users are more honest and transparent online under anonymity. That’s a whopping 60% again, and 36% of that tend to post inspirational or positive things. The groups are also crucial marketing touchpoints.
Niche communities as growth channels
It has been a long time that we’ve seen a new, ideal channel emerge. The creation of such mediums has suddenly slowed down. However, with the rise and bloom of niche communities, the drought might end anytime in 2020.
These communities have hit a phase of maturity, making them very interesting and robust growth channels. Web forums, Subreddits, FB groups, and slack platforms are the most common mediums for social media communities. They offer multiple ways to accelerate traffic to your site and boost your brand.
As big communities are tanking, niche communities are winning. The latter focus on one topic, doesn’t allow clutter, and is more engaging. With less crowd, calumny, chaos and noise, niche communities are less competitive and less invasive. You don’t have to worry about competition or hazards.
The sole reason that makes these communities bond and click is the love of something, which the members demonstrate. People literally go out of their way to help sans any financial stake or interest.
Hi, I am an Author who believes in making the life of their readers interesting with his writing. Writing was always my first interest. Ever since I was a teenager, I was already into writing poems and stories. Today, I have gained a great experience in my work. Check out my work and share your views.
