Write about your community, not for them
When companies asked me why their community had stalled, I would usually find the same scene. Product updates and feature announcements filled the feed. Members had joined, but they weren't talking to each other. They were waiting for the company to give them something to respond to.
I've built communities that grew to hundreds of thousands of members, and I've consulted with dozens of companies whose communities were stuck. The community manager was often working incredibly hard. That was part of the problem. Every new post taught members that the company would keep the room going for them.
When the company carries the conversation
I think of these as branded communities. The company chooses what gets discussed and writes most of the posts. Engagement can look fine on paper, but most of the conversation points back toward the brand.
Over time, conversations get stale, engagement drops, and the community manager tries to make up for it by posting more. I've watched that loop wear people out more than once.
The communities that kept growing worked differently. Members brought the conversation, while the company made room for it and helped good contributions travel further. When the company stepped back, people still had reasons to be there.
Put a member in the story
On community sites I worked with, we asked the community managers to write about how a member had used a feature, crediting that person and explaining what they'd figured out. The post could still teach people how the feature worked, while giving them someone in the community to respond to.
It took some convincing. Community managers are used to being the expert and creating the content. Once they saw how members responded, they got it. People wanted their work to be featured. They shared what they'd discovered, and even started competing to show the cleverest uses.
We were still explaining the product, but members' work gave us more to write about and brought more people into the conversation.
From communicator to facilitator
The change also gave the community manager a different job. A communicator creates content and speaks for the company. A facilitator finds useful contributions and helps members share them.
That means asking for feedback when a feature is still taking shape and finding members who are using the product in interesting ways. I pay attention to what happens when the community manager steps away. Do members continue the conversation, or does the room go silent?
I watched this happen in a developer community. The company began documenting what members built and how they used new features. Members created more, and the company spent less time producing its own material. That was easier for the community team to sustain.
Some audiences want a channel of updates from the company, and that's a reasonable thing to provide. But when a company tells me it wants members to feel ownership, I look for their contributions in the feed. If I can't find any, that's where I'd start.