Are you actually hurting your community?

[JoelR]

You're the community admin with a strong desire to be helpful, but could you actually be undermining your community's growth and performance?  

What are some of your best intentions that backfired?  

• Do you seek constant agreement, or lurch from one member feedback to another?  
• Do you overprotect your staff members, and keep them in the dark?  
• Are you too involved in every matter as a micromanager, or are you not involved at all?  

 

[Nomad]

When I started, I was too much concerned about content quality. I wanted the title to be search friendly and the post to be written in good language. I had a lot of users who were using English as a second language and most of their posts were not very good. Therefore, I went on editing those posts. I have not stopped doing that because I came to understand I was actually hurting my community.

[Destiny]

As a community admin, it is very easy to get yourself into a situation where you want perfection that it can be too much and even sometimes a turn-off for those who visit your community whether they be intentional or not. 

I always used to be a perfectionist when it came to quality content and quality titles within my community, not something I would jump to being again as I know that affected my community badly in the beginning when I did that. 

[Toni]

One of my biggest regrets, when I started my first community, was constantly wanting feedback or asking my community what they wanted to see instead of waiting for them to give ideas and feedback when they were ready to. 

You learn from your mistakes though and I know I did. 

[Maria]

One of the common issues I see with a lot of community owners is they are eyeing for perfection. That's why they are too involved with people are posting. You own the community but you do not own your users, you need to let them say whatever they want to say. Another mistake I see is they are too concerned about getting feedback. You need to look how your community is performing through analytics tools instead of asking feedback personally.

[Nomad]

On 4/22/2024 at 10:49 PM, Destiny said:

As a community admin, it is very easy to get yourself into a situation where you want perfection that it can be too much and even sometimes a turn-off for those who visit your community whether they be intentional or not. 

I always used to be a perfectionist when it came to quality content and quality titles within my community, not something I would jump to being again as I know that affected my community badly in the beginning when I did that. 

"Perfection"

Yes, that's the word you need to avoid. If you are trying to create a perfect community, your attempt will go futile as there is no such thing as perfect. If you make too many rules to make your community perfect, you will not have a lot of users and engagement.