🎉 Ok, here are my 2019 predictions for the community industry / community management...
1. The social media backlash will continue. Big platforms will offer more private community features, but this will clash with their business models. New players will emerge to fill the need
1. The social media backlash will continue. Big platforms will offer more private community features, but this will clash with their business models. New players will emerge to fill the need
2. As people leave large platforms, and seek new options for community, businesses will capitalize by offering their own niche branded communities around their products and missions.
We'll also see a lot more founders launch new, niche community companies/brands.
We'll also see a lot more founders launch new, niche community companies/brands.
3. Chat based community platforms (Discord, Telegram, Slack) will continue to grow rapidly. Quality of communities will be an issue, when all the best groups become too large. There will be some fatigue around this format and people will crave more structure again.
4. There will be a noticeable shift away from VC as the only default option for startups and more options (like @indievc, tugboat @LighterCapita) will emerge. This means businesses can move slower, be more intentional, and focus on long term community.
5. Community platforms will become more focused on specific objectives (ie. ambassador programs, events) and markets (ie. consumer, membership, SaaS). The old, one-stop-shops will continue to win support community contracts but will lose out on other program types.
6. Community professionals, on the other hand, will become less specialized, and work across many different departments (marketing, product, ops, HR, support, etc). We're going to see more VP's of community with a lot of influence in their companies.
7. As platforms become more focused on specific objectives and markets, and community pros take on more strategic roles, the industry will become better at measuring the value of communities. We'll see more examples of communities that can report on ROI.
8. Crypto will still be a major player in the community industry, but with the downturn, will start cutting the community teams that they rapidly built up. There will be a flood of talent in the market of people claiming to be community experts after working on ICOs.
9. To diversify revenue, and avoid losing distribution on big social, media and press organizations will continue to launch subscription membership programs. Membership communities is a growing market.
10. There will be a boom of tech and programming focused on offline community building, local event programs, user groups, etc. The focus will be on hosting more smaller events, to compliment the big conferences (which will continue). Much of this will be volunteer driven.
