There’s no perfect approach to community building but over the years community builders have welcomed with open arms the idea that something as potent as communities shouldn’t be reduced to templatized ways of functioning. From conversations to events and everything in between, communities ooze diversity, which is why you can’t have generic strategies that people eventually end up ignoring.

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Since community-led growth has been popularized by businesses as an important growth strategy, the need for goals, insights, and data will continue to grow for measuring the ROI of communities. This will also dictate how mainstream community-led growth becomes, especially for SaaS or software companies. And when companies gradually scale, the communities will scale with them.

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But the idea of community management is quite different from the eyes of a community manager. Although the approach to community building still remains human, there are certain things that a community builder is answerable for/needs to ensure that it works smoothly even when the community scales. And these things are heavily driven by numbers, data, and automation.

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When you have a larger community to manage, it can be really easy to miss out on important things. These things can often be critical and maybe even a deal-breaker for community members. Not just that, but being constantly aware of your community’s needs can lead to -

• Faster response rates which eventually delight members and play an integral role in building a sustainable community engagement engine where members give back to the community.
• Better engagement opportunities because you know which member is looking for what.
• Value-driven responses are personalized and specifically tailored so members can cut through the irrelevant stuff and discover value more quickly.

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A community that functions in accordance with what the members need is already halfway there in terms of becoming an engine of growth and sustainability.

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However, you as a community builder cannot be omnipresent. It might still be possible if you have a small community, but larger communities with hundreds of discussions cannot always be stayed on top of. And you can’t always be scouring through our community to know what’s going on - it’s not practical. You have hundreds of other things to take care of. Important things. Coming up with engagement strategies, planning & hosting events, experimenting with new ways to scale, and a bunch of other critical aspects of community building that a manager should focus on.

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Get notified for the important things

Since the beginning, we’ve wanted to focus on building a product that caters not just to the decision-makers but more importantly to those who are down in the trenches, experiencing first-hand what community building is truly all about. The ability to automate workflows has helped hundreds of community builders offer more value while saving hours of manual work.

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With the addition of Team Alerts, you as a community manager can essentially choose to get notified for the things that are important to you.

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What are the things you can get notified for

• If a member asks a question in the community. Threado’s ML-based algorithm precisely identifies questions and notifies you instantly.
• If certain keywords are used in the message.
• Based on the sentiment of the message i.e. does the message have a negative sentiment or a positive sentiment.
• Based on the type of message i.e. is the message a question, an issue, feedback, spam, or general information?
• Based on member filters like their name, email, tag, engagement level, or the date when they joined.
• Where the message has been posted i.e. which platform or which channel?

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How can these alerts be a game-changer for you?

• Imagine always being able to respond to questions right away. When you get notified of questions being asked in the community, you or your team, can respond right away and offer instant value which goes a long way when you’re building a community.
• Depending on what you’ve built your community around, there always are certain keywords that stand out or are important. In a sea of messages, you need to prioritize which ones are critical and which ones are not as much. When you get notified about certain keywords being used in messages, you can get to them faster. For example - you can choose to get notified when the keyword “help” is used in a message. This could be someone asking for help or offering to help.
• Notifications based on sentimentality can be a game-changer. For instance - If you’re a support community, you should be aware of what people think of your community or product. Get notified of negative sentiment messages and get to them faster and help resolve them as soon as possible.
• Classification based on the type of message. Whether it’s a question, an issue, feedback for the community, spam, or just general information - Threado classifies these messages so you can setup alerts for each separate message type and identify these messages more easily.
• There might be some members like community champions or advocates who play an integral part in the functioning of your community. You can also choose to get notified for member-specific attributes based on their names or emails. You can add tags to certain members and setup an alert to get notified whenever they post a message.
• You can get notified when messages get posted to certain channels. For instance - you’ve created a new channel for an event or maybe even a competition. You can setup an alert to get notified every time a message gets posted there so you and your team are always on top of everything.

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How to setup a Team Alert on Threado

Threado gives you a complete view of your community which makes it easier to understand data points and leverage those insights to take actions to setup alerts that are precise and impactful.

Let’s look at a simple use case at how you can get started with Team Alerts. Let’s setup an Alert to get notified when someone asks a question in the community.

Signup to Threado.

Integrate your community platform.

Navigate to the Automations dashboard on Threado and create a new workflow. Let’s name it “Alerts for questions”.

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After you’ve created a workflow, you need to define the trigger condition based on which members will enter this workflow. There are essentially 3 ways in which you can setup a trigger condition -

1. When a new member joins
2. Receiving alerts for when a message gets posted.
3. Custom member filters based on certain criteria.

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Since we’re setting up an Alert, we’ll select Message posted as the trigger condition.

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Now,  select “Is question” as the entry condition so all messages that are questions will be identified and entered into this workflow.

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Select “Get Slack alert” as the action block after you’ve set the condition.

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Now, select which workspace you’d like to receive the Alert on. It’s recommended that you connect your Internal Slack workspace which is better for collaboration and transparency for your team and yourself.

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You can also define a custom alert message using custom fields like username, message, channel name, and more.

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Setting this up becomes even easier using templates. We’ve picked some of the most common use cases for community builders and made it even easier to setup workflows with templates. All you have to do is select a template of your choice, click on “Use Template” and the workflow will be replicated on your workspace.

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These templates are entirely customizable and are only there to make things easy for you!

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Always stay on top of your community

Community is definitely an important part of our future, but we can’t build something amazing without the right tools. With Team Alerts, the aim is not just to give you and your team the ability to cut through the noise and get notified for what’s important to you, but also to take action as well directly through automation and personalized message to make sure you leverage all of Threado. Together, all this could function as an orchestrated machine that helps you serve, grow, and scale your community.

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