The Future of Community Building: Top Trends to Watch in 2024

From Advanced AI Tools to Private Community Havens: The 2024 Roadmap for Community Leaders, here’s what I think it’s going to happen in the world of Community Building in 2024.

1. Communities and AI (or AGI)

AI is THE trend word of 2023. Full stop.

AGI - or AI 2.0 (just came up with the term) is where machines start to bring cognitive tasks to life. They learn, generalize and apply this knowledge to plan future actions. If we leave the details aside, AI is already playing a huge role in how we work everyday.

I can’t recall not opening an AI tool everyday to help me with some specific tasks:

• 1.1 summarizing calls (webinars, 1:1 zoom calls with community members, presentations)

• 1.2 Helping generate ideas, titles, emails, newsletters, posts and whatnot.

• 1.3 AI helping edit videos and podcasts

• 1.4 AI focused in SEO, onboarding and whatnot

This is not by any means removing the human element of communities. In fact, I argue that this is offloading repetitive, binary, boring, admin tasks to let community leaders flourish in what they’re best at.

This is not coming back and if leaders are not pairing with their favourite AI tools, they’ll be far behind in 2024.

2. Creator communities:

There’s an eternal debate on whether you have a community or an audience. Interestingly this is becoming trivial as we see the merge of community creation with audience reach being part of one umbrella.

Some say that Nuseir from Nas Daily has a massive audience but not a community. Yet, thousands of people meet and talk about topics he raises. When he decided to create WhatsApp groups for people to connect, within days he had thousands of members. Are they still just an audience? The groups are broad, in multi-languages and he’s not even in them.

Jay Clouse started a business around community building. Within 2 years of being completely unknown in the industry, he reported to have generated 500K USD ARR in 2022.

Sam Parr had a newsletter, then a Podcast (My First Million) and you could claim this is all just audiences. He then launched Hampton, an exclusive community for founders making 2 million plus ARR and only 10% get accepted. He has crossed the million dollar ARR mark and the waiting list is growing.

Didn’t he have a community? Probably yes. However, we learned that a community is just a community if you have a common space that theoretically you built and control, so that you can claim your community builder status.

Honestly I used to think that way. Creators (being it Taylor Swift or Mr Beast) were audience builders to me but I came to the conclusion that they’re forming communities too. And that gets me to my next trend.

3. Community Ecosystems

or platform-agnostic communities, or “community everywhere” as some use. Communities used to be a forum or controlled space (usually by an admin or a brand) that was called community.

We’ve since outgrew these spaces and people want to engage in different ways and places. Communities became ecosystems and companies are starting to realize that now.

The rise of platform-agnostic communities is a trend I find exhilarating. We already juggle between places and I start a conversation with a friend on WhatsApp, move to Instagram DM and suddenly find myself commenting in a specific tool or forum as if we were having a pub crawl online.

Tech is enabling for more seamless conversations to happen. New generations are not on forums anymore but use TikTok, Lemon8 and other tools as their search engine, community, shopping, telephone, dating and everything else.

Companies that optimize for cross-platform will win.

4. Niche and Private Communities

Opposite to my statement above, communities that ahve been focused purely on growth are losing traction quickly. That’s for 2 main reasons: the bigger it gets, the less intentional and more ‘audience’ based it becomes (see the trend?). Generalization makes it hard to build trust and strong connections. You rely a lot on the vocal minority and extroverts.

There’s also a challenge of staying relevant as you grow. That’s because new members will need a different level of attention than veterans, but that’s not scalable unless you breakdown into smaller groups. That’s when niches start. Niche communities can be extremely powerful to drive ROI as they can curate the right member, dialogue and outcome.

Private or ‘secret’ communities are getting bigger and bigger now, but they’re secret or private! That’s the key to making them so fascinating. I had the experience to have lunch at a secret place that’s hidden in plain sight. A small door, you walk through a small corridor and are greeted by a host. The host ask you for your code. You callout your code, they’ll match to your face and have all your usual requests ready for you: your preferred meal, drink, table, etc.

They don’t bother you with asks or bills. It’s all settled as part of your membership.

Everyone there has a very interesting profile and you can sit at the bar and talk to someone and it will be extremely valuable.

Guess what? You can’t apply for membership. Members who have been there for a while can nominate new members but there’s a cap per year, so not even nominations get through. No one talks about it and I still don’t know the name of the place I was in.

High-quality ‘environment’, high-quality interactions and people. And IRL. Astonishing.

5. Community Enhancement tools

The rise of community tools. 10 years ago and I could name the only 3 tools we had available to build communities. 5 years ago and the list became 10. 2023 and I lost count of the sheer of options to build, enhance and track communities.

Tools that focus solely on tracking users, enhancing their data with social network crawling, track in-product events and add them to user profiles.

No-code tools to get community off the ground. Slack-like tools, in-app tools, SaaS tools, AI tools, community-event tools, you name it.

It’s getting intensely more complex. That’s great but also makes the community manager’s job broader as the tools can be helpful but also a new burden to learn, optimize, monitor and have budgets allocated for.

There are so many tools that I foresee community managers becoming actual operators for the community managers. Rather than strategy consultants, more operators helping with RfPs, implementation and operation of the tech stack and resources available.

This is game changing for the industry but just like other more mature areas like marketing and software development, we will see more specialized tools and tools coming with professional services as an add-on. We just need to see more maturity around budget, PnL so that what used to be 1 line for the CFO to approve (”community tool”) is now a whole spreadsheet 🙂

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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