Thought leadership from Esha Shukla, Senior Product Manager at WhatsApp
Esha is a distinguished product leader with over a decade of training and experience building social technology products. She currently leads the effort to help billions of users around the world engage in thriving online communities on WhatsApp. Prior to WhatsApp, Esha led the effort at Facebook to build the Lock Your Profile digital safety and privacy tools for billions of women and at-risk populations around the world and led the online communities product portfolio at Meetup.
In the social media and messaging space, Community Messaging is emerging as a top trend that most technology companies want to win. People want to connect not just with friends and family over their favorite social media / messaging platforms, but with a larger group of people that have shared interests — forming a ‘community’. We see so many companies in this space, each with their own use cases and principles that ground their product. Some of these include: Discord – a platform that started as a community space for gamers but quickly became popular across other use cases (social, artists, learning etc); Telegram Groups are a powerful way to build communities and can support up to 200,000 members; Slack is a popular workspace ‘community’ messaging app which lets you create different channels for topic based conversations; most recently Reddit also announced their foray into the communities space by introducing their version of discord-like channels for community chats.
In this article, I’m going to share some considerations you should keep in mind for making decisions if you’re planning to build a community messaging platform, or if you already work in the space and want to bolster your offering further.
Have strong product principles and hypotheses on what your community messaging product value should be for users
Is your community messaging product meant for complete strangers to connect online only? Is it meant for instant messaging online or more group-format async conversations? Is it going to be with people you know and trust in real life that can then broaden your circle (2nd or 3rd degree connections)?
These are just some basic questions you should be asking before you embark on the journey of building out a product. Having a strong hypothesis for what user problem you want to solve is essential for a community messaging product where the word ‘community’ can be interpreted as different things based on the audience. Research has shown that a strong hypothesis will play a critical role in helping you convincingly fail or convincingly succeed as you look to build and A/B test your product.
Establish roles and ensure the ‘administrator / creator’ has appropriate settings to manage the setup, moderation, and maintenance of the community
There will always be 1 person who takes the initiative on the platform to start the community – this person’s role is often known as the ‘administrator (admin) or creator’. This individual must have appropriate settings and user functionality needed to successfully create, manage and engage their community. On the creation side, consider starting simple but eventually providing templates that the admin can leverage to breeze through setup. For managing the community, you have to give them ample customizable settings to be able to control: privacy of the group, content moderation, who can send messages, who can edit group information, who can add others to the community, who forward media from the group etc. Maintaining the community includes functionality that can facilitate engagement among the community – consider providing conversation starters in empty chats, creating polls and events, voice chats, calendar plugins, app integrations, notifications and reminders.
Provide users with controls to manage their identity in the community
In sheer numbers, the ‘members’ (aka non administrators) will be much larger on your platform. Admins should have more controls to help manage the community, but it’s equally important to equip your non-admin user base with sufficient choices to personalize their community messaging experience. For instance, users should be able to manage their notifications experience across the different communities they’ll be added to or will join so they don’t get overwhelmed and can easily navigate among different types of conversations. Users also should have control over how their identities are presented in these communities. As a part of the sign up process, you should be diligent about giving users a choice for signing up – email, unique username or phone numbers, but also managing what shows up on their ‘community profile’. Particularly for online only communities, where you don’t know the others, anonymity is essential, and this can be managed through usernames vs collecting information that can be tied back to the user in real life. A practical example is the ‘Lock Your Profile’ product on Facebook – which provided users with global controls over how their public digital identities show up on communities across Facebook.
Always build integrity and reporting functionality from the get-go keeping bad actors in mind
On any internet / digital platform, especially once that gains traction and has a large user base, adversarial actors will always look for ways to systemically abuse the systems. The best way to make sure you can reduce harm and misuse of content on your platform is to equip users with the appropriate integrity and reporting functionality, and put the right actions in place in case of violations. For example, always give users the option to report messages, posts, or users on the platform and create a strike system to temporarily ban or kick users with reports off the platform. Build integrity scanning on the platform that can detect extreme bad actors (e.g. usernames or groups) and prevent them from causing harm in the first place (autoblocks, verification checks before sending messages etc.). Both Facebook and WhatsApp have appropriate rate limits and forwarding limits in place to prevent misuse.
Building a community messaging product is quite challenging to get right but if you build with the above considerations in mind, coupled with strong conviction, data and research insights, your community messaging product will be off to a great start.
Members of the editorial and news staff of the Daily Caller were not involved in the creation of this content.