Brands build online communities around their target audiences.

As consumer preferences change and technological advances offer more and more opportunities, community management strategies change alongside them.

In this piece, I’ll go over community management trends to be aware of in 2024 and how you can adapt them for yourself.

Community Management Trends in 2024

1. Hyper-Personalization

A community management trend I’ve noticed most often is hyper-personalization, and I’m not surprised by this:

Consumers’ expectations for personalized experiences have reached an all-time high, and this desire has grown within online communities.

Consumers, including myself, want to feel connected to the brands they support, and personalized experiences create a sense of belonging that keeps people coming back for more.

How to Adopt This Trend

My top tip for community managers looking to adopt this trend is to gather information about your ideal members and use that information to create a personalized experience. For example;

• Data about your community members behavior, interests, and preferences can help you generate personalized content recommendations and target messaging that is unique to individual users.
• You can create personalized onboarding experiences for each member with custom welcome messages, suggestion sections or community spaces to join, and resources to help them get the most out of their experience.

AI can be extremely helpful when providing personalized experiences, and I’ll touch on this below.

2. Leveraging AI in community management.

Community management helps you ensure your community runs as you want it to, enables you to build those relationships with members, and ensures your community is a safe and respectful space for all who use it.

As more and more people eagerly join online communities, it can become understandably more challenging for community managers to keep a pulse on everything.

To supplement their duties, a recent trend in community management is leveraging AI-powered tools as trusty sidekicks.

How to Adopt This Trend

My top tip for using AI as a community management sidekick is to choose a tool that is specific to your exact needs.

Some tasks that AI tools can be helpful for are:

• AI tools can scan through the content within your community to detect and remove harmful content in real time to keep communities safe and aligned with your community standards.
• AI-powered chatbots can use information about members to offer personalized experiences and direct them to the content most aligned with their interests.
• Sentiment analysis tools can monitor conversations and alert human moderators to any issues that need immediate attention.

If you want a general solution, look for community management tools with multiple use cases.

Pro Tip: Whenever I recommend using AI, I have to mention that it’s important to not become overly reliant on it. Use it as a trusty sidekick to bolster your efforts, not as the sole thing responsible for managing your community. Always look over your tool’s shoulders to ensure it performs exactly as you want it to.

3. In-person community events.

Online communities help you deepen relationships, but there’s no better way to build relationships than in-person connections.

Jenny Sowyrda, Manager of Community Strategy and Operations at HubSpot, had the same thought and told me, “It seems like 2024 is becoming the year of people wanting to find value in person. I believe that folks are saturated with online content and the curation that comes along with that.”

In-person events are an additional opportunity to offer immersive and interactive experiences that you can’t necessarily build online.

As a result, a community management trend I predict will grow is creating opportunities for in-person connection at in-person events.

How to Adopt This Trend

Sowyrda says, “There’s something fun about going to an in-person event, or meeting folks in person, because you don’t know where the conversation is going to go – you don’t know what you’re going to learn.”

I recommend looking for opportunities where it makes sense to offer in-person elements. They don’t have to be large-scale, expensive experiences — you can choose whatever works best for your budget and ability.

For example, if you’re launching a new product, you can invite a select few members to a small launch party where they can try out your new product.

However you adopt this trend, always make sure your in-person events are focused around building connections and allowing attendees to interact.

4. Niche interest communities.

Consumer desire for increased personalization gives way to this trend, as more niche communities let people join groups hyper-specific to their interests.

And, these more niche communities go a long way in building trust and genuine connection between community members and between you and your community members.

How to Adopt This Trend

Successfully offering niche communities comes from understanding your community members. Do they have any unique interests, hobbies, or identities that align with your brand? Any unique interests can be used to create them.

You can create niche interest communities that are standalone, or even create sub communities within your main community, so long as you share content and offer engagement opportunities that members would expect to find.

This is an extremely general example, but it explains what I mean: if you’re a t-shirt company and you create a niche community for red t-shirt lovers, you want to share red t-shirt related content. Talking about purple t-shirts isn’t of interest to your members.

Pro Tip: Micro-influencers (between 10K and 100K followers) can shine in helping you attract people to your niche communities. They bring marketers the most success because they have a smaller group of more loyal and engaged followers.

If you find an influencer that fits with the niche community you want to create, they likely have a trusted group of followers who are a good fit.

5. Humanizing your brand.

Consumers want the brands and businesses they support to let their personalities shine. They want conversational tones that show there are real people behind the brand that add an air of humanized authenticity that people crave.

I think Viktoriia Khutorna, communications specialist at Promova, puts this well:

“People are likely to go to a company that not only sells at a reasonable price but also communicates humanly, jokes, supports, or honestly admits mistakes and goes to fix them.”

This consumer desire runs over into online communities as well: people want to know that there is a real, human community manager that engages with them.

How to Adopt This Trend

My tip for community managers is to be conversational when you share content with the community and in any interactions you have with members.

Canned responses can be the baseline templates, but further humanize them with each interaction you have.

You can also share behind the scenes content that show the day to day of your brand, display your unique personality and humor

Sharing behind the scenes content is also a great way to humanize your brand.

You could, for example, have a community manager give a behind the scenes look into their day to day as a community manager. It gives a face to a username, and shows members that there is a real human behind the screen.

6. Data security.

A trend we uncovered in our Consumer Trend Surveys is that consumers are more concerned than ever about privacy and data security, and this is relevant for community management as well.

Members expect the communities they’re part of are safe and secure, that information they share about themselves to join the community and while they’re in the community is protected, and any personal data and information is secure.

How to Adopt This Trend

If you’re building your community, I recommend having data and privacy protection measures in place. For example:

• If you collect credit card or banking information for subscription payments, it must be stored securely or deleted after one-time payments. I highly recommend using secure payment processors built to help you prioritize financial security.
• If you collect personal demographic information (like email or addresses), it needs to be stored securely so bad actors can’t access it.

For whatever kind of data you collect, always let members know you’re collecting it, how you store it, and how you plan to use it. Transparency is key; consumers are more likely to trust you if you give up-front explanations.

Consumer preferences are always changing.

The community management trends I mentioned above are the most recent developments I’ve discovered, and they stem from consumer preferences and technological advancements.

I recommend leveraging those most relevant to your online community and reading the HubSpot Blog to stay on top of evolving trends.