7 Non-Trends for the Community Space in 2023

🔮 It’s the end of the year and lots of folks are wrapping things up with their predictions for 2023. We decided to take a different approach and talk with our community members about non-trends for the new year! That’s right, like an emo teenager, we wanted to hear about things we hope will NOT be cool next year. 💁🏼‍♀️

1. Building a community without figuring out what the purpose of it is. Wayyyy too many folks just launch communities just because it’s cool without thinking why they are doing it in the first place. -Klara Losert
2. Pushing engagement for the sake of engagement. An active community doesn't necessarily mean it is a better community than a quiet one. I think more community builders are going to shy away from just posting vanity metrics as KPIs and diving deeper into other metrics for success. Which can be done now with great tools such as Common Room and Talkbase! -Max Pete
3. Spinning up a community space and expecting everyone to be excited. I hope people will take a slower and more thoughtful path to community. With more focus on community discovery, relationship building and experimentation before committing to a specific community space. -Rosie Sherry
4. Having a free rein community. With the economic downturn and layoffs a lot of us in the industry experienced, I think there will be an upturn in hiring and building out community teams in 2023. I do think, however, communities and their teams will have to be more metrics-centric up front. I think there will be less leniency on building a community without also being able to show the value along the way. -Tiffany Oda
5. AI-powered communities. I think content is going to go haywire with the AI content creation becoming more readily available. Having to sort through the jungle of content to find the authentic and substantive content will most likely lead to content fatigue for users. This also means that the people who are creating original content will need to push that much more to make sure their content is discoverable and is seen. -Tiffany Oda
6. A love-hate relationship with social media. I hope it becomes less trendy to try to separate social from community building. I say this truly to myself, but I know other people in our industry have expressed annoyance with our job descriptions getting lumped into a “social” title. The truth is, we have to work together with our social friends, or even support social ourselves. And honestly, it’s a good thing because that’s where our community members are! -Kristen Meren ‍
7. Finishing your morning affirmations and quickly working backward from the Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Meetup.com, Reddit, Slack groups, Salesforce, and forum posts, before then moving to internal Slack messages and then emails (in that order), while wondering if you will ever get that morning workout routine in (dear reader, you probably won't, but brave space here). Oh, and then getting out of bed before that 6am customer call. But we love what we do, trendy or not. Here's to more building and being in the service of others in 2023. -Tristan Lombard