Hey DevRel rockstars!
Building a thriving developer community is no small feat. You’re shuffling a million things: creating stellar content, answering endless questions, and building relationships with developers from all over the world.
But fear not! To make your life a little easier, I’m sharing the top 5 community tools every DevRel should have in their arsenal. These bad boys will help you manage your community with grace, free up your time to focus on what matters most, and keep those developers happy and engaged.
Community Management Platforms: Your One-Stop Shop for Engagement
Imagine a world where you don’t have to jump between a million different platforms to interact with your community. That’s the magic of community management platforms. These tools centralize all your community conversations across different channels (forums, social media, etc.) so you can:
- See everything in one place: No more frantic switching between tabs! You can easily view discussions, answer questions, and monitor sentiment all from one dashboard.
- Boost Engagement: These platforms often come with fancy features like polls, surveys, and gamification tools to keep your developers hooked.
- Provide Excellent Support: Offer seamless ticketing systems and knowledge base integration to empower your developers and free up your time for more strategic initiatives.
Here are a few popular community management platforms to check out:
- Orbit: https://orbit.love/ – Streamline your community management with features designed to spark conversation, encourage engagement, and build relationships.
- Common Room: https://www.commonroom.io/ – Unify customer data across your entire go-to-market strategy, including valuable insights from your developer community.
- Spectrum: https://www.spectrum.com/community-solutions/resident-support
- Circle: https://www.circle.com/en/
- Tribe: https://appsumo.com/products/tribe/
Content is King: Content Creation & Sharing Platforms
You know the drill: developers are hungry for great content. High-quality blog posts, tutorials, videos, and webinars are like gold for attracting and retaining top talent.
Content creation and sharing platforms can be your secret weapon for churning out high-value content that will leave your developers saying “More, please!” Here are some of our favourites:
- Contentful: https://www.contentful.com/ lets you create, manage, and publish content with ease.
- Notion: https://www.notion.so/ is an amazing all-in-one workspace for note-taking, brainstorming, and collaboration – perfect for fleshing out ideas.
- And of course, there’s always the classic YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ for all your video content needs.
Unleash the Fanatics: Developer Engagement & Advocacy Platforms
Some developers are just… well, rockstars! These developer champions can be your biggest advocates, spreading the word about your product and helping you build an even stronger community.
Engagement and advocacy platforms can help you identify these rockstars, gamify the experience to keep them motivated, and even run contests and hackathons to take things to the next level. Here are a few to consider:
- Advocu: [https://advocu.com/] – Empower your developer heroes and create a loyal community around your brand.
- DevGauge: http://devgauge.com/ helps you identify and empower your developer champions
- Apple Developer Program: https://developer.apple.com/ offers a comprehensive set of tools and resources to help developers build innovative apps for Apple platforms.
Data Makes the Decisions: Analytics & Measurement Tools
Let’s be honest, building a community is a bit like navigating a jungle. You need to be able to track your progress and measure the effectiveness of your efforts. That’s where analytics and measurement tools come in.
These tools help you track key metrics like user activity, engagement rates, and sentiment analysis. With this data in hand, you can understand how healthy your community is and make data-driven decisions to improve it. Here are a few popular options:
- Mixpanel: https://mixpanel.com/ gives you powerful analytics to understand how developers are interacting with your product or platform.
- Qualtrics: https://www.qualtrics.com/ specializes in survey creation and analysis, helping you gather valuable feedback from your developer community.
- Gainsight: https://www.gainsight.com/ focuses on customer success, providing insights to help you retain developers and improve their overall experience.
Communication is Key: Forums & Chat Channels
While some DevRel tools offer built-in communication features, having dedicated forums or chat channels specifically for your developer community is essential. Here, developers can connect directly with each other and the DevRel team, fostering a sense of camaraderie and knowledge-sharing. Here are a few popular options to consider:
- Discourse: https://www.discourse.org/ is an open-source forum software that allows you to create a customized and scalable community platform.
- Slack: https://slack.com/ is a popular chat platform that offers a variety of features for team communication and collaboration, perfect for fostering real-time conversations within your developer community.
- Microsoft Teams: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/log-in is another powerful collaboration tool that integrates well with other Microsoft products and offers features like video conferencing and file sharing.
Bonus Tip: Don’t forget the power of collaboration tools! Project management apps like Trello [https://trello.com/] or Google Docs [[invalid URL removed]] can be incredibly useful for DevRel teams to manage projects, brainstorm ideas, and collaborate internally.
By leveraging these tools and embracing a community-centric approach, you’ll be well on your way to building a thriving developer community that fuels the success of your product or service.
Happy DevReling!
