Climbing the Pyramid of Fandom - Create a Challenge

Hello everyone!

You may have noticed by now that reading is a struggle most of the time for me lol but no matter how long it takes I will finish this book for you all and for me! To get through the previous chapters I have the links at the end!

Today I'm in-depth on Chapter 8 - Create a Challenge!

Challenges, when done effectively, are so powerful that they're worth bringing back to the conversation when you're trying to turn your active audience into a connected community.

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Who doesn't like a little bit of competition and winning? Or even get some prizes in the end?

Challenges can be used not only like a lead magnet to increase your followers/subscribers, but also some kind of team-building, or in this case, community-building, by engaging with others about the challenge while healthy competing with each other, or even supporting each other to push further to reach the finish line! Also, it's even better than you also joining them in this adventure, showing your audience that you are there for them, supporting and pushing to compete, building up that relationship even stronger!

But, and there's always a but, having these challenges are so cool and you have good results with the most of the time that you tend to think that it would be profitable if you keep the challenges going all the time.

In your business and your brand, you'll be faced with moments where you can choose to make things more automated, or more human. There's often not a "right" or "wrong" choice in these situations, but if you're trying to build an engaged community of people on their way to becoming superfans, then erring on the side of human will take you a long way.

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In the past, I entered into a few challenges like the #2020Vision and #IAmAlive and both helped me a lot in being more comfortable on camera and being consistent in creating content every day, and I am grateful for them to this day. However, there wasn't an end date and it reached a point that it was turning into something forced or in cruise control and the feeling of challenge faded. I had to make my own end and move on to other things.

What worries me in these situations is that people get used to this kind of content creation and don't move on to new things to write, making them unable to improve and grow, just stay there in the same course.

Is not a challenge anymore, more of an obligation, some kind of a never-ending cycle.

Having a start and an end date and having them occasionally, not only creates more excitement and a sense of scarcity but also makes the challenges special when are not accessible whenever they want. And had they know that it will come again, you can also come up with the next date so they can anticipate and plan for it! Something like the CTP Staking competitions which Hive account@achim03 occasionally provides!

So like the first quote said, challenges if done effectively can be powerful!

I have a few more guidelines to help you succeed in building ravings fans by creating and running challenges.
- Communicate who it’s for, and why. Be clear about why people would want to join your challenge, and what they’ll get out of it.
- Tell people what to expect. When people can picture themselves going through the challenge, they’ll be better able to decide if it’s for them. And you won’t end up with an “expectations mismatch.”
- Keep it simple. Don’t let your challenge go on longer than it needs to. You want people to achieve a tangible result in a reasonable amount of time.
- Emphasize community. Make sure you have a forum for communicating with the whole group (such as a Facebook group), and for them to talk to each other individually.
- Plan ahead. Give enough time to promote the challenge and get people to sign up.
Follow up. Know your intended call to action once the course is done. Do you want course participants to check out one of your paid courses? You can even incorporate it into the challenge.

From Superfans Companion Course

And it doesn't need to be elaborate to be effective, it can be as simple as taking a specific picture and using a certain hashtag and posting about it, the prize of recognition on social media is so simple but powerful at spurring people to engage with (page95) the person/brand.

When you create a space for someone to succeed in a supportive community of others trying to do the same, you're giving them a great way to reach their goals and become a tight-knit member of the clan.

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