Social media for community building

Hi everyone!

I need help choosing the right platform. I created a project for medicinal plant lovers. It runs through Patreon subscription where I post an artwork depicting an herb and my research about the plant. I want to build a community around it so that people are motivated to share what they discovered about the plant, share pictures of their herbals, recipes... Patreon itself doesn't seem to be ideal for this, so I would like to set up another platform for this community feature.

Ideally the content there would be visible only to members, but it's not so necessary. If its open to all it can at least act as a marketing tool.

Any ideas on how to do this would be much appreciated!

Chatgpt recommend Circle, but that looks like you have to pay a lot just to set it up. Right now my budget is unfortunately 0. I was also thinking Discord, but that seems more tech/games related. Facebook could maybe work, but this platform is aging so badly. I joined Substack, but that seems like Patreon+twitter, which doesn't help.

Comments

Independent-Ant-7230•3 months ago•2

discord actually works better than people expect for niche communities, once it’s set up it feels pretty natural

main thing is having a simple system to keep content + discussions flowing, otherwise it goes quiet fast, even using things like runable, Notion, or Substack to plan posts and keep things consistent can help

platform matters less than how active and structured the community feels

No-Perspective872•3 months ago•1

Look into Stan Store- you can create a community there. Use social media to drive members to your community.

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EngineeringDry6227•3 months ago•1

Discord can still work even outside gaming if you keep it simple. A few channels for plant IDs, recipes, and discoveries usually gets people sharing quickly, and it’s easy to keep some parts private for members.

Parking-Ad3046•3 months ago•1

Facebook is aging but Facebook Groups are surprisingly still active for plant/ herbalism communities. The demographic for medicinal plants trends older anyway. You can set it to private (members only) and use it as a Patreon perk. Free to start.

Educational-Load8568•3 months ago•1

honestly for something like this i’d just go with discord

it feels gaming/tech at first but once you set it up around a niche like medicinal plants it works really well. you can have channels for herbs, recipes, photos, even monthly discussions tied to your patreon drops

big advantage is it’s free, private if you want, and people can actually interact instead of just consume

a lot of small creators are quietly using it as their main community hub now, not perfect but probably the best zero budget option

frank_talks92•3 months ago•1

Your idea sounds beautiful, and I feel Discord might actually be the easiest free option to build a close community around it. You can create separate channels for plant discoveries, photos, recipes, and discussions, while still keeping Patreon for paid content.

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