Earlier this year, I took Community Management classes with C School and learned lots of great tactics for working in community. One major takeaway I picked up from the course is using "ritual" posts.
Ritual posts are basically posts that you share on a regular cadence (weekly/monthly/etc.) to establish a rhythm that your audience can follow and to relieve yourself of having to think up new ideas to post about every time. We have various ritual posts we share across DEV (the Top 7, What Was Your Win this Week, Follow Friday, etc.) and I even use this tactic for my own personal Music Monday series.
Clearly, you don't want to overuse this tactic as it can distract you from creating interesting posts that don't follow a formula. But, at the same time, using ritual posts you can create really fun experiences that folks can tune into weekly and lessen the burden on yourself as a content creator.
Do you have any ritual posts that you like to share? Any ideas for a ritual you might wanna start? What thoughts would you keep in mind when crafting a ritual post?
Top comments (14)
Never heard the term, but I guess that's what my Weekly Learnings and VS Code Tips series are. ๐
Sorry, what?
Thought the embed could handle a series and then tried series liquid tag. ๐
Haha dang! I feel ya. ๐ I'll make sure to put in a request for that.
Hot dang! Looks like I already did. ๐
Oh absolutely! Those do indeed fit the bill!
Ritual posts are a good way of building consistency with your content and I'm definitely a fan of the ones that add value to a community.
I don't have any active ritual posts at the moment, but I did recently use a ritual method in relation to web3 research I was conducting, posting an update for 1 week/1 month/3 months into the research. Had I continued the research, I would have expanded the ritual to 3 months/9 months/1 year
Well said!
You're absolutely right that they gotta bring that value to the community... I find it's good to be experimental with them and feel free to drop that ones that aren't catching on to try out others.
Also, cool to hear that you used this tactic with Web3 research! It is awesome how quickly the content will pile up and it can really make ya feel accomplished and proud when you're a good number of posts in. ๐
Interesting idea, and I can see how it helps "writers block" ...
Oh fasho! I find that it really keeps me disciplined with my writing. It makes it so that I'm on a schedule. Granted, I clearly am pretty forgiving with myself ๐ โ notice that I didn't publish a Music Monday post yesterday as I was off for 4th of July. ๐
Another thing, at least in one ritual, the Music Monday post, I'm setting up a discussion each time and so that triggers interactions with community members โ the content of my posts actually stays the same (except for the GIF changing out, haha), but the discussions are fresh each time. And the topic is genuinely something I'm passionate about โ I crowd source new music suggestions from you all each week! It's so dang delightful. ๐
If you haven't heard it you need to listen to Miles Davis, Kind of Blue ... ^_^
Ooo this sounds like a good suggestion. I'm dipping for the day but got this one teed up to listen tomorrow. ๐ฅ
Meme Mondays!
Yes!! That's totally a ritual. ๐