How to generate content ideas from your developer community

Have you ever been stuck, wondering what content will be the most relevant for your developer community? This blog will help you solve that problem and generate content ideas. But the relief of knowing what content to make is just the tip of the iceberg. Generating content from your developer community has other benefits too:

1. It will garner more engagement and goodwill. Showing you actively listen and respond to your developer community’s needs
2. If your community is discussing the topic, there is a good chance that developers outside of the community are searching for it too. This will give the content an SEO advantage, allowing you to capture more organic traffic
3. If certain topics are recurrent in the community, generating educational content for it will reduce the burden on your customer success teams and help developers in your community feel supported

There are many reasons to utilize your developer community to generate content, and we’ll run through how to use crowd.dev to do just that. Check out our short video tutorial or simply read on below for the step-by-step.

Connect data sources

If you haven’t used crowd.dev yet, the first thing you have to do is connect your data sources. This will help us give you a unified view of your developer community - including what everyone is talking about. crowd.dev has various built-in integrations, including GitHub, Slack, Discord, Stack Overflow, Reddit, and many others. You can find step-by-step instructions for every data source here.

Once your developer data is flowing in, we can move to the next step.

View conversations in your community

To find out what the developers in your community are talking about, we must go to the Activities page by selecting “Activities”. This page will show you all of the activities and events in your community. On the top menu, above the search bar, you will see “Activities” underlined in red. We need to switch the view from activities to conversations. To do this, click on “Conversations”. Now we can see all of the conversations in the community, giving us insight into what our developer community talks about on platforms like Discord, Github, and Slack. 

We can filter this view to see which conversations have the most activity in a given time period, ensuring the topics serve a need and are relevant. To do this, click “Filters” in the top right corner. Select “# of activities” and “greater than” and then input the minimum number of messages each conversation should have. This will vary based on your community's size. Now we will only see activity with more than a certain amount of messages. To get the most relevant conversations, we can add a “Last activity” filter, and we can sort by “Most recent activity”.

Now we have access to all of the relevant conversations that our developer community engages in, allowing us to surface ideas for content.

Use Eagle Eye to discover content trends

Next, we will take a look at content trends using the crowd.dev tool Eagle Eye. Eagle Eye monitors over 10 relevant platforms for developers to find content in your niche. Today we can use it to see if topics from our community are coming up in broader contexts.

To set up Eagle Eye, you need to click on “Eagle Eye” on the left side menu. Now we click “Set up your feed”. Input keywords that are relevant to your developer community and the conversations they are engaging with. Next, select the time period and the platforms you would like to surface content from. Once you have confirmed this step, you will get a view of all the content. 

You can edit and update the keywords and platforms by selecting “Feed settings,” or you can sort by “Most recent” or “Most relevant” in the top right corner. 

‍

You can also receive personalized emails that summarize this content. To set this up, click “Activate Email Digest” and input the frequency and time you want to receive emails. 

Now that you have this setup, you will get relevant content trends sent directly to your inbox, giving you inspiration for your next piece of content.

Wrapping up

Staying on top of relevant topics and ensuring your content resonates with your community is paramount. Leveraging tools like crowd.dev can empower you with a comprehensive view of discussions and trends in your community. 

If you would like to learn more about how crowd.dev can benefit you and your go-to-market team, book a call with us here.

‍