Building a Community…
Hey everyone Sean Flac 2.0 here. I wanted to take some time to share some behind the scene stuff with Shadow Pack Gaming. Shadow Pack Gaming is an online community comprised of Streamers, Bloggers, Photographers and other Content Creators.
SPG started during Covid-19 when there were a lot of people working from home and couldn’t go anywhere. There was a lot of traffic on streaming channels, YouTube and all platforms of social media. As we enter the post pandemic world and everyone is getting out more, having returned to the office or just got tired of living online we’ve streaming traffic has since declined. Some have left streaming all together while others have just taken to part-time. With half the members gone or cutting back, the community itself has taken a big hit. Keeping the community going has become what seems like an impossible task.
Trying to stream for your main source of income takes more time and effort than just having a regular job. If you can’t dedicate the time to it, it’s hard to maintain. When we were in talks about how we could build a community we saw the ebb and flow of this and decided that we needed to attract a diverse audience and community members so we weren’t a one trick pony. We decided to branch off into YouTube with pre-recorded content, then Instagram for pictures, then finally came the Blog for writing.
What does all this back story have to do with the title you may be asking? Well once you build the community you have to put in the work to keep it going. When we started this community we had no idea what it would take to keep it relevant. We had no idea how much time and effort would be needed to keep people engaged, keep the content fresh and figure out ways to maintain it financially. We’ve spent hours on how to go about this, we’ve put things to a vote, retracted votes, tried things and trashed thing, you name it we probably have discussed it.
In the end what I’ve learned is building / maintaining a community takes the actual community. As they say “It takes a village to raise a child”, it truly does. Our “child” is the community and we want it to be a place where everyone is welcome and feels included. Just like streaming, keeping a community alive/thriving takes a lot of time and dedication along with discipline. Through the hard work and dedication of our members, we have established a blog team that post weekly, daily weekday trivia, and a weekly photo contest in our Discord. We’re currently looking into a YouTube show and related Podcast. Trying to do shows with people in different time-zones takes a lot of coordination.
So after all the coordinating and recording, you have to go into post production and promoting. Editing out all the blooper moments and all the dead space and potential slip of the tongue take a lot of time. Depending if you have another full-time job, editing may take a few weeks. Once there is a final product we have to promote it. Promoting get done on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and now Threads. Meta has put togther a nice business suite that makes this whole process easier but it still takes time and effort to get things out.
When people say to me I can do what you do, I invite them to try. I invite them to be better at what I do so more people can do it. A lot of what happens to keep a community alive happens behind the scenes. Even though the traffic has died down, there are a group of great people in our community and I feel they’re worth the all the time and effort it takes to continue on with this journey. They say chase the dream that keeps you up at night and continuing to create content in different forms is mine. With the help of the SPG community I can still chase that dream!
~Sean Flac 2.0
You can follow Sean Flac on
YouTube: www.youtube.com/@seanflac
Instagram: www.instagram.com/sean_
Threads: @seanflac@threads.net
Website: www.seanflac.com