K atie c ouric

Leverage Your Community to Fuel Decisions
Ray Chan, CEO and cofounder of 9GAG, an online platform for humor, has
built a company with 39 million page likes on Facebook, 44.5 million
followers on Instagram, and 15 million followers on Twitter. Globally, it’s
one of the largest media entertainment brands and one of the top thirty most
followed pages on Instagram. Also, if you take away celebrities from that
list, it’s ranked number six.
Ray uses feedback from his community to vet which content has the
most viral and highest-quality potential. The feedback his brand receives by

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observing its audience’s responses allows him to make decisions about what
will be posted on its social channels. If something’s going to perform well,
it usually happens pretty quickly. The team tests a lot of content within the
community and lets the successes drive future posts.
9GAG’s content is fun and humorous in general, which makes it
accessible to a lot of people. His team is based in Hong Kong, but 9GAG’s
user base is very international. Its followers are not only from Hong Kong
but also from the United States, Germany, the Netherlands, Indonesia, the
Philippines, and other parts of the world. If he relied only on people from
his team to design rich content, it would probably be biased. Instead of only
having his editorial team decide what works, the brand lets its community
—comprising millions of people—become an extended version of the
editorial team.
It’s really important to keep learning and seeing where the market’s
going. Listen to your community and let it guide you on where your
company and your brand should be focused. Ray also has an app and points
out that there’s a big gap between what the mainstream media is talking
about and what users are doing. For example, if you look at TechCrunch,
you would think that tons of apps are very popular because they’re featured
in their articles. However, most of his users are from a younger
demographic and don’t even read TechCrunch, so this type of secondhand
research doesn’t serve his company. He suggests relying on firsthand
research by talking to your users directly to know what they like and what
they’re doing. He is constantly listening to his community and audience to
continually learn and improve his overall content strategy.