How should Freetrade boost the growth of this community?

Community function in the app.

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The quick and easiest way, - YouTube channel.
even solo users can reach thousands of users and subscribers talking about stock, tech, crypto and the like, then hopefully a better positioned tech startup like Freetrade can smash it for sure.

you even have access to the relevant data for quality, number update on weekly basis.
Stock analytics, some TA and FA thrown in the mix as well as some opinion pieces of your favourites

this neednt be longer than 10 minutes and who knows, youtube channel, if honed right may become profitable in itself, enough to get a dedicated staff member to run this full-time!

Get Raoul Pal on the interview - Global Macro investor from Real Vision and you can get real debate and discussions there.
We all need to remember, this is an investment app, not day-trading per se. So invest, and investment consideration alongside quality macro views and trends is what we all need to hear quality discussions about.
Map such trends and views with Freetrade Stock matching, and you have a win:win

At present, many of us would be consuming youtube(refinitiv)/digest(finimize)/articles(ft) elsewhere - certainly not the ā€œforum chatterā€ - and thats where spend their time on.

Time to get congruence across the medium and bring this content to Freetrade - one stop shop for quality investment views and discussions, in different mediums, Forum, Youtube and who knows, perhaps a podcast one day too.

Exciting times!
J

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But thats a good thing. App speaks for itself.
if you want quality engagement, Freetrade should consider integrating more of such facilities on the app itself for easy consumption, but not necessarily forum chatter.
i.e.- Market/macro figures UK/worldwide

Im certainly not using freetrade for the ā€œForum useā€, - its a poor metric to assess the engagement.
if it was, that Forum would have been integrated into the APP one shape or form and voila - ā€œcommunity engagementā€ would get top figures

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i donā€™t think i would consider investing or seriously participating on the premise of prize draws here.
thatā€™s surely more akin to gambling, and that should be discouraged.

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Sounds like a plan, but if community engagement is an important attribute, can i suggest integrating this into the very app itself?
not a straight forward ado, but would certainly boost such metric by sheer convenience.
also, can i recommend having a dashboard for macro views/trend for the UK/US/Global economy, GDP/CPI, etc - to make Freetrade more a one-stop-shop to consume these updates.

Also, can we get a feature alongside like stock-watching-news-feed, in the app. I believe yahoo finance app features such example, This alone can stir up relevant discussions - under such news/update posts. You get that engagement alright. :wink:

J

I am based outside of the UK so unfortunately canā€˜t use the product yet. Still, because I invested in R5 and R6, I follow up almost daily on new posts written on the forum.

I imagine that having a stake in Freetrade itself would push customers to be a lot more active on the forum (maybe @Viktor could double-check what share of community members are investors vs. overall ratio of investors / customers). What draws me to the forum is seeing Freetradeā€˜s progress / announcements / new features, so this might be the starting point for a simple in-app integration; there could be links to the forum for the Freetrade Chat & Crowdfunding Freetrade categories.

A link to the Ideas category could be implemented right where a customer could find the in-app support.

Also, it might be helpful if in the app, on the specific single stock pages, one could directly link or subscribe to new posts in the forum about that single stock (e.g. posts about Tesla) where available.

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All very good points granted, but would gamifying some elements not broaden the appeal of the products? I suggest it would but ovs donā€™t know for sure :slightly_smiling_face:

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Iā€™d also rather the app not be full of links to the forum. Tends to get on my nerves when apps do this.

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They could just put a link to the forum in the profile page on the app - near FAQs and Chat with us

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Agree gamifying can help, however itā€˜s hard to do without encouraging some sort of gambling (which is contrary to Freetradeā€˜s mission) and while still staying low-cost.

Educational and high quality content on the forum also seems like an option.

You can read the relevant regulation here Gambling Commission website but short answer is ā€œnoā€.
I donā€™t see how what you are suggesting is a ā€œcompetitionā€

Unlike a lottery where the outcome depends on chance, the outcome of a genuine prize competition must depend on the exercise of skill, knowledge, or judgment by the participant.

Either way you should not overestimate how serious any kind of gambling addiction is. When at all possible you should avoid those grey areas.

The way I see it, there are two problems:

  1. Get more people on the community/forum
  2. Achieve greater engagement on the community/forum

For 1, as @BramblerJohn said, the community is all about investors. They are the ones visiting, posting and liking posts daily. e.g.The only reason the ā€˜how many usersā€™ thread is so popular because itā€™s basically telling FT investors theyā€™re getting richer (their FT shares are increasing in value through growth). Freetrade has ~8k investors andā€¦ ~8k forum usersā€¦ that is not a coincidence imo. I think freetrade missed a trick in the latest crowdfund (~7k investors) by not capping it the max investment; Ā£7m across 14k investors is better for the community than Ā£7m across 7k investors. Maybe an idea for next time.

2 Is admittedly more complex. I definitely donā€™t see the same volume of high quality posts I used to; newer members of the forum might not know how awesome things used to be. I think community ā€˜influencersā€™ should be incentivised (freeshares, etc) for encouragement. Another element to it is a perceived lack of reciprocation from FT: e.g. I couldnā€™t care less, but with the ā€˜whole/fractional sharesā€™ debacle, a lot of people were outraged and felt like their voices werenā€™t being heard, and I think itā€™d be hard to feel enthused about the community after that. Same goes for high-vote-count stocks that are yet to be implemented (this is getting better tbf), etc. I know freetrade is great for being customer-first, etc - but action speaks volumes, addressing concerns re: whole shares (just an example) verbally is a great start, but actually implementing whole shares in response goes a long way.

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I think youā€™ve really struck the nail on the head with the points around capping investment amounts (just like Monzo did early on) and also on the quality of posts! Discussions used to be pretty intense (not bad intense) and those have definitely become fewer in number.

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While gamifying might help encourage some to participate more, I suspect it will also put off larger/older customers who want a degree of seriousness from their broker - and who Freetrade will need to attract to be ultimately be successful.

Also, there are still do many basic/core features Freetrade need to deliver on and I feel things like this would be a distraction

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This what most worries me about an idea like thisā€¦ you turn off the people with major portfolios who arenā€™t interested in stuff like that but rather a fully functional product.

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More crowdcube investors having a stake in Freetrade => more community involvement.

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Something as basic as this seems a good idea to me - at least for a starting point :+1:t3: There would be a low risk of dividing user opinions on the lack of data in app vs too much clutter.

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I think this touches on the idea that perhaps this space could become more focused on providing high quality impartial investment education / content in order to benefit participants making an investment decision. (I know there is so much research online already but to be able to access it right from the FT app would make life easier for investors and add a valuable service)

There are lots of threads here solely focused on topics that FT investors are concerned with (which is great) but not useful to a large portion of users. Itā€™s time consuming to decipher through all the categories of threads and then hundreds of comments and opinions to find any useful information.

I believe the AMAs with Simon and Perry held recently were excellent. I would personally tune in more frequently to learn from investment professionals and be given the opportunity to ask them questions. More content along this line please :smiley:

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Nature of the beast, people are more polarised in chatrooms than IRL. The usual promotion (and summary display only) of most-liked usually does the trick.

The other problem is that this is a chatroom in a regulated industry, so the elephant in the room (market performance only be discussed obliquely) makes life difficult

Suggestion.

Currently the biggest short term bottleneck seems to be hiring great talent to support the expansion and building new features which are interconnected. I see some countries in job listings where FTā€™s media reach is low (as it is mostly UK focused)

The original topic was geared towards growing the community but there might be a way to turn to the existing community to create even more value for everyone.

Assumption #1: Largest job seeking tool in the EU = LinkedIn

Assumption #2: Current FTā€™s media outreach < than communityā€™s total outreach just on LinkedIn.

Rough calculation - 8K community users * 20% response rate (pessimistic hopefully) * average connections on LinkedIn of 100 people (on the lower side probably as well) = 16K people reached. Hopefully, this is on the lower side of the spectrum.

If FT can share a template for sharing current job offerings in a sexy format (with Plusā€™ color palleteā€¦ Just sayingā€¦) I would love to share on the social networks where my reach is good (>100 people) but creating a message from scratch is daunting.

This might also accomplish the goal of growing the community if the link is provided.

It is extremely hard to look for a job during the times and it also can bring positive changes in somebodyā€™s life.

Donā€™t see any negatives (except for some people their employer asking questions) if I am not missing anything.

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