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Answer by Erica Friedman, 25 years of telling people how to do online community right:
One-hundred percent effectively to 0 percent effectively, depending on the person.
I’m going to propose a person, an average person. Her name is Joanna. Joanna has two kids in their late teens and a job that she likes in an office, and she likes get-togethers with family and friends. She doesn’t travel much, but she and her friends and their spouses often go over to one another’s houses for potluck family parties. She watches TV, sometimes goes out to a movie, and is a casual fan of pop music and culture. She’s moderately physically active. Fairly average, yes?
How likely do you think Joanna is to have online friends? You can’t tell from her profile, can you? Maybe she has friends she kept in touch with online when they moved or people she’s met at work conferences or through hobbies. But what we can infer is that Joanna is more likely to hang with people in person. For Joanna, social media is an extension of real-life friendships—a way to stay in touch with people she knows and has met.
Now we turn to Terry. Terry’s also a working mom with two kids late teens—just like Joanna. The difference between Terry and Joanna is that Terry is a fan of Otome games. Terry likes her neighbors, but their lack of interest in a topic she finds compelling makes their conversations somewhat unstimulating. She’s as glad as anyone to watch hockey, but she just played the original Angelique game for the first time and really wants to talk to someone about it. Guess where she goes?
So, whereas Joanna’s friendships have geographic, familial, and circumstantial origins, Terry has interest-based friendships. Joanna has folks she knows from her kids’ school, work, family, and hobbies. Terry’s friends share her interests.
Terry has a niche hobby that will certainly give her a chance to speak with folks all over the world who also like Angelique, but those folks are scattered thinly across the globe. They “meet” online, they talk online, they hang out online. For Terry, in-person meetings are an extension of online friendships.
Terry’s relationships are just as real as Joanna’s; they are simply shaped differently. In fact, Terry might talk with her friends more often than Joanna, who gets together with them every few weeks (or not). Both sets of relationships are equally valid, and serve the same functions for the people in them.
For many, online communities provide a wider and larger pool of people from whom to draw than mere geographic or circumstantial friendships. While it is true that online, no one knows you’re a dog, you can also become a dog online and meet the rest of your pack, if that’s what you want.
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