Editor’s note: We sat down with Yosub Kim, Director of Brand Marketing at Figma, to learn how the company builds a successful community around its users. This conversation dives into what community-based marketing really looks like in practice — and the bottom line impact it can have on growth. It’s part of a new series where we share insights from top marketing leaders. More to come soon. 👀
Most brands talk about listening to their audience.
Figma actually builds with theirs.
Not in a vague, “we read the comments” kind of way — but in a way where the things people create actually shape the product itself, and the marketing around it.
“We want to listen to the people who are in Figma everyday, because they have the best feedback for our product,” says Yosub Kim, Director of Brand Marketing at Figma. “And we want to make sure we’re addressing it in a way that feels good for the business and the community.”
I sat down with Kim to talk about how Figma approaches social media, community, and the feedback loop that ties it all together.
Key takeaways
- By building alongside its community, Figma creates a brand people feel part of, which naturally drives advocacy and customer loyalty.
- From replying to comments to helping customers directly, Figma prioritizes one-to-one interactions that create positive customer experiences and build trust.
- By bringing its customer base together across online spaces (like LinkedIn and X), local community events, and global conferences like Config, Figma creates a path for everyday users to become brand ambassadors.
- Figma uses customer feedback to shape product decisions and even inspire new products, helping build relationships that feel responsive and real.
- By highlighting what users create in its marketing, Figma puts its audience at the center of its messaging — strengthening its brand community and turning users into loyal customers.
When you look at Figma’s growth over the years, what role has social media played?
We really ground ourselves in the fact that design is not just how an app looks. It’s really about how it works, the user intent, the flow, and how it feels.
That’s where social really comes in. It’s been a huge part of Figma since the very beginning.
Our community is really active across different platforms. They’re always giving us feedback, sharing their requests, showing off everything they’re making, and the ways they’re hacking the platform.
Source: @motomiya333
Internally, [social] is a top-down, bottoms-up priority. Dylan Field, our CEO, is very active on social. Even today, he was there asking people for feedback and troubleshooting. For us, it’s really a team-wide priority.
Social listening is also important. We work closely across teams — brand marketing, customer support, and product — to make sure we’re addressing all the major questions, the most voted forum questions, and requests.
If you had to explain Figma’s overall social media strategy in simple terms, how would you describe it?
For us, it’s really about highlighting designer creativity, experimentation, and how they’re using the platform.
I would categorize it within three pillars: product launches and announcements, community highlights, and always-on content — that’s the memes, jokes, and the things people who use our products are talking about regularly.
We also want to make sure that we’re not just jumping on a trend to be on it. We’re really breaking down the context, the why, and the ways in — so it’s not just “if you know, you know” kind of content.
Source: @Figma
Where community fits into Figma’s strategy
At what point did community become a core part of Figma’s strategy?
I’d say it’s been there from the very beginning. My former boss, Claire Butler, who was the first marketing hire at Figma, and Dylan Field would do customer drop-ins and check-ins.
There’s a story about a customer who had an issue with the product, and they literally got in the car and drove to the customer’s office to help debug it. It turned out the Wi-Fi was down, so it all worked out.
Something Claire has talked about is doing things that don’t necessarily scale. I think that’s important. How do you create those one-to-one interactions? How do you surprise and delight people — not just at a broad level, but when someone DMs you, tweets at you, or leaves a comment?
I really care about how we show up on every kind of surface. It’s always been a throughline in my time at Figma and in the company’s culture.
How does community connect to Figma’s broader business goals?
Community is the business goal. When people trust Figma enough to gather around it — in hundreds of Friends of Figma chapters across the world from Singapore to Portugal and South Africa to Peru — that’s not just goodwill, that’s the deepest form of product loyalty you can build. It opens lines of communication that make us a better company and helps us to build better products. It puts us closer to how design and Figma actually work in different markets, and it means when we ship something new, there’s already a community ready to run with it. You can’t buy that. You build it by showing up consistently, and caring about the craft and your customers as much as they do.
Source: Friends of Figma, Toronto
We also bring people together virtually and in-person, too. We have an annual conference called Config, which started in 2020, and brings together thousands of designers who use Figma.
For the most part, they’re really instrumental in showing us real business use cases — how they’re building products and apps. A lot of it surprises me because it’s so creative and unique, and something that I would never have thought of.
It all ladders up to our broader business goals across the board, and it’s really important to Figma.
Source: @Figma
Looking back, are there moments when the community meaningfully shaped Figma’s growth or direction?
Our users are really good at hacking the platform and using it in ways we never intended.
Two examples are FigJam and Slides. With Slides, we saw designers creating presentations directly in Figma Design— creating frames, turning them into slides, and then using prototypes to click through.
Because of that, we created Figma Slides. We realized there was a real use case for it. People were already using Figma Design in this way, so it made sense to separate that out and make it part of the Figma suite.
Source: @zanderwhitehurst
FigJam was also based on user behavior. People were using comments and cursor chat to communicate with each other, so we were like, why don’t we build FigJam — a brainstorming tool where you can talk to each other and collaborate — and have it be part of the product suite too?
More recently, we’ve seen it with Figma Draw. People were using Figma Design to illustrate and create these incredible pieces of artwork that I’ve never seen anywhere else, so we created Figma Draw as an extension of that. It’s been amazing to see how people are using it. We’re constantly taking their feedback and building on it.
Source: @zielinskiwoj
It feels like a true full-circle moment where we want to listen to our users, because they have the best ideas for our product. And we want to make sure we’re addressing it in a way that feels good for the business and the community.
What types of content tend to perform best for Figma on social media, and why do you think that is?
For us, people love looking at the process of how something is built. Designers are always posting speedruns of what they’re illustrating or creating in Figma, and that’s become a huge pillar for us.
We want to make sure we’re sharing the making of something, and also addressing feedback or requests from the community. For example, with a product launch, we’ll try to find posts from people who are like, “I want this feature in Figma,” and then amplify that or engage with it once the product is live.
Source: @Figma
How does Figma encourage customers to share their own work and ideas?
I feel like it’s pretty self-sustaining. The people using Figma — designers, developers, product builders, makers — are already sharing their work instinctively. They want reactions, buy-in, or to share what they’re hoping to build.
For us, it’s more about how we highlight the community in different ways. One of the things we’ve been working on, especially on the brand marketing side, is how we take the work they’ve done and build it across different surfaces.
For instance, we’ve worked with a slew of creators in product design, UI, and UX. We launched a “Made in Figma” campaign where we highlighted their work and speedruns on billboards in Times Square.
Source: @Figma
We also launched a billboard in San Francisco featuring a Figma Draw illustrator to show the power of Figma and the creativity that goes into it.
Source: @Figma
That’s another way for people to see that and say, “Oh, I want to be part of that. I want to build and create something that Figma highlights, or that the community really cares about.”
What turns an everyday user into an active community member or brand advocate?
I think it really comes down to listening — and how we respond as a brand. And also providing the right tools to match that.
For a lot of people, Figma is kind of like an infinite canvas. I love that we’ve built products out of the ways people use the platform. There are a lot of things in the product that make it a really interactive, engaging experience, and I think that carries over into brand advocacy on social.
Ultimately, we want to meet people where they are. Whether that’s replying to a meme we posted, or engaging with them in ways that tie back to the things they care about.
Source: @Figma
That’s the real, non-scalable way of turning someone from just a user into someone who really advocates for the brand. It’s that connection, that community-building, and that one-on-one interaction.
How do you balance letting the community shape the conversation while still maintaining a clear brand voice?
I think it goes back to setting the foundation of what our voice is, where we show up, and having pillars around what we engage in and what we don’t.
It’s also about taking a page from the community side: how are people talking about the product? What are the things they’re saying? And then debating internally — what do we want to say, how do we want to frame this, and how do we want to think about it?
It also depends on the platform too. We do a lot of social listening across every social network — Reddit, Twitter, Threads, Instagram, YouTube, you name it — and pulling in all the feedback, reactions, and conversations people are having about Figma and the product.
For us, it’s about asking: how does this tie back to the foundation of our voice? Does it hit our guidelines? Does it hit our values?
Social can be really fast-paced, and we don’t want to react just to react. We don’t want to show up in a conversation just for the sake of showing up. We want to be really fast, but thoughtful.
What mistakes do brands make when trying to build community online?
I don’t want to say it’s a mistake, but it’s something brands and teams really have to think about: what do you actually engage in? Is it engaging in every piece of content out there?
Sometimes you’ll see a TikTok video, and brands that have nothing to do with the topic or conversation are jumping into the replies. And some of those do go “viral,” or their comment gets a lot of traction.
But I think about what that actually gets you. Yes, it’s brand awareness — but does that move anything in terms of your goals, or the things you care about as a company?
Maybe that virality part is what they want. But I think jumping into everything can sometimes be a miss.
Versus experimentation — thinking about your voice, and how you differentiate yourself from other companies. Not everyone can be Wendy’s, and they shouldn’t be. When everyone tries the same voice, there’s no differentiation. When everyone tries the same voice, there’s no differentiation.
It’s really about finding that balance: how do people see you, how do you want to be perceived, and how do you show up on each platform? That’s something that I always think about.
Looking ahead: Social media, community, and AI
What advice would you give marketing leaders preparing their social media strategies for the next 5 years?
Beyond what I mentioned around trends, engagement, and voice, it’s really about thinking through how your community views AI in this landscape.
I think for marketing leaders right now, it’s about being really detailed and specific about how your company is using AI, how it shows up in workflows, how your community thinks about it, and how that all comes together.
It’s not just about putting AI in a social post for the sake of it. It’s about really being thoughtful about how it shows up.
We love seeing all the ways people are using Figma, and how they’re thinking about AI tools, product building, and tech in general — because they’re the ones who are showing us what’s possible within our product and out there in the world.
We want to make sure that Figma is the place where people can go to bring any idea to life, across different workflows and use cases — and making sure we’re always building and shipping for them.
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