My first community Turns Ten Years Old March 10th!
After a decade of community building, here are a few things I have learned
Some Observations About Planets and Such
The Questions We Ask
Listening Through Noise
Think of it like this: Your community is your planet that you are trying to protect and grow- the inhabitants of that planet (your members) love to have choices. One such choice is the ability to follow the community feed if all things happening inside your community from the outside- from the comfort of their fb profile by following your associated facebook page, for example, as a filter. This gives them an option. They don't have to be bombarded with everything that happens. This is the whole point in Groups. You follow groups to reduce the noise. For example, a surveying student wouldn't be interested necessarily in the discussions happening in the Retired Surveyors group. Such is the case with your community. Relevance becomes possible through organization. If your members follow your satellites, they are able to casually jump in at any time. This is their right as citizens of your community to not have to be notified when something irrelevant to their interests occurs on the main site. The best way to keep those following from the outside coming in is by feeding them links to community content every-single-day. The best way to do this, in my opinion is through creation and updating of linktrees - one link with a collection of links related in type or subject matter. It could be discussions about a particular brand, organization, topic, category or type. You collect the links and keep adding them... but only share the one elink. Now you can pack 20 reasons to come back to the site rather than one.
Recycling archived content and bringing awareness to popular items is kinda your job if you manage a community. No one likes to enter a room for the first time and join a group of people standing around and staring at one another. A good way to insure this doesn't happen is to continuously reignite the conversation by introducing new speakers to the circle. Regularly update the links and redistribute them to your peers and colleagues. On one community forum I built, we have conversations that were first started in 2009 that still receive comments and every new visitor offers a new perspective or insight from another geography. Of course you could pay a person like me to try to do it for you. I would of course do my best, but chances are it would be better if I taught you so that you could put the time in. Chances are if I can't relate the subject matter of your community to my own life, job, hobby, interest and/or passion, how could i ever really be able to make it perfect?
Lead By Example
Put the time in and see what you attract. If you think your community is dead because no one new is applying to join, no one posts anymore, people are leaving, or any of the 100 other reasons why communities die, you may be wrong. Word of Mouth to mouth resuscitation may save it's life. If you want for your network to expand, you must lead by example. You will never be able to effectively "pay someone to do it for" you. At the end of the day, week, month, year, decade, only you know what will gain the interest of people like you...for whom the community was intended. Take it from me..a person who like you felt at one time like i didn't know what to do next. I noticed a sort of scientific process at work that I wanted to follow closer. My original Ning community for Professional Land Surveyors built March 10th 2007 will turn 10 years old next week. I have learned a lot from managing online communities over the past decade. Hopefully some of my observations can help save a few of you some time.
Takeaway and Give Back
If you have a lot of content which has not been categorized or recollected into linktrees, you are simply missing out on all of the traffic you could and should have- would have, if you did. elink.io is not the only web service out there allowing you to curate collections of links. It is, however, the most versitile and (as a student) the cheapest to manage, in my opinion.
Building a community doesn't happen over night.In fact, it shouldn't.You do not need a lot of third party add-ons to make your site attractive, but you will have to do work outside your community to bring new members in.. You simply must put in the time and effort if you hope for a community to form. The way your site is designed and layout is tuned will be an ongoing experiment for the entire life of your community. For this reason I have always tried to help save time by sharing tips. In order to build a sustainable community, you must get to a place where your members feel comfortable and think of your place built for them when sharing that photo or tip or guide on the community you built for them. Progressive enhancement is the human way to increase relevance of your community for search engines, social graphs, bots, algorithms and yes, humans. You can do this for your community by channeling the traffic back into the network and reintroducing relevant content to those new members and visitors which might find it and the dialogue which occurs useful even five years in the future..
Comments