How to Cultivate Your Online Community
Like seeds in a garden, an online community needs help to grow. Anyone can start a blog, Facebook page, Twitter account or other social media tool. But once you've planted the seeds, how do you go about helping your online community grow? Building a useful, relevant online community for your brand, business or personal interest takes a great deal of thought and discipline. But with patience and persistence, you can reap generous rewards.
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Instructions
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Ask your community questions. Whether through a Facebook discussion or a simple question in a status update or tweet, asking questions can start insightful discussion that will help you gain more insight into what your community cares about. Questions don't always have to be serious -- sometimes all you need is a relevant picture and a request for a caption to get a great dialogue going.
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Be an active, hands-on participant in your online community. As the community manager, it's natural to want to stay in the background. But rethink that strategy: The people in your online community want to see the person behind the curtain. Just be sure to always identify yourself, and speak honestly about your role in the online community.
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Reward level-headed, loyal participants in your online community with additional responsibility. As your community grows, you may need more sets of eyes monitoring content, keeping track of statistics or responding to community feedback. What better gatekeepers for your online community than the visitors who regularly contribute to discussion? Just be sure to vet your candidates to make sure they are trustworthy and reliable.
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Treat the existing participants in your online community just as well as the new. Be sure to thank people for their participation, respond to their emails promptly and answer questions in a timely fashion. Just as if they were customers walking into a store or guests arriving at a party, your online community members need to be welcomed and treated warmly so they will want to return again in the future.
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Tips & Warnings
Be sure to be consistent with your involvement in your online community. In today's 24/7 world, an online community goes stagnant and irrelevant very quickly if you do not participate consistently, as in at least once a day -- preferably more. This is where the work and persistence really matters.
Always be aware of what your community cares about by regularly monitoring the statistics of your site. From the number of views on links to the number of comments on a particular post, your site data will give you invaluable insights into your online community culture.
Develop rules for discussion in your online community. With proper guidelines for discussion in place, there can be no controversy in the event you must delete a comment or block a participant from coming back in the future.
References
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