BEST PRACTICES TO BUILD A COMMUNITY FROM SCRATCH
Before you start off to build a community, you need to know - “What is a community”.
Community is a feeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals.
- Know the objective of your community
The first and foremost thing which you need to know before you start building your community is to figure out the reason Why do you want to build a community.
So basically, you need to make these objectives strategic.
2. Prepare guidelines for your community
A lot of people don’t understand the need for guidelines in the initial phase of community building but believe me, you will realize it’s needed once your community starts growing. Because, in a community, you might have a lot of people who will create a nuisance and to avoid this you need to have it.
3. Identify your audience
Once you know the objective behind your community, you need to target your audience. To do so, first, you need to figure out the set of people who come perform the desired behavior you want. Set strategic objectives which target a specific group of people to perform a very specific behavior (valuable behavior for joining the community).
4. How will you ask people to join your community
Before you ask people to join your community, you must need some relative content to attract your audience and to generate the content you need to have engagement in your community forum (online community). I have seen a lot of Community Managers put fake engagements but I would recommend you not to do so. Now how will you generate organic content? Go and personally reach out to people to join your community and once they join start moderating conversations. Great! Now you have got the kickstart to your community and you have decent engagements as well.
5. How to scale your community?
Let me tell you one thing which every Community Manager must realize that, strength of community != body count. So if you are planning to scale your community, you need to focus on generating more useful content and onboarding good people rather than just growing the number of members.
So how will you do that? As now you have few members and organic content in your community, share those content in the form of blogs or articles to attract others. This way you can see a lot of people taking an interest in your community.
Well done. You have built a community and it’s running successfully.
