Building an Online Community
Building and maintaining a community is the fundamental rule of creating and sustaining a forum or social network. It’s the people who make it, drive it and use it that creates success. Without them, lays a boring website with little content and probably a lot of white space.
As I am currently working on creative a drinking games forum, “Rekt”, I want to ensure I can manage a community and sustain it with active users who thrive from using the service and adding content.
During a guest lecture with Michael Mentessi, a community builder for Code Club, we learnt that creating a community is key to a forums success.
Imagine Facebook without any users… boring right?
One of the most effective methods we learnt to build a community was to appeal niche and small, then scale up and grow in time. Our initial idea for the forum was to have users from around the world telling their versions of the game. Michael explained that this would be difficult to encourage users from around the world to join as they had no reasson or incentive too.
Our strategy changed. We have decided that to encourage an online community would be to start of exclusive to one university, then over time introduce it to another, allowing for friendly rivalry and even more conversation.
Another effective method for creating an online community is to make it clear to the user to purpose right from the landing page. This includes having easily readable terms and conditions and forum rules to make it clear what is and isn’t acceptable on the site. It will encourage people to sign up and get active on the site.
Great. They’re signed up… But how do we know they’ll log back in? … Let alone post anything!
An effective way to drive users back to the site from the get go is an encouraging email. Now many companies send the boring and mundane emails such as “Thanks for Signing up” or “Welcome!”. But does that really make you think ‘WOW! I need to go back to them!’. The answer is NO — if you didn’t already know.
A great way to encourage users to use the service is to offer coupons and vouchers. Everyone likes free sh*t right?
Another is to have a clear call of action. This basicually directly thanks the user and then says now buy something. Simple. People love honesty.
In the early days of creating a community content will be lacking and users may be slacking… a way to encourage growth is for admins of the site (ie: YOU!) to start posting stuff and people will respond. As the community grows people will add their own topics and start their own conversations. Hopefully creating a successful online community.
Tom.
Web Media Level 1. Ravensbourne.
WEB14105
Tom Sharman.
