Building a community is tough. It’s hard to create a buzz about the service and sustain active users. Events can help kickstart the community into becoming active and therefore successful.

Events can create an increase in user interaction on the website. This creates conversation and helps develop a community by creating links and common interests between members. It’s once users feel welcome and part of the community that they will continue to come back and care about the community and it’s members.

There are many types of events that an online social space can create to kickstart the community. Physical events happen in real life and involve members meeting in person. An example of this is Meet-ups from YouTubers such as VidCon or SummerInTheCity allowing ‘YouTube Celebrities’ to meet and great their fans. Another type of event is Virtual, this could be a competition where a brand will offer prizes in order for exposure and a buzz about their products that the online space and it’s members are creating.

On the social space I am creating, REKT, we will be using events to encourage the community to develop and grow and become evermore active with increased communication and conversations.

One event we will be doing is an online virtual competition with Jagarmeister. This brand partnership will aim to promote Jagar products and get people in the community talking and using it in their drinking games. The way the virtual competition will work is that users will be notified via email that there is a new competition. It will also be advertised on the events page. For the competition users will need to create a new drinking game using their drink as an ingredient. This challenges users to be creative and also adds content to our site as well as fulfilling the clients aim to create a buzz around the product.

An example of a physical (real-life) event that we will be hosting will be a launch party for the social space. This will be at the University of Greenwich exclusive to students as we were planning a launch to a London university. This event will include cheap drinks for members and a way for users to meet each other and interact on more personal level. This helps to create stronger community.

Another idea is of a virtual event where users post their drunk fails of the week. This will encourage users to post on the site and interact together and create a stronger community.

To include females into the site, we have introduced an event “The King or Queen of Beer Pong”. This is a real life event in which users can meet up and play drinking games that they are discussing on the online space. This inclusion of females onto the site will hopefully ensure that females use the site.

Events Page of http://REKT.raveweb.net:

Question: What kind of events could you use to improve user engagement with your social site and grow the community?

Tom.