How to - series: 10 Steps for your first year of Community building Introduction Welcome to the Open Social How To guide for community and site managers who are starting their first online community. If your community is already up and running this How To is still a helpful guide to see where you can fine tune your strategies and make sure your community blossoms. In this How To, you will learn:
1. Why and how you should adjust the look and feel of your online community
2. Why and how you should run a Beta community
3. Things to consider regarding community moderation
4. Why and how you can set up a content calendar
5. Tips and tricks to increase engagement in the first year of your community
6. How you can use social media to find new users and boost your community
7. How you can use our notifications to increase engagement
8. How to source co-community managers from within your community
9. The benefits of on- and offline meetups to solidify your community
10. How to use the Open Social Analytics suite to improve your strategy
Introduction How to: 10 Steps to keep in mind when starting a community 1. Look and feel/ tone of voice While communities mainly exist for people to engage with What is the best way to make people one another, and most of these conversations take place in feel at home? Decorate! written form, it’s very important that people trust that the community is safe and feel comfortable enough to engage in conversation to begin with. A welcoming look and feel can really help achieve this. Your look and feel and tone-of-voice can also help make your brand more recognizable to your (potential) audience. This way, when they encounter you somewhere else, they know it’s you and are reminded of your community.
Unless you already have a logo and look-and-feel, be sure to keep in mind the psychological effects colors can have on people. Red is viewed as bold but can also be experienced as aggressive, green is generally experienced as peaceful but is also associated with the environment, and grey may come across as balanced but can also be viewed as a little boring. Come up with different variations of your logo and color combinations for your community and run a poll among your friends or co-workers to check what associations they have. Adjust, and try again until you found the perfect look and feel for your community.
Step 1 When determining your tone-of-voice keep in mind what kind of community you would like to start. Do you want it to be open so everyone can say whatever they want, whenever they want? Or do you want to make sure your community doesn’t get too cluttered and chaotic, so you should be more stern from the start? Consider how formal or informal and inclusive you want your community to be and what tone-of-voice can trigger users to engage and be responsive in the most meaningful way for the purposes of your community.
Tip: Be sure to use your community colors or logo for the Site Manager and Content Manager profile pictures, so it’s easy for people to recognize official topics, groups and responses.
Step 1 2. Start with a Beta community
Why should you run a beta community? When you start a community you usually start from one of these two starting You probably have a lot of ideas to set up your community for positions: success. But there’s only one way to be sure if your ideas will work or ➔ Build a community from scratch fall flat: test! A beta community helps you try out your content and ➔ Transfer an existing offline Community Management strategy on a real live audience to see community to an online platform how they respond. The other benefit is that, once your community is launched for a wider audience, you’ll already have a lot of content
and conversations going on when they enter the community for the In both cases it can be very helpful to start with a so called first time. You’ll have standards in place on how to start topics, ‘beta community’. You can see this as a testing phase before launch new groups and events and some ‘old guard’ people on your you launch your community and open it up to a wider team that can show newcomers the ropes. public. For this phase we advise you to invite a small group of users (10-25 max) to get your community up and running. While you could (and will continue to) test your strategies in front of
a huge audience, trying out a number of things for a month or 2 for a smaller (trusted) audience is a lot more manageable than trying to steer things in the right directions of you have hundreds of eyeballs watching your every move.
Step 2 What should a Community Manager focus on in the beta launch? Post weekly polls to ask your beta group to review the content Invite a handful of members (10-25) and give them a personal you’ve posted in your community. Keep track of how many people welcome. You can do this by meeting with them ‘face-to-face’ or commented and liked your posts to check if your engagement sending them an email or other personal message to explain why figures tally up to the feedback you’re getting from these polls. you’ve started this community, why you’ve invited them to join and how to join. Be sure to schedule individual and group sessions with your beta community to get the feedback you need to make your community Set up a reports for yourself so you can keep track of all your a success. community activities in the beta period. This will help you figure out what makes your community tick and will also give other Use your beta community to test what groups you need to create to stakeholders insights on why you’ve made certain decisions in the structure your community. You may have some preconceived beta period. You can use these reports to set up KPIs for your notions about which groups you will need, this could be location or community once it goes public to continue gaining important interest based for example. The best way to test this is to run a beta insights on where to adjust your strategy. community and see which groups form naturally or by asking your beta community for input on which groups to set up in your weekly Check their individual activity regularly. Are they responsive? What polls. This way, once your community goes live, you’ll have a clear are they responding to? How are they responding? And if not: find structure for new community members to explore and add on to. out why! A lot of Community Managers dismiss inactive users, but Furthermore, at the time of writing any user can start a new group it’s important to know why someone isn’t engaging in your on your Open Social platform. Running a beta community and community. A few small adjustments might make them more setting up some pre-existing groups before you start to invite the comfortable to become active members, or they might like the masses will prevent people from starting too many groups community but prefer to lurk instead. themselves.
Step 2 3. Guidelines / Moderation
Guidelines are a set of principles that give Tip: The Beta period is a great time to discuss which guidelines new and existing community members an you’d like your community to start out with. This way your Beta idea of desired behavior within your community is involved in the rules of engagement for your community. Sometimes the guidelines are community from the start. referred to as ‘rules’ or a ‘constitution’, but it all boils down to the same thing: giving Tip: Remember to send all your community members an update users a sense of what a community is about whenever you update your guidelines. and how they should treat one another. Examples of community guidelines Good community guidelines are short and simple. They let a
community know how users are expected to interact with one
another. Try and capture the personality and beliefs of the
community and make sure you’re not too restrictive. Your main goal with community guidelines is to ensure people interact with each other in a civil manner so everyone feels welcome and set some boundaries for which content isn’t allowed under any
Because you want people to feel positive about your community circumstances (personal attacks, ‘doxing’ -i.e. sharing private details when they first come in, make sure your guidelines focus on what of a community member-, racism and sexism come to mind for people should do, rather than what they shouldn’t. This is why we example). prefer the term guidelines, it feels a lot less strict than some of the other terms that are in use.
Guidelines are always a work in progress so don’t be afraid to get them ‘wrong’. You can always adjust them at a later date. Just don’t update them too often to avoid confusion. Once you’ve setup your initial guidelines be sure to include them in your welcome email or welcome message to new users.
Step 3 Open Social has several functions in place which help community managers moderate their communities. For example:
- Delete offensive content posted by community members, be sure to check the Steps to Content Moderation below before you use this feature.
- Edit content posted by community members, be careful with this functionality. People tend to view this as censorship worse than removal. Be aware! As is often the case with fine print, most of your community members won’t read the guidelines or just skim - Submitting content under someone else’s name and through them. This is okay! You want to have them in place in case changing the authorship of a content item, use this feature things escalate and you need to step in. In these instances it’s only with permission of the person under whose name you important you have a set of rules you can refer to so people accept will be posting content. your correction more easily. - Close comment threads, if comments escalate or if an event
has taken place in the past you can choose to close the Moderation comment thread. We advise that you add a summary of the Keep in mind there is more to moderation than looking out for discussion or event to content items for which you have offensive or problematic content. You may also want to refer users closed the comment thread so people understand why the back to an existing topic or group if they create duplicate content, thread has been closed. close inactive groups or simply help a user edit or close their account if they are experiencing some kind of problem. - Cancel/ block user accounts, use this functionality sparingly and be sure to give users a warning if you are planning to block them to give them a chance to adjust their behavior.
Step 3 Steps to Content Moderation
1. Unless the content is extremely offensive or even illegal, don’t delete the offending content straight away.
2. First, see if the community corrects itself and if users step in to correct undesirable behavior.
3. Help steer the conversation in the right direction by referring to the guidelines and reminding the person or people involved this type of behavior isn’t allowed.
4. If the person or people involved continue their behavior, contact them with a personal email or message and give them a warning to let them know they will be removed from the community if they continue in this manner.
5. If the person or people involved still continue, block their account and delete the offending content.
Step 3 4. Content calendar
Of course we all hope that our communities To ensure you have enough varied and diverse content to appeal to will be filled with User Generated Content your various target groups, it’s wise to set up a content calendar. (USG) from the get go, but more often than not There are plenty of free templates to create a content calendar you will need to post content and keep the online, we use an edited version Hubspot’s template ourselves, but a activities going in the first 1 to 2 years of basic content calendar should contain: building your community. You will have to gain people’s trust before they start working for you. - A monthly overview of the content you’re planning to post
- An overview of how you’re going to share this content, will you post it in a group in full, or as a new topic? Or as an external blog with a link in a new topic, maybe even as an
event? And how are you going to share it on social media?
- Important national and international holidays and events, as well as events that are of importance to the group
- Plans to ensure maximum engagement for community events you or community members are planning
- Plans for mass notifications or community emailings (consider for example sending a weekly or monthly update to your community members with the latest activity from your community)
- Anything else that you can think of that you need to plan ahead or avoid overdoing or redoing or need to take into account for your community
Step 4 Remember, just like your content and engagement strategies, the content calendar for your community is a work in progress. The more active your community becomes, the less (or maybe even the more) content you will have to provide. It’s okay if parts of your content calendar don’t work for you (anymore), you can always adjust it to suit your (changed) needs.
Tip: Make sure you create content that is valuable for your community. As FeverBee explains in chapter 3 from their book Buzzing Communities: the best content can be time consuming to create without giving the results you were hoping for. One easy way to avoid this is by spending at least some of your time writing about your community:
- Showcase members - Showcase member and community achievements - Showcase community events
This is a great way to give back to your community, make people feel welcome and appreciated and generate content at the same time.
Step 3 5. Engagement
So how do you ensure people engage in active conversation on your platform? In most cases, during the early stages of your community, the community will be relatively quiet. There are some simple steps to try and engage your community to keep the conversation going.
3. Reward members who are actively engaging. You can like 1. In your content, that you have planned with the content their comments or leave positive feedback on their calendar tips from this white paper, be sure to give your comments. It’s important to find a balance here where community talking points. your likes and feedback feel authentic and not
automated. So like their best comments and give For example, end with a question for the community and involved feedback, for example “Wow, I’d never thought make sure it is an open question that will require more than of it that way. Do you think X, Y and Z will improve if we a yes or no answer from your community members. “Bobby approach it in this way?” is looking for more information on X, is anybody willing to
share their experiences? I think we could all learn a lot from Tip: a great way to motivate people to engage is to ask this.” your most active community members if they want to be
featured with an interview. This way you get new content 2. When you see a conversation is starting to happen but is that can spark activity in your community AND the losing steam, drive the conversation forward. (Again) asking content revolves around some of your most active open ended questions and engaging in the conversation members, which means they will help drive the properly, maybe even asking some other more opinionated conversation around their content. It’s a win-win! community members to join in can really help a
conversation gain momentum. .
Step 5 4. Keep tracking of which community members are the most engaged and who you’re engaging with. Some community members may be more active than others and you want to stimulate this, but it’s good to keep an eye out for quieter members and motivate them to get engaged. People may get demotivated and feel left out if they feel there is a inner circle within the community and as a community manager it is your duty to make sure everyone feels welcome.
Tip: To find out who your most active users are, export your user database. Under the header ‘Posts created’ you will see the number of content each user has created and find your top content creators!.
5. In your email updates to the community, be sure to link to the most active topics with a short summary and call-to-action. This way, you can re-activate discussions around certain topics and also ensure none of your community members are missing out on a chance to add to the conversation.
Step 5 6. Social media
Social media is everywhere! But how do you 2. Page or no page? use it to increase the reach and engagement of You’ll have to decide for yourself whether you want a your community while avoiding that the page or account for your community on the social media community moves to your social media channels of your choice. While a lot of people think this is channels instead? In this chapter we explore expected, having a page or account may detract followers some basics on how to utilize social media for from actually going to and engaging on your community. your community. You can also choose to run hyper targeted ads that link directly to your community, rather than first trying to build an additional community on social media platforms before you can start direct them to your community.
Advertise! 3. Both Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn offer supreme targeting tools. You can target your ads for everything from interest, location, language, age, gender and educational background. Keep in mind that the more you know about your audience, the better you can 1. Where is your audience? target your ads and get a return on your investment. With Research what social media platforms your audience is using. niche targeting especially a little budget can go a long Depending on how big your team is it’s important to determine way. Most social media platforms offer very decent which social media channels should be your priority. For a how-to tutorials and explanations on how to get the most community with two Community Managers we recommend out of their advertising tools on their website. picking 2 to 3 social channels to focus on at max. Tip: You can also target your ads to followers of related Facebook pages! Some pages have the option for you to target ads to their followers switched off, but many pages still allow this and it’s a great way to get a quick ROI.
Step 6 4. Join the conversation! 5. Tease Odds are there are already a few pages or accounts on If you do decide to run a page, be sure not to give all your social media that are related to your topic of interest. It’s content away on the page. What you want to try and do is always a good idea to start following these pages and trigger people and tease them just enough to get them to accounts and join the conversation. You can either share click the link and read the full topic on your community relevant and interesting posts from these pages to your instead. For example, don’t go “This week we had a own page (provided you have one), people love it when discussion about how often to water your plants and their content is shared (albeit in a respectful manner) and concluded that it depends on the type of plants you may start following you back and share your content and own,” but go “Who knew there were so many different discussions as well. Alternatively, when relevant, you can insights on how to water plants? Find out what our share links to either your sign-up page or to a specific community thinks is your best bet in this week’s Trending discussion with these pages. You don’t want to overdo Topic!” instead. this as it may come across as spammy, but if there is a discussion or post and your community is having a relevant conversation on the same topic, people won’t mind if you point it out.
Tip: Use Tweetdeck or Hootsuite to set up ‘listening’ channels on Twitter. You can set up columns with searches for specific keywords relevant to your community and find out who are talking about your topic of interest and what they’re talking about. You can use this to come up with content surrounding topics that are of interest to your target audience and identify and start building relationships with key influencers at the same time.
Step 6 7. Use of notifications (OS specific)/ Email marketing
Emails and notifications are a very effective way On top of the normal user notifications, Open Social comes with a to drive users to your community. While set of email notifications for community managers. These will help automation plays a huge role in this, sending you track new activity in the platform. New activities include: manual messages can be even more effective. ➔ New users in the community ➔ Newly user generated content (groups, events, topics and posts) ➔ New comments
We encourage you to enable these notifications so you can manage and respond to new content while you’re building your community. Engaging with new users when they first arrive in your new community can really help kick-start an active platform. Automated Open Social notifications Open Social has a variety of in-app notifications and email notifications. Think of
➔ Welcoming new users to the platform by placing a In-app notifications appear in the notification center of each user. An welcome message on their profile icon in the menu bar indicates the amount of new messages for a ➔ Tracking inappropriate content, so you can alter or delete if specific user: needed ➔ Spot the creation of duplicated groups or events ➔ Track, monitor and engage with hyper-active topics
We encourage you to make good use of notifications to ensure your In Open Social in-app notifications are always sent, but users can change users engage in your community! :) their settings for notifications via email to indicate if they want to receive emails regarding specific types of notifications in case they aren’t logged in or have been inactive on the platform.
Step 7 Automated Open Social notifications Open Social has a variety of in-app notifications and email notifications. Set up a reminder in your content calendar for a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly email updates and consider the following options: In-app notifications appear in the notification center of each user. An icon in the menu bar indicates the amount of new messages for a ➔ Use the user export to send reactivation emails to inactive specific user: users ➔ Filter users based on interest and inform them about new content that matches their interest ➔ Organize your own event and invite users (or invite them to user generated events in their area) ➔ Combine all of the above and create perfect emails for your users based on activity, interest and location to create the perfect email for them
Tip! Another quick way of sending personalised emails and keeping specific users active and engaged is by using the @-mention on the Open Social comes with an export feature that allows you to export user platform. Users will receive an notification in their inbox as well as data from the platform. This export will give you a lot of insights, for on the platform example when a user last logged in, how much original content they posted and how many comments they’ve left. You can use this information to target different emails to users at different activity levels. Import your user groups in an email marketing program like MailChimp and start sending those emails to increase traffic and engagement!
Step 7 8. Activate users to co-community managers
As your community matures, recruiting active How to find your influencers There are different ways to detect influencers. This will of course community managers to co-community also depend on if you are running a community which is based on managers can really help you increase activity an existing offline community or creating a community from on your community, get better performing scratch. Think of (user generated) content and ultimately give a ➔ People within your (existing, offline) organisation who have boost to your membership levels. Having an expertise that they could take the lead on within your others, from within the community, manage community and who enjoy knowledge sharing and monitor the community much in the same ➔ Highly active members way as you are doing can really help you ➔ Members who have a high level of expertise and/or passion increase your reach. for certain topics ➔ Members with great people skills (motivators, coaching etc) The best people to help you drive engagement on your platform are members who really drive the conversation, they are most commonly referred to as ‘influencers’.
Step 8 How can your influencers help you? The first influencer should be you! Especially in the early stages of ➔ You can ask them to create content for you related to their community building, you should try and actively engage in all area of expertise discussions, drive the conversation forward and build a report with ➔ You can ask them to manage (one of the) local groups ➔ You can ask them to welcome new users to your as many of your members as possible. If your users see how invested community and help them with their onboarding process you are in your community and what a sincere interest you have in ➔ You can ask them to help you organize on- or offline them at an individual level they are more likely to trust and respect meet-ups ➔ You can ask them to help you moderate discussions (make you and begin to contribute themselves. sure discussions and stay active and monitor any potential misbehavior) It’s incredibly important to get to know your community members
TIP: You may ask influencers to help you monitor and moderate properly. Your goal is not to go through all of them to find your discussions, but it’s best not to give them rights beyond that. The influencer, your goal is to build relationships with these people so decision to remove offensive content should be limited to people they feel welcome, wanted and heard. within your organisation only, as assigning these rights to anyone else may cause friction within your community. TIP: Asking community members to be interviewed and featured is also a way to build relationships. Take your time to find your influencers Just like community management, finding influencers and building Getting to know your community and all its members will activate enough of a relationship with them to ask for their help, takes time. your community and give you an idea of who your influencers are. Once your relationship with an individual user feel solid you can then either ask them for help, information or input as listed above, or just keep going and monitor their behavior within the community to see what kind of content and topics they are interested in so you can cater to their needs and wishes.
Step 8 How to manage your influencers How you manage them will depend highly on the inner politics of There are different different ways to manage your influencers: your community, as well as the time you can allocate to both your influencers and the rest of your community and where you are in ➔ You can make them highly visible. For example by: the phases of community building. ◆ Creating a special group for the influencers where you involve them any decisions to be made Tip: Be careful on how you engage with your influencers on your surrounding the community and report back on community and who you pick as your influencers or co-community these decisions to the whole of the community managers for example. Steer clear from controversial figures and ◆ Rewarding them with special benefits such as for avoid that other users feel left out. As community manager it is example a monthly column or feature article within important no one feels left out or gets the feeling others are getting the community or on your website preferential treatment, even if in some cases they are. ◆ Giving them a moderation role to help you moderate your community ➔ You can be more low key with them. For example by: ◆ Monitoring their conversations and engaging more frequently publicly or privately to get ideas and feedback on how you manage your community ◆ Rewarding them with special benefits on an infrequent basis, so less noticeably than in the previous examples ➔ Something in between.
Step 8 9. Meetups (offline and online)
In this chapter we will explore how you can use A video group chat session: online and offline meetups to keep your a. You can use a video chat tool like Google HangOuts or community active. Skype; i. Group video chats can get messy with people Whether you have moved your existing offline community online or over shouting one another, are started an entirely new online community from scratch, regular ii. Not everyone may have the necessary meet-ups can really help give your users a sense of community. In connectivity to engage properly. addition, people often feel disconnected or removed from the people they talk to online, having your community connect in b. You can use a group chat tool like Skype; real-time can help put a human face to one another and ensure for i. These group chat sessions can also get messy, more respectful debate. but it’s easy to go back in the conversation, ii. Most people at this point will have a stable enough internet connection to join in.
c. You can create an Event in your Open Social platform; i. This is an easy way to announce the meetup and check attendance, ii. You have an instantaneous platform where the debate can take place, right there on your Online community! There is a threshold for a lot of people to meet people they know iii. Of course we recommend that even if you go from the internet face-to-face. A much more low bar way to get your off-platform you use the Event function from community to interact in real-time is to do it online. There are two your community to announce the meetup and options: keep it top of mind by leaving comments on the
event every so often.
Step 9 When you first start organizing these online meetups be sure to set a 1. Consider giving the following groups an incentive to meet up: clear goal or topic of conversation for your meetups. People won’t just a. Small pockets of users who engage more actively with start talking, you want to give them an idea of what they will be talking one another about. Think of: b. Groups of users who may be living close to one another 2. Incentives in the early stages of your community to meet up can a. Running a live Q&A (Questions and Answers) session with: be: i. An expert a. You would like some feedback from your most active ii. An interesting or popular community member users iii. Yourself and your team b. You would like to thank your most active users by bringing them together, treating them to lunch or dinner b. Deep diving into a topic that blew up on your community in real (and get their feedback at the same time time Just as with starting your online community, don’t expect too much c. Discussing community house rules or guidelines in a live activity for your first offline meetups. These will most likely occur meet-up between 3-5 users tops. As your community grows and matures small pockets of community members may spontaneously decide to meet up Offline over time, if they discuss this publicly and as this becomes more If you’ve moved your community from off- to online this is of course less common you can suggest to organize a bigger event for a larger section of an issue, but as said there can be a threshold for people to meet of the community. people they know from online face-to-face. Still, it’s worth considering offline meetups as your community matures. Some things to consider Be aware that the expectations people have of a meetup organized by when moving your online community offline: the organization running the community are a lot higher than for a user organized meet-up, so you will need to have a healthy budget set aside to rent a venue, organize catering and set up entertainment or speakers for example.
Step 9 10. Use of analytics
It’s important to determine realistic goals and Finding and retaining an audience keep tracking of them using the appropriate ➔ Starting conversations KPI’s in your first (and all following!) year of ➔ Building relationships building your community. This helps you gain Community Managers also have several macro tasks: insight into how your community is developing over time, what issues you need to tackle and ➔ Planning, writing, sourcing and sharing content set realistic ideas for any stakeholders within ➔ Organising and promoting events your organisation as you report your results to ➔ Reporting to stakeholders them. ➔ Determining the overall strategy for the community
KPIs Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) can really help you and your stakeholders determine which of these tasks you should focus on to optimally develop your community further. The Buzzing Communities book explains that, depending on the phase of a community, a CM should prioritize different tasks. In a new community for example, it’s more important to focus on the micro tasks while a more mature community demands that you focus on macro tasks.
The role of the Community Manager As a Community Manager (CM) you are partly responsible for the success of your online community. The work of a CM can be separated in several micro tasks:
Step 10 Set goals Insights into community activity Start by developing a community strategy. Ask yourself what the goal is Insights into community activity versus Community Management activity of your community, do you want to decimate information or do you want is important to determine whether your community has reached critical your community to do all the talking for you? Looking at your target mass. When most of the activity taking place in a community is driven audience, where they are online and what they are doing, what is a and fostered by the activities of the Community Manager, ending this realistic benchmark for engagement and traffic in the first year? How fast activity will lead to the death of the community. However, if the tipping would you like your community to develop and what is a realistic goal? point has been reached where the community is creating most of its own How do you get there? content, the Community Manager can start focusing on macro tasks to further boost activity. What KPIs are relevant and interesting for you depends on the following: - If you started your community from scratch Google Analytics - If you are transferring your community from off- to online Besides the Open Social Analytics tool, Google Analytics is a great way of - If you are driving a volunteer community tracking user behaviour. For example, try tracking the registration process - If you driving an (existing) intranet within a company to gain insights for your content strategy:
Open Social comes with a standard set of Analytics that can help you - Is there specific content new users are reading right before they track your KPIs each month: sign up? - Are users finishing the registration process or they do you ➔ Active % of users somehow lose them, for example because new users don’t ➔ The total amount of topic or event likes and comments respond to the verification email, and how can you make them ➔ The total amount of post likes and comments go through the entire registration process? ➔ Number of comments, posts and events created by the community Tip: Google offers great basic to advanced training for their Analytics tool, ➔ Number of comments, posts and events created by the content you can find it here. manager
Step 10 11. Key takeaways
Community building takes time Engage! Don’t expect your community to be very active from the start. In the Engagement comes in many forms! At first your community may not first year you will move from content generator to content curator, interact with one another, but if you create content for your before you will start feeling like a ‘real’ community manager community by interviewing people from your community you are still boosting engagement Make people feel at home Make sure the look and feel of your community and your tone of Go social! voice are aligned to your goals to give users a clear idea of who you Social media functions as an extension of your community. Use it to are and what your community will bring them find new users and get inspiration for content that your members might like and actively engage with Start with a Beta community Test the plans you have for your community on a smaller group Use smart push notifications before you invite everyone else in. This preloads your community Keep your community coming back for more by using smart push with content and creates an active user group that can help when notifications and emailings that are relevant to their interests and new users come in draw them back onto the platform
Set up clear guidelines Let your community help you! Clear house rules will give your users clear expectations on desirable As your community develops you can build relationships with key and undesirable behavior and help you with community moderation influencers from within it. Recruit them to help you create content if you ever need to step in and address an issue or moderate your community right along with you
Create a content calendar Meet-ups A content calendar will inspire you to keep your community Organize on- and offline meet-ups for some real time interaction engaging and active and help you keep track of your progress between your community members. You can host Q&A’s from throughout the year relevant experts online or just meet for a few drinks, but real time interaction is where true bonds are forged to keep a community active over time
Key takeaways