They should be a small thing, but emojis that depict emotions have become an intrinsic part of social media communication. Fast to type and easy to understand, they’re a natural language for mobile phones and small screens.

As your community grows, you’ll still need to roll out the welcome mat for new members. When people join, they should feel at home, familiar and part of the environment.

Your members have two hands on your private social network. One hand holds onto the people they know. That’s what keeps people on platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp: they join and stay because their friends have joined and stayed. If their friends were to leave they’d leave too…

Private messaging looks like just another feature on a community site that should be packed with useful features. It should also be the least interesting. But private messaging is still a vital part of the community.

Services like Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor are making it easier and easier for people to send good looking, fully responsive newsletters out to their client base. They can get great results for businesses wanting to boost sales…but the percentage of people who actually open their newsletters is fairly pathetic.

Once your private social network is up and running, you should be looking to pull back, focus on marketing and leave much of the community management to the members. That includes content creation.

When you launched your community, you would have been super-busy. You would have been corralling your first members, welcoming new members, looking to raise the community’s profile, answering questions and creating content to spark discussions…

In five years, most of Facebook will be video.

Your stats will tell you a great deal about the health of your private social network but it won’t tell you everything you need to know. Occasionally, you’ll need to dig a little deeper and talk to your members directly. You need to send them a survey.