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.
You’ll still want to create some of your own content but if you can persuade key members of your community to publish their content on a regular basis, the community will be healthier and your life will be easier.
One way, of course, is to ask them directly. Contact the key members of your community that you know and invite them to publish a post once a week. Give them a general topic and when they do post, praise them to the skies.
Promote that content in the community and invite comments about it.
If you’re not paying people for their contributions, then you need to reward them with exposure and an ego boost.
You don’t need to approach members directly though. Often, engagement alone is enough to motivate contributors to keep publishing. If you want a key influencer to keep posting, make sure that you comment on their posts, refer to their posts in your own content and ask other members to weigh in on the discussion. If that member feels like a leader in the community, they’ll have a status they want to protect with continual publishing.
And you can make that status clear by awarding some members of the community with a title such as Community Organizer or Community Manager. When they feel responsible, they’ll also a feel a duty to keep posting.
That’s all for now! Next time, I’ll discuss private messages.
