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…
You’re probably still doing that but what you need to do to kickstart your community isn’t necessarily what you need to do to grow it.
Once your private social network is up and running, changing your activities may help your community to grow faster.
Cut back on the actions that your private social network members can do for you, such as answering basic questions, and reduce the amount of content you produce. Your members should be able to fill that gap for you. If they don’t, ask your most active member to publish a post once a week or so and reward them with a higher status in the community.
You can also skip the community-based welcomes, letting other members meet new people at the door.
Use the extra time that withdrawal frees up to open more doorways into the community and increase engagement. Build stronger connections with bloggers in your field. Quote community opinions and information in the content you place on the community—and off it. Review the stats and focus your efforts on the parts of the community that attract the most activity.
Communities have different phases. They start with a slow launch, grow then split into small sub-communities. If you’re trying to perform the same action in each phase, your community won’t grow as quickly as you’d like.
That’s all for now! Next time, I’ll talk about motivating your key influencers.
