If you want to grow your online community, then it is not about getting more members in the community. This is a vanity metric. Instead, try to focus on getting more conversation going in your community. People should feel like they are with their friends and should have meaningful conversations with each other.
You should have a strategy in place to increase the activity levels in the community. People should feel the value of being present in the community.
“Never create a community which is already present”
In this blog post, I am going to give you the best strategies to grow your online community from scratch
Reach out to passionate people to grow your online community.
You must be having some happy customers or even your team members who like your product and services. Reach out to them first before anyone else. If not, then reach out to passionate people in your niche or industry leaders and your own network to help you to start the initial conversation in your new online community.
Now once you have your core team ready, you can invite other people stating benefits like you will get access to industry leaders, special badges, and valuable content.
Keep the conversations to the point. Create content so that people move in the relationship model towards the continuation stage. Ask them self disclosing questions like what is your opinion on this particular topic? How would you react to this situation in your niche? etc.
Keep it open
Communities can be of two types. A private membership group is a closed community, one has to register or buy a product/service. An open community like Reddit does not require to even sign in.
Here, if you have 1000 people who know about your community, 500 will actually join and 90 to 100 will actually communicate. These numbers are just guesses. Also, other benefits of keeping an open online community is that you will get SEO benefits and there will be more awareness about your brand.
Sometimes, the engagement increases so much in these open online communities that you will have to create subtopics so that members find it easy to search for information.
Paid traffic
This is simple. You can just apply digital marketing methods to grow your online community. Run social media or google ads, have a funnel in place, and create valuable content.
This will help you get an extra boost to grow your online community.
Give Rewards to members who communicate more
The human brain enjoys getting rewards, doesn’t it? Rewards can be of two types, emotional and physical. You must focus more on emotional rewards because motivation comes from inside.
Emotional rewards can be in the form of a shout-out or a genuine public thank you for a message. Give these types of rewards to the most valuable people generously.
Physical rewards are giveaways of physical products, contests, a small money reward or a virtual trophy. These rewards are good but they are limited. Also, doing a task where the motivation for it comes from outside is not a good thing.
Welcome new members
New members are very important people. They are the ones who can be your future brand advocates. You must not only welcome new members but also ask them questions so that they self disclose information about themselves. Once they do that, they move up in the relationship model and hence start engaging more.
Create welcome posts having a few open-ended questions for them. Ask them what is your goal for joining this group? What do they do? etc. In short, get to know them.
Conclusion
If you want to grow your online community you have to get people talking about themselves. Create valuable content and ask questions about their goals, opinions, etc. Give them tasks to do, appreciate their efforts, and help them whenever possible.
Do you want to learn more about managing a community, how to create content and increase engagement, etc? Comment below.
Thank you for reading this blog post. Take care.
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