How do you build an online community?
To understand how to build a community, we need to understand what a community is and why people form communities.
By definition, an online community is a group of people connected by a shared goal, an interest or a purpose and communicating with each other in the same environment. In other words, any community is a solution to some social problem that is ineffective or impossible to solve alone. For example, a club of chess enthusiasts is a community, so is a group of volunteers who fight pollution in a local national park.
The first and most important step towards building a community is to find a problem that bothers people or an interest that many people share but they do not have the opportunity to get together. Typically, the problem to be solved (or the interest that connects people) is described as a mission of a community.
Besides the mission of a community, for a community to grow one should select the correct software platform and establish basic rules of the community. When selecting a software platform one needs to think what tools the community will need to achieve the mission and choose the one that covers the needs. The rules describe what behaviors you expect on your platform.
When you define the mission, select the platform and describe the basic rules, you can move on to get the first users to your community. As the number of users grows, you will need to move your focus from promoting your community to managing existing users (“the real community management” starts here). As the community grows, you will need to move your focus again from running initiatives yourself to supporting leaders from the community and assisting them in the initiatives they propose.
Building a community is a big topic. If you are interested in it, I recommend looking at two books: