Starting a community is a typical chicken-and-egg task: A community is successful when there are people who participate in it, but people usually want to participate only in successful communities. The magic of community management is to somehow gather a critical mass of people before the community becomes successful.
Topics covered in this chapter:
- Why should a community manager seed initial content to an online community?
- What should a community manager need know when writing content about the community itself?
- What should a community manager keep in mind when starting to invite the first users?
- Is it reasonable to use paid advertising to promote an online community?
- What should I advertise when using paid ads to get most out of it?
- What are the key principles of banner advertising of an online community?
- What should a community manager keep in mind when they are inviting people to participate in their online community?
- What should a community manager keep in mind when asking users help promote the community?
- What should a community manager keep in mind when working on partnership programs to promote the community?
- What should a community manager keep in mind when working on public speech to promote the community?
- What is a balance of user interests in an online community?
- Why is it important to provide feedback on all user actions in an online community?
- Why it is important to correct new users’ posts by editing them yourself?
- Why it is important to remove all negativity towards new users in an online community?
- How to nudge new users to take actions in an online community?
- How to help new users adapt to the unique features of an online community?
- How to understand that you have successfully launched an online community?
This is a fragment of a draft of the book “Lessons Learned While Working On Stack Overflow”. Read the full book on kindle or the paperback version.