What should a community manager keep in mind when asking users help promote the community?
Virality is what we strive for at any stage of community building. When you ask users to help you promote the community, consider the following.
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Communicate from the perspective of the mission. The mission is a description of a proposed solution to some social problem that bothers users a lot. Users came to your community to solve this social problem in the first place. It is totally valid to ask them to help solve the problem by inviting some other folks to the community. Recruiting others becomes just another way to contribute to the success of the group.
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Ask for specific actions. It could be sharing a link on social networks, writing certain things via mail, sharing information about the community with colleagues, etc. Make sure that your platform has all necessary integrations to enable users to easily do what you ask them to help with.
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Emphasize the importance of everyone’s help. Explain that even a minimal contribution to spread a word about the community will help.
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Ask for help regularly from the first day of the community, even if you don’t have many users yet. Users will read your posts later and generate “deferred actions”.
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Ask for help sincerely.
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.