What should a community manager keep in mind when starting to invite the first users?
Inviting people to an empty site is risky. At the same time, there is no reason to wait until you have all the content on the platform. When you have some initial content that defines the topic of the community and the culture of interpersonal communication, it is the time to start attaining first users to the community. Making users get engaged and stay in your community will take some time. Throughout this period you will need to continue posting content on the platform.
Communities at different stages are interesting to different types of people. Users of a particular type join a community, help grow it and make it attractive to the next stage users, and then often leave the community. In the initial stage of a community our goal is to find such users who would want to create a lot of content on a platform that has little activities and organize the platform for others.
An online community operates correctly when it consists of people with mutually complementary interests who work together. The success of launching an online community largely comes down to the ability to maintain the balance of interests when there are still few users. The most critical problem in this regard is that usually the balance of interests is expressed in an imbalance in the number of people of different types. To keep the interests balanced we need to constantly monitor the community and attain users of a certain type based on the current needs.
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.