What should a community manager keep in mind when they are inviting people to participate in their online community?
One of the ways to attain first users is to manually invite people yourself. Use existing communities, Facebook groups, chats and other places where people who could potentially be interested in your project. On these sites, you need to identify those who create a lot of useful content and contact each of them individually asking if they want to join your community.
Some things to consider.
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Look for specific types of people that you lack at the moment in terms of the balance of interests. The community must provide opportunities to act right away for the people you invite.
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Invite people gradually to be able to correct shortcomings if you have any.
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Invite those who write a lot. Contact them first.
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Send personal invitations. Create an invitation template that briefly outlines the mission of your community and the experience awaiting users on the platform. Review all messages of the person you want to contact and tailor your template based on their interests. Greet the person by their username, describe where you found their contact information, explain why you decided to write to them particularly.
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Personalize an invitation based on the user’s role in the community. Different types of users see the value a community gives them in different ways.
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Be ready to discuss your community and answer the follow-up questions, talk in detail about the mission and the current audience.
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Respect people’s choices. Don’t get into an argument if they turn you down.
Looking for people and inviting them personally is one of the most time-consuming ways to grow a community. At the same time, it usually has the best conversion rate. Most of the people one invites will visit the community and try to do something. People usually are happy to help if you offer them something actionable and interesting.
Please note that most online communities have an imbalance among the most active participants towards experts who usually help others. Such people rarely start discussions themselves. In order for the community to work properly and people to stay engaged, besides inviting experts you need to simultaneously attract those who will initiate discussions, most probably, through other channels.
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.