Why should a community manager seed initial content to an online community?
The ultimate goal of the initial stage of any community is to gather active, interesting people on the site who are enthusiastic about the topic and mission of a community. For many online communities, the “loop” of community formation looks like this: interesting content attracts people, they see an opportunity for self-fulfillment in the community and start creating new interesting content that attracts more people who create more interesting content and so forth.
Let me emphasize that we create content not for the sake of content itself, but to attract early users. The point where we have enough users that they are creating enough content to stay engaged is the end point of this stage of community development.
More precisely, there are two goals for seeding the initial content.
-
Attract early users. Plan your content strategy carefully and beforehand. The way you write the content and the topics you write about will attract people who will write about the same thing in the same way.
-
Create opportunities for action. Users will act on your platform only if two requirements are satisfied.
- There is an opportunity for action, so users can show off their skills.
- Users feel the urge to take action here and now.
It is typical for community managers to seed the very initial content from different accounts. Doing so we set the culture of interpersonal communication in the community. In the future users will understand the behavioral norms of the community by reading through existing posts.
The narrower the range of the topics and the fewer places where discussions take place at the beginning of the community, the faster users will start to find each other and help each other. Until users find each other naturally, you will need to organize connections manually and act as a regular user in some way every now and then.
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.