Seeding Your Online Community Without Lying to Your Members
Last week, I wrote about the practice of creating fake accounts to seed a community and why you should never lie to your community.
But, “getting a community going is hard,” some might say. “You need activity to entice people to join,” they might also say. “If I can’t lie to my potential members, what can I do?”
In short? Actual work.
It isn’t easy to get a community going. That’s true. It’s also true that one of the factors that determines the attractiveness of your community is the activity that people see when they first visit it. There is nothing wrong with seeding, as long as you treat your members with respect. Let’s talk strategy.
Participate Yourself
Just because you shouldn’t post as 200 different people doesn’t mean that you can’t post as one person – you. Participating has numerous benefits and activity is just one of them. Some people are concerned about dominating the conversation and that’s fine. But, you can participate without dominating.
Get Your Team Involved
If you are starting a community for a company, members will usually like to see people from the company in the community. Ask them to get involved and to participate. Try to guide them in what they should share. Give them examples and direction, if they need it.
Friends and Family
Even if you don’t have a team, you do have friends and family, right? They can help. If possible, you want to identify the people that have the strongest interest in the subject matter of your community. If you are starting a video game forum and your sister loves video games, that is a good match. If your brother hates them, then that isn’t a good match.
These people know you and will be willing to help you. It’s not the hard sell you would have to make to a total stranger.
Contact People That Could Add Value
No matter the space that you are looking to cover, there are likely people that you know of that could add tremendous value to your community. Maybe they are not a friend or a person that you know well, but someone who has knowledge that you respect. It can’t hurt to ask them, as long as it is done in a very low pressure, non-spammy way.
As Derek Powazek says, don’t invite just major influencers. Powazek cites Robert Scoble, a well known technology enthusiast. But, for every Robert, there are a thousand passionate technology people who don’t have his massive audience or the droves of people demanding a chunk of his time. They might be more interested in an invitation to your community. Those invitations should be made privately and respectfully.
Use Your Current Outlets to Recruit People
Another way to find people is to look at the current areas where you engage and have permission to post a message advertising your new community. This could be your blog, your Facebook page, Google+ profile, your email newsletter or something like that. Tell people what you are doing and ask if anyone is interested in joining in. It should not be a shared space, like an online forum, but a space where people have to opt-in to you. Spamming other communities makes you a poacher and poachers are the bad guys.
Curate
Another great point Powazek makes is that you should curate your early members. That’s a great way to sum up the proper way to go about seeding. Curation. Invite the right people, tell them what you are doing, why you are inviting them and how much their participation would mean to you.
When you do get those first few people, appreciate them, encourage them and spotlight them. Online communities by 1 person at a time. Never forget that.
It’s not easy to start a community and not everyone will be successful. But, through the methods we’ve discussed today, you can greatly improve your chances of getting your community off the ground in a way that won’t come back to bite you later.
I think when starting an online community, the frame of mind you need to be in is knowing that it’s going to take a lot of hard work, a lot of dedication and a LOT of patience.
If I had a penny for every time someone told me “starting an online community is easy” I wouldn’t need to create one myself, I’d already be rich beyond my wildest dreams lulling about on a tropical beach. of course, I hear this from people who’ve never started one.
Too many jump into it thinking they’ll create an awesome website and within a few weeks it’ll be the biggest buzz on the internet. Unsurprisingly, they lose heart and close their doors a few weeks after they realize it doesn’t work like that.
It took me 3 years to make my last community a success. 3 years of none-stop tinkering, learning, posting content, for the first year I was basically sat in the chat room by myself 12-14 hours all day every day welcoming every new person that came in, conversing with them about things that don’t even interest me but interested them.
I had a system that I would post 5 new topics per day and 10 new replies per day in the forums.
About 2 years after opening the community was self sufficient, teaming with life, a 1000 new posts every day in the forums, dozens of people in one of the chat rooms at any given time, after 3 years I deemed it a success as I could actually leave the community for a week or two weeks, return and it’d just be how I left it (whereas previously if I needed to take a break, site activity would dip in my absence).
That’s just the amount of hard work, dedication and patience it requires.
My new community is only 4 months old – very young in its infancy so I’m starting all over again like before. No black hat, no under-handed tactics, no deceiving members – just the same as last time. Pure hard work.
Great blog post, Patrick, it’s important for people to learn there is -no- replacement for time, dedication and nurturing.
Thanks for the comment, Tommy. That is great to hear.
Patrick