A friend of mine recently asked this question:
“On a whim, I started a college alumni group on LinkedIn (because there wasn’t one). With no effort on my part, it has grown to 513 members which I think is pretty solid (I also co-founded another group with 240 members, and founded 2 other groups that have less than 50 members each). The question I have is “now what”? What can I do with this group to grow it, create value for members, and become more than an icon in a LinkedIn profile. I’m trying to think of ideas that won’t become a full time job for, so perhaps soliciting for a “alumni of the month” story or creating a news letter from Alunmi supplied stories (I would just be an editor, not too hard).”
Great question, and some good suggestions to start with!
It got me thinking, what ELSE would I do to grow my LinkedIn community? After thinking a bit about it, I came up with 5 more ideas.
5 Ways to Grow Your Online Community
Create a Ning.com community for each group, and invite all the folks there to start there own conversation. Seed it with a few topics/posts, then invite folks to discuss things and create their own things. Then, set a few folks up as admins and let it do it’s own thing (with some moderation and commenting from you). While this used to be free, it now costs $20 or more a month. Still an excellent option if you’re not a programmer.
Create (and seed with ideas) a few topics on a LinkedIn group and get folks helping each other. The more people you can connect together virtually, the more you can help each other.
Create a live meet-up where everyone can get together and share things. There’s little better than getting together in person to make your online community sing.
Create special business cards just for the group, so when you meet up with someone who would “fit in” you could give them that card and invite them in.
Set up a free poll (one option is at http://surveymonkey.com and ask some questions of your existing group.
And one more way to grow your online community:
Create a free ebook that only members of your community get access to, or only members can contribute to. Great examples of this can be found in David Zinger’s Employee Engagement Network (which I am a member of).
What would YOU do to grow your online community?
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Phil
Congratulations on taking the leap and moving to this wordpress blog! Your energy, enthusiasm and passion for ‘making it great’ is irrepressible and wonderful, particularly when so many people have chosen a different direction. I wish you great success! I’d like to keep your link on my blogroll. Hit me back with a reply and tomorrow I’ll swap out the old URL for the new one!
Best,
Rick
Thanks Rick! Always so nice for you to stop by and say nice things!
Energy, enthusiasm and passion for greatness is what I am. I’m glad you enjoy and appreciate it. It means a lot to me! Thank you!
Wow, Phil, I’ve been away from your post just a few days and you’ve moved! I’ve always admired the great way blogs look on WordPress, and yours looks wonderful too. Word Press has more flow to it’s look, and it seems like you can do much more with the design.
I always look to you as an online pioneer, not just with this move, but of course with your up to the minute advice contained in this recent post on growing an online community. Thanks, Make It Great Phil!
Thanks so much Deb. I’m glad you like the looks of this place. It’s much easier to customize now
Happy to share a few tips with you too. They work for me, and I hope they work for you too!
Isn’t it funny how some of the biggest things grow from the smallest ideas? It’s the great thing about the ease-of-use that our online worlds give us.
Some other ways you can grow your community include:
* Twitter chats using designated hashtags. This allows your community to come together regularly, as well as involve others that might be interested.
* Facebook group. Use their forums, message boards, etc, to keep your group up-to-date with each other’s lives. Post videos, photos, links, etc.
* Start a group on Stumbleupon (http://stumbleupon.com) that lets you see what your friends and peers are recommending online.
There are a host of ways to grow your community and the best is, these ways keep on growing themselves as well.
Danny – Great ideas! I plan to explore Twitter and many of these other suggestions in future posts. What’s common sense to us is uncommon to so many others. Thanks for sharing yours with me and my community.
Sorry, but I disagree on everything you said.
In my opinion, these are the five rules to kill your community.
Create a Ning.com community for each group – and pay $20/month per community? With a bit of webdev effort you can create your own social network using a ready-made script. In addition, do you think that all your Linkedin members will bother to sign-up to another website?
Create a live meet-up – What if the community is internationally-based?
Create special business cards – The issue above applies again.
Set up a free poll – In this way you will just put off your members as they will be annoyed like every person who has to fill a “customer survey”
I have been a bit harsh as you rank first in google if your look for “how to grow your online community” and don’t think this blog should be there.
Jim
Thanks for your feedback Jim. It’s possible these could kill your community…or they could grow it if you do them right. It really depends on what the makeup of your group is.
Do you have any suggestions on how to grow your online community?
If you don’t have any ideas, how about you find some articles that you think are better and linking to them? I’d love to learn what you think are good suggestions for growing your online community.
Thanks for stopping by!