Build Your Community: Turn your connections into a powerful online community

Should members be allowed to swear in the community?

Organic search traffic. If your community is public and searchable, you should see around a 10%–15% increase in visitors arriving by search traffic each month.

advantages. They are relatively easy to get started, very useful to members, and can help you support thousands, even millions, of people without a paid support team.

One approach is to select members by their level of activity.

No ongoing conflicts. Online debates often continue forever as two sides become increasingly entrenched in their own views.

The most obvious way to find out what your audience wants is to ask them.

Keep social density high (but not too high). Social density is the level of activity that takes place within any given area of the community. The social density has to be enough to sustain a critical mass of activity (i.e. people need to see the questions from each other to answer them), but not so high for it to be overwhelming.

One hundred contributing members per month (i.e. members starting or replying to a discussion). Three hundred monthly posts (or about ten posts per day). Ten new registrations per day.

the community in November 2015, Airgetlam has contributed more than 20,000 responses to the community – that’s about 166+ days of full-time labour. This kind of extreme volunteering is a common (and yet still strange) phenomenon in communities.