Building Online Communities - They Have To Be Maintained

Friday, March 14th, 2008

Categories: Online Communities

Like many organisms, online communities need to be maintained and catered to. Communities that grow old have the potential to go stale, recess or even vanish completely. What can you do to avoid this terrible scenario?

Listen to what it is that the community wants and cater to them. These are your customers these are the people you are to looking to please.
Remain active in your own community. If it doesn’t seem like someone’s there for them for their own peace of mind, they may begin to feel helpless.
Expand to similar niches using your existing community to leverage your second community. It never fails to have a back-up plan.
Add Small Features - Where would Facebook be without applications? Things wouldn’t be as interesting as they are now. (I’m discounting the fact that there are a few people like me who minimize every application they see).
Avoid Large Scale Changes - Users will learn to love their forum theme or ad placements, large scale changes, although you may think they will please new users, will dissatisfy your bread and butter members.

That’s all for now, hope that helps.