To develop a successful community, you need to have a hook, a concept that will make your network truly unique. To define your hook, you need to answer a few questions:
- Who is the community for?
- What will the community be about?
- What will happen in the community?
- What is the goal of the community?
- How will you attract and sustain membership?
Let’s tackle these together.
Who is the community for?
You probably want to engage everybody at once. Resist that urge. Instead, use the rule of two qualifiers: you want to build a community for X who are or who do Y. For example, consider a community of backpackers who wants to share travel experiences, a community of engineers who love tinkering with mechanisms, or a community of gamers who are into cosplay, etc.
You can apply more qualifiers if you like, but make sure to use at least two. Focus your community on a smaller group of people who have a lot in common.
To make sure your NING network is accessed by the people who really belong to your tribe, you can enable Profile Questions. This feature allows you to ask your prospective network members any questions you like before they actually join your community. These questions show up at the registration stage. Besides providing you with useful information about members, the feature lets you automatically assign members to specific categories or groups based on their answers.
What is the community about?
Your community should be about things people are interested in and about the people who are involved with these things.
That means you’re not just covering the topic – this isn’t a newspaper, after all. You’re bringing together people who share the same passions. This is what makes it a community rather than an ordinary content site.
Your community is not just about the subject matter you’re interested in. It is about communication. That is why NING has provided users with comprehensive social networking tools. You could create a forum to let your network members discuss pressing issues, launch polls to get feedback. Or you could use Live Chat to talk to your members privately or in a chatroom with several people at once.
What will happen in the community?
What kind of events, discussions, and activities will take place on your network? What content will you share with the community? Make a list of ideas for the first couple of months. It is also a good idea to draw up a content plan and publishing schedule.
With NING, you can share all types of content, including articles, blog posts, photos, videos, and music. You can also create events to boost engagement and unite your network members around all forms of exciting activities.
What is the goal of the community?
It’s good to have a purpose. It doesn’t have to be big. For example, movie communities typically aim at publishing the latest movie news or finding out which flicks are worth watching. What benefits can your members yield from being a part of the community? Being the best or the quickest at something often works quite well.
For instance, you could start a blog and turn it into an authoritative knowledge hub to which visitors will turn for useful and engaging content time and again. Or you could set out to crowdfund an extraordinary idea of yours and bring it to life. For example, develop a product the entire community will benefit from (an ebook maybe?). You could even launch a charity fundraiser!
How will you attract and sustain membership?
Now connect the dots. Make a list of your target members. You can begin with your existing contact base or people talking about the topics you are interested in on different social media channels. Reach out to these people and invite them to become members of your community. Explain to them what the community is about and why it is worth joining.
As your NING network continues to grow, accumulating a wealth of quality content, you can expand your influence online thanks to the Social Sharing features. With their help, your content can be shown on other social platforms, including Facebook and Disqus. Thus, more people will get to know about your network through social shares and likes.
Getting your concept right
If you get the concept right, your community will thrive. Take some time to develop a network concept that will attract high-quality membership, positive engagement, and community-driven dialogue that will propel the evolution of your NING network.
