Tips for online groups
- Configure the online with other leaders and your first members
- Notification settings can be important for encouraging the pace of engagement you want, while enabling individuals to tune the communication they want from the group.
- Determine how you’ll manage and moderate conversations
- One of the biggest mistakes is leaving a group with no moderation.
- Start testing out the engagement experience before inviting more people.
- Maybe you can duplicate content to different platforms – you will have two (or more) different groups with the same name, with different audience (because people will choose the most useful platform for them).
- Admin & Group Manager Roles
- When your group is not very large, you can manage it by yourself only, but when it it has more than 1000 members - you need more admins and moderators. You can give the admin or moderator role as a reward for most useful answers or for most active members.
- Pre-populate with some content
- Your intro & biography
- Some useful links
- Actual news etc.
- A question or survey
- Soft launch the online space for a smaller group of leaders and people you may have spoken to in the beginning of your process of getting members.
- Rally the people who are part of the very beginning discussions and to help execute any larger launch plans & communication plans.
- Groups can get to memberships of thousands of people
"Information has an amazing property. When you share it, you don't lose it. And others still get it." - Aleksandr Lapygin, ROSECO, ГИП ГИПу друг (GIP2GIP friends)
- Encourage new people to introduce themselves, post something on their minds, and ask questions.
- Encourage other members to engage with new members, seek to make specific introductions
- Positive reinforcement can go a long way
- Conversations can be rapid and engaging. The pace and tone of the group can be set by moderators.
- You might encourage certain people to engage or introduce people
- Moderation + Admin
- Clear rules help you moderate and keep conversations productive.
- Remove SPAM immediately or people will leave the group
- Large groups might end up having 3-7 moderators, with at least one of them online constantly
- Surveys are a good tactic to spur engagement (e.g. «What is your opinion about…», «What software do you use for this purpose», «How long have you been in this position»
- Some things that kill online community: too many marketing posts, only job listings/ recruiters, lack of moderation and community norms that enables toxic people & conversations to take root.
- The online platform should have tools and automation that help you see, organize, and manage the members who are part of the group - and the content that is shared within the group over time.
- All the links and files are collected automatically, and everybody can find and use all the information later.
- Content/ knowledge management: As the group engages, you may develop and identify especially helpful resources.
- Pin or aggregate those resources for easy access.
- Link back to key resources or conversations as you engage and moderate.
- Example: Facebook groups include tabs for:
- Files that are shared + allows you to create files
- Media (photos and videos) + allows you to create albums
- Member management:
- Give active members more moderation privileges
- Publish/highlight the list of members in some way as a community tool
- Reach out to people who haven’t been active in a while
- Don't be afraid to switch platforms if it's not working for you & your members.
Story from the Autodesk Group Network. There was a case when Anton Ilichev’s «IntC3D» Civil3D chat was launched in WhatsApp firstly. As I remember, it’d existed for about a year, until it was bombarded with spam. There was more than 100 members, when Anton decided to move to Telegram. Not everyone had Telegram accounts, but as I remember everybody installed Telegram to be able to communicate with colleagues without spam, and now he has more than 700 members in his group. The migration took about a week, not more.
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