This is the Key to Growing an Online Community Quickly

It all starts here

Photo by Glenn Tan on Unsplash

Happy Thursday, y’all! Hope you’re having a great week. Right now, while you are thinking about it, please hit the Like button. It will help raise visibility for this issue on Substack, which will help the newsletter grow. Thank you!

Today let’s talk about the key area to focus on in order to quickly grow an online community. The Pareto Principle applied to online communities suggests that 80% of the interactions in your community will originate from just 20% of the members. Another theory suggests a 90/9/1 rule, saying that 90% of your community members will never contribute, only lurk. Another 9% will contribute an average amount, and 1% will be your ‘super users’ who drive most of the interactions among members.

Regardless of which stats you choose to believe, every community is different and YMMV. But the larger point remains: Few community members will ever contribute, but the ones who do, are quite valuable to the overall health of your community.

Since we accept that we want as many community members to contribute as possible, then we need to consider ways that we can make it as EASY as possible for members to contribute. THAT is truly the secret to growing an online community quickly. We need to put members in a place where they feel comfortable contributing.

Think of participation as a bar that members mentally have to clear. And the first time the bar will be the highest. So getting a member to contribute for that first time is crucial, as once a member has contributed for the first time, the chances of them contributing in the future increase significantly.

So we want to think about how we can lower the bar to make it as easy as possible for our community members to contribute. Look at the start of this issue. I asked everyone to please Like the issue, as that helps me by generating visibility. That’s a very quick and easy way for each of you to contribute, just click a mouse or tap your phone screen and it’s done.

I used to ask everyone to Like and comment. But then I realized that by doing that I was pairing an easy form of participating (clicking Like), with a hard one (leaving a comment). This could easily turn off someone on doing either. So I took away the harder form of engagement and just offered the easy one. With the understanding being if a member gets comfortable with the easy form of interaction (clicking Like), then it also lowers the bar for them engaging in the harder form of engagement (leaving a comment).

And BTW, let me just say that leaving a comment IS a hard form of engagement. It’s hard for me, I often find a new writer whose substack I want to support with a comment, but I read their issue and think ‘I don’t know what I can add here’. So don’t feel bad if you don’t comment that much or ever, that’s not your fault, it’s on me as the content creator to make it easier for you to comment.

Here’s how I applied the idea of making participation easier to an online community I built. From 2009-2019, I ran a chat on Twitter called #Blogchat. At its height, #Blogchat was not only the most popular chat on Twitter, but during its weekly Sunday night slot, it was often the most popular hashtag on all of twitter. In 2013 alone, #Blogchat had over 50,000 participants and the hashtag generated over a billion impressions.

There were a couple of reasons why participation was so high in #Blogchat that I think can help you when you are building your own community:

First, topics were mostly 101-level. I asked very basic blogging questions to encourage more participation. This made people feel more comfortable contributing. Once they started tweeting, then I could interact with them directly and we could drill down deeper into a subtopic and have a more robust conversation. But that doesn’t happen unless I lower the participation bar at the start by asking an easy question to answer.

Second, I adopted a strict ‘there are no dumb questions’ policy for #Blogchat. I made it clear to everyone that we all start at zero, and we all were at #Blogchat to learn from each other. Our community had the motto that there are no experts here, just learners. That helped put everyone at ease to share their thoughts, because they didn’t have to fear getting their hand slapped over leaving a ‘dumb’ comment. All participation had value and was valued.

Now to be fair, this is not the only way to grow a community, it is just helpful to increase participation quickly. There was another Twitter chat that took the opposite approach; Their topics were much more specialized, and as a result, they had far less participation than #Blogchat did. But their conversations were much deeper and more analytical. Which the moderators for that chat wanted. The potential problem with this approach is if you have a really small number of members driving this deeper conversation, if a few of them miss a chat, the conversation can really struggle to gain traction.

But above all, reward the behavior you want to encourage. I want more participation, so I look for ways to encourage more participation. I know from sharing my issues on Substack that certain of you are wonderful about engaging and supporting each issue. I go out of my way to engage on your content as well, to say thank you, and to also encourage you to continue to support my work.

So if you want to quickly grow your community, focus on simplifying participation for others. Think of it in terms of acceleration, pressing the gas helps your car quickly get up to speed. Once you have reached your desired speed, then you can let off the gas and focus on maintaining momentum.

Special 20% lifetime discount on paid Backstage Pass subscriptions

It’s down to the final week of the special LIFETIME 20% discount on the paid version of Backstage Pass. The first paid issue goes out next Thursday (August 1st). The discount ends on July 31st. On August 5th, I’ll have a post recapping what happened in my 2nd month on Substack.

Hope you have a wonderful weekend, be sure to click the Like button for me (thank you!)

And say Hi on Substack!

Mack