Howto create a successfully virtual community
Virtual communities are web pages where its visitors can contribute and interact among them generating new content on the site.
Virtual communities are very valuable cause the high volume of quality trafic they attract.However, create successfully communities is not an easy work. It depends of different factors like the community topic, its virality, marketing, and so on.
I’m going to describe the first steps in order to do it. I’ll not tell you the topics you must choose or the marketing plan you’ll should follow, the target of this article are the people that owns a virtual community or is building one and wants to turn it into a succesfull community. We’re integrating these features into moneytrackin.com
1. Customization
Provide tools to your user in order to allow them to customize his entered data (avatars, foot signatures, links to their blogs/websites, …). The aim is to provide a sensation of property, that the user feels that the data he’d entered like his own.
2. Ranking
Everybody likes the competitions, mainly if you’re the champion. Provide a public hall of fame with figures of the most active users can be a great incentive for the users to do more effort on the site.
3. e-mail bulletins
Monthly bulletins are also a great tool to get the attention of inactive users again. You must generate a custom bulletin for each user and show them some information of their interest to catch its attention. A great example are Xing’s bulletins, they always accomplish that I login to the service again, even when I forgot it completely ;)
4. In search of micro-elites
You don’t need thousands of people contributing to a topic, you just need 5 or 10 people who really understand it deeply (source). Try to find this micro-elite and incentive it in order to participate in the community. The results will be better and sure their contributions will attract the big crowd.
These are my opinions, of course they can be wrong/incomplete and I hope that you help me to complete this article in the comments. Help me to turn this blog in a successfully virtual community! ;)
