Once you launch your community, how do you get anyone to join and grow it?
Jon Bischke built a robust community on eduFire, the online video learning site that he founded. So I asked him to teach us. Here’s a paraphrased transcript of what he said:
I’d offer two pieces of advice:
Find your network’s seeds
The first one is that everyone has a social network, whether or not they have one on the web. Most of us know a few hundred people that can often the seeds of your community. So reaching out to them and asking them to reach out to people they know, that’s how a lot of the big social networks got their start.
Build with your diehards
The second thing is to find your passionate early adopters. People who come to your site, and identify with what you’re doing and feel strongly enough to be the champions of your site.
Within eduFire, we have 50-100 people that I would consider diehards. They’re on the site every day, posting to the forums, and welcoming new people to the site. Those are the types of people that, if you build relationships with them, really help grow the community.