How to create a sticky community website

Written by Brij

May 26th, 2007

Community forums have gone from nice to have to mandatory part of any online initiative. To successfully engage users in a meaningful and interactive way is a dream for any online management team. Doing that requires luck, hard work and lot of iterations.

Here are few tips which can act as a quick checklist to make sure your community initiatives are in-sync with user objectives:

Make sure content is relevant and dynamic. One trick is to think of it as a restaurant and patrons want to come and eat fresh. Any stale information will be treated with boredom and will discourage repeat visit.

Complement community forum with feedback tools. Polls, gallery, code snippet and puzzles are some good examples for technology oriented community forum.

Let audience get their sense of ownership. This is usually a tough call as its hard to give up control To seed trust you will have to let people run with the threads. Famous “benevolent dictator” comes handy here.

We will continue to chew over these tips and add some more as we learn more.

Let us know what is working for you?