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Let'z grow a digital community II

· Community

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.

Different situations render different approaches to grow a digital community. As such, having a digital community formation strategy not only helps you to execute efficiently but also enables you to reflect and adapt according to emerging changes to the situation at hand. For more details on how to craft a good strategy, please refer to [ Crafting a digital community formation strategy ] . Once you have a plan, execute it. While you are executing it, you always need to remember the following 2 elements of a thriving digital community.

Be relevant and rewarding

Users go to a digital community to seek and contribute information so you have to ensure the content in the current site are relevant. Creating relevance for your digital community also means educating and enforcing digital norm guidelines. It also means removing stale contents while updating new ones. Updating new content can originate from active influencers so you also need to have a good reward mechanism to support the ongoing contribution from these folks. For more details on creating the right reward mechanism, please refer to [Rewarding to grow a digital community] . 

Track and manage

To ensure your digital community grows according to plan, you need to set measurable goals. By putting the actual number against the expected number, you can evaluate the progress of your plan and tweak accordingly. What is the conversion rate? What is the frequency usage rate? What is the multiplier effect of community growth on the outcome of building the community in the first place? For more details on what metrics to set, please refer to [ Setting the right metrics to grow your digital community], which will be released soon.

By tracking the right metrics, you can then start managing the development of your community. Managing the digital community is about understanding the structural and dynamic drivers of the communal activities and you need a team for that. For more details on digital community management, please refer to [ Now you launch your community strategy, what's next].

Everything takes time

Once you accomplished all of the above, you can expect the community to grow. However, you have to remember that you are growing a community. This process is similar to growing a plant and it takes time.

Just in case, you did not read the previous article, you can click on the previous icon to read part 1 of this series.