This page is a collection of information and resources intended to examine the different types of growth and how you can leverage those to grow your own online community. Not all of these approaches will work in every situation – every community has its own quirks and challenges. You will need to experiment with a variety of approaches to find something that works.

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FeverBee Resources

Types of community growth
Replenishment, expansion and organic growth, and when each is most appropriate.

The online community lifecycle
Using the lifecycle you can identify exactly where you are now and where you need to go next.

Techniques to get more people to join your community
A list of best ideas (with examples) for growing you community.

A model for getting people to join and participate in your community
This model explains why members don't participate in communities and how to get them more engaged.

The Sweet Spot framework
The key to community growth is hitting the sweet spot that combines what members need, what brands want, and what communities offer.

A campaign based approach to growing a community
There is a process to growing a community. It’s not something that should be left to chance. It should be part of a coherent community management strategy. Ideally growth should be campaign based, which means a heavy focus upon growth over a short-period of time.

Growth channels
Don't rely on search results for growth. This attracts information-seekers, few of whom will become regulars. Rely upon the three channels you can control – direct marketing, word of mouth and promotion.

How to find your community's founding members
Successful communities are built from a list of contacts with whom you already have a strong relationship. These people become your founding members. A list of contacts is not the same as a list of customers.

Criteria for inviting new members
Don't invite everybody to join your online community at the same time. You wouldn’t invite people with nothing to contribute to a business meeting would you? Set a list of criteria and invite people in small groups, based on that criteria.

Why people aren't joining your community
Don’t bribe people to join your community. No freebies for registering. Instead decide what the problem is and change your approach. Your audience isn't joining your community because either: they don’t know your community exists, or they know your community exists, but they don't feel like joining.

Community growth hacking
When you launch a community, you face achicken and the egg problem. Nobody wants to join a community until there is activity there. The easiest way to get a community off the ground is simply to build up a large number of existing contacts before you launch the community.

Some basic non-promotional growth tactics
A list of growth tactics suggested by existing community members.

The right and wrong way to grow a community
Rich examines what is going wrong in his favourite example of a terrible online community.

Themes, discussions, activities, growth
A model to bring in new members by defining a theme and creating a collaborative paper for distribution.

Growth by autonomy
Members feel autonomous when they feel understood and accepted, when they are given options, when they can openly express how they feel, and when they are encouraged and supported to act in line with their beliefs. You can leverage autonomy to grow your community.

Cluster growth
Don’t randomly approach people, target specific clusters of people you want to join and then create specific content to appeal to those clusters.

Using the right symbols to attract the right members
To reach any specific audience you need to flood your community with symbols that appeal to the group you’re trying to reach. Embed these symbols in community.

Growth in established communities
Identify specifically where members are dropping out. Once you identify, specifically, where people are dropping out you can design a precise intervention to change this.

Growth in mature communities
You can't directly invite people to join forever, you need to encourage growth from existing members. You need to penetrate through the existing connections of your target audience.

Other Resources

The right way to grow an online community: 3 examples
A study of growth in currently successful online communities, identifying what works and what doesn’t work for them.

Exploring critical growth in WikiProjects
Fledgling online communities often hope to achieve critical mass so that the community becomes sustainable. At what point does a community achieve critical mass and how does the community know this? Furthermore, online communities become sustainable when they achieve a mass of what? We explore this question by analysing growth in a large number of online communities on Wikipedia.