How To Spot Your Community Is In Trouble: 8 Red Flags

Your online community wont die overnight. That never happens. Most communities end with members gradually drifting away.

There are some clear danger signals that your community is going downhill, these are a few to watch out for:

1. No new posts in 24 hours. If your community goes an entire day (except Christmas) without a single interaction you’re on the brink of failure. Push the panic button. Engage heavily in one to one interactions to inject activity.
2. Key members have gone missing. Name your top 10 members. Have any of them been posting less frequently recently? Why? Find out and adapt.
3. Less members are joining. Community members are transient, they get jobs, move location, start families. You need fresh blood to keep the community active. Regularly measure the number of new members joining, when it dips (or slows) take action to recruit new members.
4. A new rival community is rapidly gaining momentum. If you see a new community in your field rapidly gaining momentum, it means you’re not providing something these members need.
5. Posts go unanswered. The lack of conversation is a clear flag something is wrong. When posts start going unanswered, people begin to drift away.
6. Declining sector/topic/passion. UK-CT is a dying community for a video game which is over 10 years old. It’s entire audience has moved on to other games. It’s niche is dying, it didn’t stick with the players.
7. Lack of friendliness. Whilst arguments are important, friendliness is more important. Do members seem less friendly recently? Do they lack familiarity with each other and previous community discussions? Do they know how the top members in a community are?
8. Boring discussions. Subjective, but important. Do the discussions feel like they’re less interesting recently? Is there a poor quality of things to talk about?

Keep an eye for these signals and react aggressively when you spot one. Don’t be passive, by the time you spot a signal, it might already be almost impossible to reverse the problem.

Comments

[Terry]

This is great advice Rich! I've shared this post on LinkedIn and Twitter! =)

[Brandon Cox]

On your point #6: "If you see a new community in your field rapidly gaining momentum, it means you’re not providing something these members need."...

I'd have to agree, but throw in that it could also be that you aren't doing well on the promotion and connecting side. In other words, maybe your tools are just as good, but nobody knows about you.

[lenNY's Yankees]

All good points. I'll be following on RSS

[L. C. Sterling]

Very good post, except it's "fewer" members, not "less" ...

(One of the very bad aspects of the Web, propagating poor and poorer grammar.)

Thanks for the list.

[P D Webb]

"If you see a new community in your field rapidly gaining momentum, it means you’re not providing something these members need."

Although not new, Facebook is hard to compete with. We have a wildlife community, but Facebook has a wildlife cadre of members that number in the 10s of 1000s, with major leaders in the conservation field present and active. All the big guys are there, and their big organizations with fan pages and Cause Apps

I admin a premium Ning community that use to be reasonably active. Every time we added something new that got people excited, the program changed so that function no longer worked.

The killing blow was when people couldn't get to their own pages using IE, for 6 or so weeks. I tried to encourage them to use Firefox, but people don't like to be cornered into a browser they weren't familiar with, in order to surf a community.

Telling them it was a superior browser was not effective when our community was the only place IE didn't work for them.

They found Facebook to be IE compatible and never came back. We keep the community in case people burn out on FB. We are looking at Joomla CB to run on our own host in the interim, to eliminate the $50 a month it will cost to keep our community the way it has been all along.

I guess we are suffering from all 8 flags, but it's hard to find people who have never heard of Facebook, and the crux of the matter boils down to:
People go, where people are...

Thanks for the posts though

[Alex_Vermeulen]

Se a sua comunidade online não está indo bem, vale a pena ler este artigo, vai direto ao ponto! Sem teorias mirabolantes.

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