TES Connect (Teachers and Education professionals) is one of the most successful online communities in the world. TES Connect has over 944,000 members publishing 3,770 posts across 100+ forum topics.
Look closely at the top 3 forums right now; Entertainment, Opinion and Personal.
Dwell on this. From the 108 different forums, the most popular are entertainment (worth a read), opinions and personal. This is significant.
Teachers, like members in your community, want to be entertained, give their opinion and have others care about them. These three are far more important than any individual topic.
There are thousands of elements that make every community unique, the topic, the people, the tone, the history, the design. However, it’s the handful of elements that appear in every successful community you need to pay attention to. This is one of them.
Whilst your topic is important, it’s far more important to keep members entertained, solicit their opinions and ensuring they’re talking about themselves.