Why Do You Want To Connect With Those People?
Almost everyone can list people they want to connect with. It’s usually people like themselves.
Very few of these connections pan out over the long-term.
In communities, this leads to a LOT of inactive sub-groups.
While members certainly want to connect with people like themselves in the moment, you soon find they don’t set aside much time to do it.
Identifying a commonality (who do you want to connect with?) isn’t enough. You also need to go further and find out why they want to connect with these people. These are the problems any sub-group should solve.
The answers might include:
- Emotional validation and support.
- Tips and tricks from people who have overcome the problem?
- Build contacts for a future career change?
- Getting inside information
- etc…
Now when you make an introduction or create a sub-group, don’t leave it with “I think you should meet”. Set a clear purpose, highlight what each person can contribute, and set a timeline too. Close down the groups that aren’t working.
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What do you mean by inactive sub-groups?
Very Interesting article.
What do you do with the content once you shutdown some of the subgroups? What if people are still reading it, but not posting on it anymore?
Off the cuff, I’m wondering why you’re shutting down a subgroup if it’s still being read? I think I may not have a clear understanding of the way your community works.
I think it might help to define what we mean by sub-group.
Are sub-groups private areas in a forum? Are they groups like on Discourse? We probably all have a slightly different definition.
Piper, If I have a subgroup that has multiple strings of posts and google
analytics shows that I have multiple people coming to that post, but not
other posts, I would want to preserve that post getting lots of google
hits. I might would delete the group and some of the posts, but keep the
ones that are doing well and being read. It’s some of the post that are
bringing value, but others are not.
Could you not disband the group without deleting the content?
Can you merge the content with an existing group or with the rest of the site?
Yes we could. We could put it into more of a general discussion area.
This is an interesting concept for communities. I think the more they’ll understand on why they connect with people, the more they would want to keep visiting and communicating within the thread. I agree with @Chris_Detzel when it comes to old or inactive threads. I think it’s best to keep them especially if there’s a lot of valuable info that people can keep coming back to.