You can’t expect to have successful groups within a community platform until the community itself is thriving.
This sounds pretty obvious, but judging by the number of groups being created in communities attracting just a handful of posts a day, it’s clear it’s being violated often.
People don’t need intimacy or a unique place to chat if there isn’t much chatter happening already. Each new group is like starting a new community. If you can’t get the public area thriving, there’s not much hope of getting the private area going either.
The rules for creating a group should be simple:
1) Are we getting hundreds of posts a month in our public community?
2) Are members screaming for a private place to have a different type of discussions?
If the answer to both isn’t an obvious yes, don’t start a group.