What Will Be Popular?

List your discussions by popularity.

Then go through each and identify the broad topic (or category) of each discussion. You should be able to create 5 to 10 distinctive topics from the top 30 to 50 discussions.

Now add the number of posts in each topic (you need to combine many) until you have an idea what topics appear most popular within the community.

Remove those that you guide people to when they join (e.g. introduce yourself).

This will probably give you something like the above. You will see a few big winners and then a long-tail of other topics with far fewer discussions.

In short, the same topics tend to repeatedly appear within most types of communities.

If you’re not sure what activities to host, which speakers to invite, what discussions to initiate, what sub-groups/categories to create, or what kind of content to write – target those that are at the most popular end of the spectrum.

The most exciting discussions usually come from a) combining the most popular categories or b) looking to see what’s new in each of the most popular topics.

You don’t have to guess what’s going to be popular. You can look to see what already is popular.

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