A Few Hundred Posts (And The Small Bang)

You might also notice from yesterday’s post that a community needs a few hundred posts per month to sustain any level of viability.

A challenge with any client when we begin a community project is to ramp up quickly to 300+ posts per month.

If you’re falling below that level, you’re probably not going to make it.

This sounds like a bigger number than it is.

The secret to this isn’t to have a huge number of members, but to ensure that the members you do have actively participate. This might be 300 people sharing 1 post per month or 50 people sharing 6 posts per month (the former is preferable).

Within the first two weeks, you should know how often people participate and how many members you’re going to need to hit that target.

This means you need to aggressively follow through on the inception stage of the online community lifecycle. Reply to discussions, @mention other members to be involved, initiate new discussions, nudge people to participate, uncover and talk about problems members have.

You don’t need a big bang launch, but you do need a small bang to quickly reach a few hundred posts per month.