Every virtual community starts off with just one person – usually the person who starts the community. At this critical stage what happens next can make all the difference between whether a community flourishes or flounders.
The snowball effort within virtual communities is the ability for a community to grow quickly. The creator of a new community will have to spend days or even weeks inviting people to join, participating in the forum and ensuring that lurkers become members by providing quality, informative and educational material.
Eventually as new members enter and invite others the community will then begin to grow but this will only happen if that new member believes that this is a community worth promoting.
If two members invite two new members every day exponential growth will be experienced by the network as 2 becomes 4 and 4 becomes 8 and 8 becomes 16.
To ensure this happens quickly it helps if the following happens when starting a virtual community
• It is started by someone with a large network of people who know, like and trust him/her
• The network has an established group of offline members they can invite to take advantage of their online community
• The “what’s in it for me” factor is very obvious for members e.g. you allow them to start their own blog, advertise their business, work together as a mastermind and help each other etc
• The network creator knows a large number of “sneezers” – people who are sneezers have their own large group and will happily invite their members to join your network when you ask them. If you approach 5 sneezers who run groups with 600 members each then you have the potential of reaching out to 3000 potential members.
There is nothing worse than a computer with only two members on the inside or a new community that contains only 3 members in the last 4 weeks!
This is why having a clear plan about why you are starting your virtual community, who will benefit from being a member and how you will work towards bringing in your first 100 members is vitally important.
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