Online Communities Handbook: Building Your Business and Brand on the Web

Recruitment Strategies

With the millions of websites on the Internet, your target users are unlikely to land on yours unless you take steps to help them find it.

If you are building a closed community for research purposes, you might only need a few hundred users, combined with a high level of staff involvement. Your primary intention might be to have ongoing communication between your brand and a select group representative of your target customers. In this case, it is probably not your priority to maintain a constant level of activity in your community or to create a momentum for viral growth.

However, most other community models require a larger population to function. You will need to achieve a minimum level of activity and content in order ...