Online Community Management For Dummies®

Chapter 5

Getting Started with Your Online Community

In This Chapter

• Working with other communities
• Pinpointing your membership
• Picking up operating tips

You can't take any action within your community without knowing something about them. It's important to learn who you're readers are, who you're selling to, who makes up an audience, and exactly why the people in your community are joining up. If you have no desire to learn anything about the people who gather in your networks, you may as well close shop right now.

Learning about people goes way beyond knowing how they like to drink their coffee. Knowing demographics, such as age, sex, income range, location, education and career experience, can also help you pinpoint the majority of your community members' wants and needs. For example, you wouldn't run the same promotional campaign for 20-year-olds that you would for the over-50 crowd. You also wouldn't market to a high-end community the same way you would a working class crowd.

In this chapter, I tell you what you need to know to get your community off the ground and running.

Finding Your Target Audience Online

Though your community may be diverse, you can't target them without finding some sort of common ground for the majority.

• If 75 percent of your community eats cereal for breakfast, that's common ground.
• If 80 percent of your community is over the age of 36, that's ...