Building a Creative community can be a challenge, maintaining it can be even more so. This is how we built a Local Creative community of 600+ people within a year.
Creating an online community is easy, all you need to do is jump onto the internet and google it. So you start a facebook group and invite a handful of friends, now what?
1. Make sure you know your niche!
Are you serving photographers, models, all of the above? This is your primary focus and should have all of your attention. When you create a broad group for a generic crowd, it has the potential to grow quickly but becomes less valuable to those who came to learn and eventually terms into spam city.
2. Content Curation
A key to unlocking the potential of your group is deciding what content to post and knowing your audience (back to step one if you do not know your audience). Once you have found an audience content curation becomes easy. As you will most likely have between 0-20 friends in your facebook group, you need to give them a reason to invite their friends. Does your group provide a service, education or entertainment? If not, then your group is bound to catch fire and fall off the cliff.
Content should be interesting, it should be able to spark a conversation or be opinion for opinion pieces. Know that when you start a group you will have to constantly write, create and share content all day every day to show people they should participate and talk to one another an share their own content.
Once you do this eventually the group will reach a certain number of users that will share their own content, ask their own polls and the group will grow organically after this.
Usually, in a group, roughly 30% or less will participate in the discussions. Meaning for every 100 people in your group, only 30 will be brave enough to speak their mind or join the conversation.
3. IRL and Online how do we blend them?
Local groups or communities that live online are harder to push to real life but if you have passionate members and interest in events or group sessions your life will be easier. Workshops, tutorials, and meetups are incredibly powerful tools to help you foster development and growth for the group.
When people see the reason for the group and that there is a higher purpose, the community gets tightly knit, friendships develop. Blending these two things together is fairly straightforward, Video content, live streaming and becoming as transparent as possible with your group. This allows your group to not only see who manages the group but also get a sight into what you do and what you want to do, building authenticity and helping others is ensures longevity.