I’m a moderator of a smaller community. I’m posting quality content multiple times a day, and I posted about it in New Communities. The number of subscribers is low but it’s growing steadily.
Could you please give me some advice on growing this community? I don’t want to spam/flood or come off as rude or weird, but I really believe in it and think it would be useful to many people.
I think it just takes time. I’m also posting to a community that currently has 7 subscribers (and I think that includes me, haha) but I enjoy posting there since I care about the topic. Growth will come naturally, but I mostly care about exchanging ideas and just general conversation with other fans.
Constant work. Such online communities have an exponential growth pattern. So you probably have a certain amount of time after which you double.
This is obviously very apparent when you have 10k subs, and on the next day it is 10,1k. But when you are at 10 subs it can take days for the next to arrive.
Just go on posting and the thing will start to take off. If you stop, or other active members stop the community might die.
- Work it into the conversation when you’re talking to people elsewhere (I don’t mod any communities but am interested in seeing them grow and this has been the #1 successful tactic)
- Don’t be weird about mentioning it in general. For example, why does this post not say what your community is or have a link for people to follow?
- Don’t just post links that people can click on, think “huh” and then move on. Post questions or other interactive things to draw out lurkers.
- Team up with mods of related communities to maintain a list of “neighbours” that you all pin to make it easy for your users to find more stuff they’re interested in.
- Make sure to respond to anyone who does happen to wander in and leave a post or comment, don’t leave them hanging
- Advertise it on your other social media since presumably you’re hanging around people with the same interests
Thank you for your advice! I‘m trying to built a bass-related community over at !bassment@feddit.de. So if you’re reading this and moderate a music related Community, hit me up so we can cross link our Communities and work together!
Good luck! If you’ve got seen it yet, lemmyverse.net is a newer better interface for searching communities so you might be able to use that to find some likely candidates to reach out to.
Thank you, these are excellent tips! Btw here is the community: https://programming.dev/c/auai (!auai@programming.dev) - I didn’t want to mention it because I didn’t want my post to sound like cheap self-promotion, but I guess I’m a bit too shy in this regard.
The icon and the cover image are terrible, I’m planning to replace them later.
Remember most people are pretty new here and there’s no way for them to find new communities other than purposefully searching by keyword, or stumbling across a mention somewhere. So if it makes sense in context to give yours a shoutout, do it! If it’s relevant to the conversation you’re not spamming anyone, you’re literally helping them navigate.
Contact mods of related communities to see if you can ‘partner up’, e.g. a sidebar reference to each other.
Cross post to and from similar communities that you think would share users. Specifically use the built in crosspost function.
I made a post about it here: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/217550