- [Instructor] Figuring out how to scale
your online community is a great problem to have.
It means that your community is growing very quickly.
You'll know that it's time to scale your community
when you begin to encounter growing pains.
These are things like not having enough time
to respond to all the comments on your Facebook group,
rising level of spam or maybe all the new traffic
to your blog is causing your server to go down.
Growing pains are inevitable and are great indicators
of issues that need to be addressed.
Scaling may be necessary as your community grows.
Here are some ways that you can start scaling
your own online community.
We're going to go over remembering your why,
your community guidelines,
considering a dedicated community manager role,
creating subgroups, training your team,
and outsourcing content.
First, remember your why.
Take a step back and remember who your community
is for and your guiding principles.
Remind yourself why did you begin this community
in the first place.
Gaining clarity on your why
is going to help you move forward.
You may also need to redefine your why.
As your community grew, maybe that has shifted.
Community guidelines.
These are another thing that may have shifted as well.
Perhaps you need an update to your guidelines, your FAQ's,
and any other documentation that supports your group.
These will help reduce the amount of questions and inquiries
you have to personally answer.
Make sure to add anything that you're missing.
If you're receiving the same question over and over again,
add it to the documentation.
Also, a great idea to review
your signup and sign in process.
If you are using an owned platform,
make sure that this process is working
so that you're not receiving a whole bunch of inquiries
on how to sign in.
A dedicated community manager role.
This might be something that you consider,
but first, make sure that you have a clear role description,
goals and expectations for anyone stepping in to this role.
A community manager is a really powerful advocate
for your community.
You might consider hiring a community manager
from a place like Upwork
or looking within your community or organization.
A dedicated person can help field all the questions
and all the inquiries and all the concerns of your community
so that they're not always going to you.
It'll reduce the volume and boost up the way
that you can serve your community.
Subgroups are a really interesting way
to scale your community.
They offer more personalized topics and support.
And as your community grows and evolves,
you may want to create additional groups
or interest groups to give personalized support and contact.
A subgroup is simply a new group that you create
that links back to your original community.
And you might consider this when your group is thriving
and you're looking to expand,
or your members are asking you
to build out a separate group, because that happens as well.
An example of this is Reddit and subreddits.
So people sign up for Reddit,
but they subscribe to subreddits based on their interests.
When you're ready, simply create a new group
under that specific topic
and link it back to your original group and page.
Your community likely is going to know
what subgroups you could potentially create
so don't be afraid of asking them.
Train your team.
Consider finding volunteers to help run your community
and your subgroups.
If you're feeling really overwhelmed,
this is a great way to bring on additional resources.
Make sure to build processes for your team
on how to handle different aspects of your community.
How is your team going to handle complaints,
product questions, and any other inquiries.
And be sure to set up communication tools for your team
so that they can communicate as a team,
and they can go to each other to get questions answered.
Content.
Content takes up a huge amount of time.
So I want to get you thinking in terms
of user generated content.
This means that you're empowering members
to contribute content like blog posts, guides, videos,
anything that is going to bring value to your community.
As anything if you're scaling,
you're going to want to create a process
for finding these contributors and posting content.
An example would be, say your community lives
on your WordPress website.
You might grant your contributor access on the blog
so that they can log in and post their draft.
Then it's pending approval.
You go in and approve it and it posts.
Setting up collaboration with other content producers
is a really effective way to scale your content strategy
and it doesn't leave you always holding the bag
for creating exceptional content.
Even if it's not quite time to start scaling
your online community,
these best practices will help you get to the point
where if you do start to scale,
they'll help you run a more efficient community.