Aurora Community Structure Best Practices
When you first launch a community, you may think you need to create a structure sophisticated enough that it will accommodate all of your needs as the community grows. However, in this case, building in anticipation of growth might not be the best strategy. For instance, it might be tempting to create every possible category and board you might need, but this is counterproductive. The initial structure for the community should be appropriate for the expected volume of traffic. Essentially, this means you should start small and add containers and boards as needed over time.
Ensure your structure includes topics and interests relevant to your members. As you begin building your community, focus on creating content that indexed by organic search (Google, Bing, etc.). Your goal is for the community to scale up and to build critical mass.
You want between 5 and 10 new posts per day on each board to effectively attract members to keep coming back. When launching the community, most companies issue invitations via email to alert members to the community. About 10% of the people who see an invitation will visit the community. Within 6 months, you can expect between 30 and 40% of your target audience to visit the community at least once. Of those who visit, 10% will post at least once per month. Although the percentage remains steady at 10% per month, it’s not the same 10% each month.
This means that you need 5,000 and 10,000 invitees within the first 6 months to support a single board. As a result, the fewer topics you have at launch, the easier it will be to achieve that essential feeling of activity. The way you organize your community depends to a large extent on its goals. A general purpose discussion community can be organized by whatever topics make sense. A support community is likely to be organized by products or product lines, depending on the products being supported.
For example, if you’re supporting computer peripherals, you might have a category for each type of device, with forums or other boards for hardware, software, platforms, and connection. This community has a large number of categories but relatively few topics in each category.
If you’re supporting cell phone users, you might have a category for features you offer, one for customer care issues, and a third for phones. This community has fewer categories but more boards per category.
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