TAKE THE TOUR
See how easy it is to create your new community at Fave, by taking a tour of the major features.
Built from the ground up to make creating and managing your community as simple as possible, you'll want to kiss your old group goodbye.
Decide on a name for your community and what you would like the URL to be, such as www.favester.com/mycommunity. Then you can brand your community with its own avatar and cover image in Settings.
Tip: You can always change the name of your community later, but not the URL.
Time to start growing your community! You can invite your friends via email, or if you have a larger community, you can upload a batch of email addresses to process. Otherwise, you can always distribute your community URL on your website or social media.
Tip: Using your existing online presence to get the word out is usually the most effective.
Channels are distinct topic sections within your community. Every community starts with a General channel, but you can create as many channels as you like. For example, you might want to have channels for Support or News or Announcements. You can even make some of the channels private.
Tip: Start with just a couple of main channels first - you can always add more later.
It's time to spread the word about your new community. The best way to do this is to take advantage of your existing audience. It's not always fun to bombard your friends and contacts about something you've created... but it works!
Your social media profiles are a great place to start... then you can become more active and try reaching out to influencers such as YouTubers, webmasters, and well-known fans of your topic. Don't spam, though!
The first 100 community members are always the hardest, but stick at it, and you'll get there.
There's an amazing person behind every little avatar. That person may be experiencing joy, pain or frustration and they're giving the group a gift of their precious time by writing a post or comment. Isn't that awesome.
Encourage your community to treat each member as a special person. Look for opportunities to help them, support them, and engage with them at every opportunity.
That's what builds loyalty and trust. That's what builds a community.
Cultivate a winning culture in your community by setting standards and an example for everyone to follow.
Treat people how you want to be treated. Respond to someone's question, take the time to say hi, remember particular things about them and then use it to engage them in conversation, encourage people, offer advice and joke around.
Be positive. Being positive and encouraging in your community naturally draws people to you and opens the door for real friendship.
It's important to have a number of trusted moderators to help manage anything that could go wrong. Having moderators on hand to help deal with situations can help avoid anything escalate out of control. However, moderation doesn't have to be a reactive process, only focusing on what could go wrong.
Moderators can also perform a variety of essential tasks including helping to steer the direction of the community, stimulate discussions by asking what members think about important topics, solicit responses to discussions by helping to find people to respond to every discussion and nudging people to take the actions you want by emphasising the kind of posts you'd like to see more of.
Creating an engaged community takes time, commitment and a dedication to studying the trends and habits within your community in order to create a better experience for members. Your community is always evolving and it's important to pay attention to it to make sure it can continue to thrive.
Always ask for and be open to feedback from members about how your community can be improved. As your community grows, think about establishing new channels or removing those which failed to gain traction.
Through constant participation and attention to detail, you can help your community succeed.
TESTIMONIALS
"Groups! OMG a forum-like group system or something to form a small community is really nice. Right now a lot of sites don't really focus on communities and rather just one on one messaging."
"I like the opportunity to form groups with like-minded folks ... I can see myself in several different groups as I now am in Yahoo groups and Google groups and IO groups."
"I don't like how invasive Facebook is as a whole and I hate that it is necessary to use for pretty much everything."
"I love the idea that it seems to be a mixture of Reddit and a messaging app. Will def promote to my friends."
"I like the idea of chatting to random people about my fav TV shows. Not all my friends watch the same shows."
