Right, you know how in real estate the most important things are
- location
- location
- location
Well, in online community, the most important things are
- content
- content
- content
Unless you have compelling content, you’ll never attract users. If you are lucky then you are Lady Gaga / The Kardashians and you have a massive audience built in, waiting to go wherever you go and gobble up every post you make.
If you’re not famous already, then you have the tough slog of creating content, and that’s the work of getting people to show up, day after day, and participate – starting with your staff and your own team! 90% of the job is showing up, day after day, and engaging with others.
So the job of the UI/UX tooling, in this case, is to make it easy to show up, drop in and hang out and contribute. (This is why chat is so important as an upcoming feature to Discourse – it vastly reduces the barrier to contribute, no need to think of a topic title, or even decide which topic to look at.. just drop in the same general channel as everyone else and type “sup”) And reminders for people to come back: emailing them weekly summaries of the most interesting discussions if they haven’t been seen in a week, and sending them notifications when another person is talking directly to them when they haven’t been on the website for a few hours.
Will any standalone site ever beat the “well, I am always logged into Facebook” effort barrier? No. But they should first make sure they’re offering something unique and interesting that you can’t get on Facebook.