What is the best for the user acquisition strategy?

Hi all, we need your advice and your point of view about what is the best strategy for online community management. What we should do and how to develop online community strategy.

I do research for strategic community management, both for my thesis and my online community. We believe that a good strategy will greatly contribute to the success of an online community, just like business strategy in general.

But we were very surprised when reading the writing on Quora that the Stackoverflow has no strategy in building an online community.

No strategy. Just great timing and awesome product market fit from day 1.

Joel Spolsky, a founder of Stack Overflow, was one of the first weblog writers back in the early days of the bubble. His blog, “Joel on software” (which is still live today Joel on Software) started the trend we see today in online discussion/QA type sites. The quality of discussion and a cult-like following created the bedrock for the early userbase on Stack Overflow.

Along with Jeff Atwood (founder) who also had a following online, the Stack Overflow team empowered the early user base to ‘own’ the community rules, discussion, etc. Both founders, armed with a dedicated following of techie experts, simply redirected their efforts onto Stack Overflow where it grew exponentially as more people started to use the Internet to solve their development problems. by Sinisa Rakovic, Founder & CEO at Hunch

Is it true Sir (@Jeff Atwood) ?

We know that many people in here have successfully built online communities, so if you don’t mind, please share your experience. If anyone know the references (books and journal) for strategic community management, please share it in here. We are very grateful for your help.

Note : Please discuss just about online community strategy, not online community tactics.

2 Likes

The “strategy” is

  1. Have a great product.

  2. Have compelling content.

  3. (optional) If you are internet famous, point your audiences at the product/content and hope for the best … but it won’t matter much if points #1 and #2 are not met.

6 Likes

Here you go: FeverBee: The Complete Online Community Strategy Guide

It’s quite important to note that a “community strategy” and a “user acquisition strategy” are quite different things. The former refers to a strategy to utilise your community to fulfil business goals and objectives, the latter is simply getting people to visit your community.

8 Likes

Thank you very much Sir. Very glad to get an answer from the source directly.

About the product, We think that discourse is unquestionable, because in our opinion discourse is the best software for online communities, so on our online community, we focus on point 2 and 3.

We are still curious about points 2 and 3. It’s like eggs and chicken dilemmas. What if we have a thought that content that is interesting to other users is produced by famous people. So that famous people are more important than interesting content.

We mean, even though the content is very interesting, if the person who writes is not a famous person, it will be less attractive to other users (or content).

In other words, as we read in other writings, Stackoverflow became successful, initially because you were there.

Is it right ?

1 Like

Thank you very much Ma’am.

Based on your explanation, once again thanks, what we mean in this topic is “user acquisition strategy”, because our main business is online community itself.

We know that you have extensive knowledge and experience in this field, if you have free time, we are very grateful if you are willing to share it.

2 Likes

Ok cool. I wrote a series on that a few years back. Check out the growth tag on the FeverBee community: Topics tagged growth

There’s also:
https://www.feverbee.com/grow-community/
https://www.feverbee.com/emotions/
https://www.feverbee.com/science/

6 Likes