What can we do to increase questions and traffic? (6 days since last question)

Question

It's been almost a week now since someone has asked a question. I think this site is a good concept and I've enjoyed the questions. I'm not sure what we all should be doing to help.

Answer 1

A lack of new questions isn't necessarily a problem as long as we are still getting high quality answers. There are two main things that a Q/A site needs to be successful.

The first is discoverable questions. People find a site by searching for a problem they are having and then ask it where it looks like they might get an answer. Having a lot of high quality questions and answers on file gives a good target for people to find in that regard.

The second is a community of experts that can answer those questions well when they do come up. Thus far, it seems that while we may not have many new questions come in, the community of experts is still around to answer them when they do. It's easier to keep experts around when there is frequent questions needing answers, but it isn't necessarily critical, as I think we've seen with this site.

Certainly, it is good to try to build our base of questions to make the site more discoverable. If you can think of a question that hasn't been asked, by all means ask away. Don't be shy about answering it yourself as well if you think you can answer the question (though please wait a bit to mark your own answer as the solution since others may also post great answers). I don't think it is something we have to try to force though.

I think part of that is that a lot of community management stuff is pretty general and the easily addressable detail comes from how you handle specific cases where it's more experience and gut feeling than raw knowledge. People encounter difficult situations in community management regularly and as long as we have a group of people ready and able to provide solid guidance when those situations come up and are asked, I think we're doing well.

We can look at ways to help people find the site, such as sharing it with leaders of other communities that you know, but I think that's going to be the biggest thing is just helping people discover the site.

Answer 2

Nearly one year ago, I asked the exact same question. (Well not necessarily, but kind of.)

Time has passed since then, and I have come to the same view as you: it of course is not satisfying to see that the topic itself has not caught up yet, however, we didn't stagnate but grew at a steady rate.

Unfortunately, it's still the same as one year ago: Community Building as a topic is not well presented in society, academia or the workplace. And the people who refer to themselves as Community Manager or something else often already think to know everything about their job. The future however looks bright: There will be more people, more minorities and less space to avoid each other. Community Building definitely is on the rise and I think that we have set a important achievement on this site by building up knowledge and sharing experiences.

So, to answer your question: We could do a lot of stuff to increase traffic, like making some ads. I also somewhen proposed to do a partnership with a subreddit which receives a lot of attention of like-minded people. (Nonetheless, many of these questions are centered around the community Reddit.) But this doesn't solve the problem at its core: even if we were receiving more questions, it's more than likely that these are either too localized or of low-quality.

I think that our goal is to build up a website which is useful, nevertheless the time between actual problem and provided knowledge. High-quality contributions are our goal, and if we receive few questions for this to achieve, I'm more than fine with it.

If you want to help there, you can browse up some old questions and provide your point of view. Moderating isn't this one right thing, I'm pretty sure everyone is intrigued to get as much information as possible.

Answer 3

Is there a possibility to increase scope and relevance to more people? For example, I've seen a number of questions that have less to do with online virtual communities, and more to do with in person physical groups. Examples are below:

1. Sports community I broke the Christmas tradition!
2. Online and offline community for makers Is there a better platform for online communities than Facebook Groups?
3. People interaction in an In-person study group How to deal with a stubborn person who thinks they are perfect?

We have 19 questions tagged "physical communities".

What if we changed our community title to something like "Community and Group Leadership?" I think we'd see that there's a lot more opportunity to increase questions and answers related to physical communities. And in this day in age, every physical group or community has some kind of online presence anyways.