Community Strategy Insights

The latest insights on community strategy, technology, and value by FeverBee’s founder, Richard Millington

Cleaning Up The Community

Richard Millington
Richard Millington

Founder of FeverBee

Adding more is a good thing…until it isn’t.

Over time, it becomes harder for members to find the good stuff, follow conversations, recognise other members and know which events are worth attending.

A good rule of thumb is to spend half as much time pruning and cleaning what’s in the community as adding more to it.

An easy way to improve most communities is to spend some time taking down less relevant content, archiving old discussions, pruning inactive members, and removing lesser used features. Look at your event calendar too and cease events which aren’t clearly driving great results.

I’d remove:

  • The bottom 10 to 20% of content (by landing page visits from search results).
  • All discussions which have seen <5 visits within the past 30 days.
  • Events which don’t attract at least 50 to 100 participants.
  • Members who haven’t visited within the past year.

Ironically, removing stuff is as likely to help you achieve your goals as adding more stuff. It increases your search rankings, improves the member experience, retains confused newcomers etc…etc…

Subtracting stuff from your community can be as valuable as adding to it.

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