One huge community or lots of micro communities

Caitlin Level 1

December 19, 2013, 4:17 am

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One huge community or lots of micro communities

Which would you rather own, one huge community (such as a general webmaster forum) or many tiny micro communities, (such as individual forums each covering unique webmaster related topics, such as coding, content creation, social networking, etc)?

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Hunter

Hunter

A catch all forum is not as good as a micro niche forum where you can specialize. Although considering the time you will need to invest into each forum, you may only want to pick a few micro niche forums to specialize in, rather than a dozen or more which could be unmanageable.

11 years ago

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Dayton

Dayton

Maybe it will just depend on how much money you have to spend on forum hosting, forum domains and software as well as related expenses for staff and advertising.

11 years ago

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Ethan

Ethan

It could take months to build one very good community even for a micro niche. So you will want to focus your efforts on the marketing and promotion of that one site rather than many smaller sites.

11 years ago

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Beverly

Beverly

Put a lot of thought into the type of forum you want and then just start one community rather than many as it will take too much time to manage them all. A forum is not like a blog, so you will need to put all your efforts into that one site. And, a generic forum for your niche won't get as many new sign ups and members since there will be intense competition from more well established forums.

11 years ago

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Corzhens

Corzhens

If I can have a choice, I would rather have one huge community. I understand that it is much harder to manage than having several small communities. On the other hand, a big community has an assurance of a longer life unless something dramatic happens. With the big number of members and the high activity level on the boards, you wouldn’t need to promote your forum since it will be promoting by itself via the members who are actively posting there. That was the case of one forum about music. It has a lot of members that were promoting the forum by themselves just to promote their posts which are usually original compositions.

7 years ago

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