Hacking MySpace

When starting a group we all want it to be successful, get lots of members, be quite active and hopefully keep it focused on the topic of the group. Well I thought that as I own a pretty successful group that I would give you a few tips from my experiences.

In this tutorial I will go through the basics of starting a group, getting your initial members and keeping the group active.

Starting the Group

The number one thing when starting a group is to have a specific topic you want to discuss, this could be rock music, dogs, even your home town/city. Before you decide you should have a look to see if you will have any competitor groups, if these groups are too big/active for you to compete with then try to go more specific with your group, for example instead of discussing dogs you could discuss only one type of dog.

After you decide on the topic you should create the group and put it in the right category. Then you need to put something in the group description that will hopefully interest people to join. This is really up to you, but if it’s structured information and not a clutter of images and text then for pretty obvious reasons I find that it will attract more people.

Getting Your First Members

Getting the first members to join and start participating is often the hardest thing to do when starting a group. I started by sending invites to everyone on my friends list (this is where having a large friends list is a big help), this helps to get some members, but I find that a lot of people will just join because you ask them to, then won’t participate in the forum. This isn’t a bad thing, it still increases your members number (which puts you higher in the search results in your category) which might increase your chances of new members joining.

One good technique is to ask your friends to promote your group a little bit, even if it’s just one bulletin, it still helps a lot.

Another technique is to go to other groups that have the same/similar topic to yours and ask active members on there if they are interested to join your group, I find that this method works wonders.

Keep the Group Growing

After you have your initial member base the main thing you need to do is keep the forum active, it will keep members coming back and discussing your topic and will encourage new members to join. You are the one responsible for keeping the forum active, you can do this by posting new threads/bulletins and trying to get other people much more involved in your group.

If you keep the group active then new members are bound to find it and notice that it is pretty active and hopefully join in themselves. The group will grow on it’s own after this. After a while you might want to take a step back and let the group be active without you posting so much and it is okay to do this, actually, I would recommend it, after all, your group is about the members, not you.

If your group is getting too big for you to handle yourself then why not ask some of the active members to help out? They can do this by monitoring posts and reporting to you any that need to be deleted or any members that should be warned/banned.

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