How to make Better use of Your Groups
The good thing about groups is they bring people with like interests together, and they make it easier to find stories that relate to those interest.
The not so good thing about groups is the limited exposure stories get when they are only posted to a group, because only those in the group get the read the stories. In some cases that may be fine, in that the author is only trying to reach the members of the group.
But how often is that the case? Usually an author wants to reach as many readers as possible. However, of the 93 groups on the NewsTalkers site, the average membership is only 23 people. Even the 50 largest of those groups has an average membership of only 41, which does not allow for a lot of exposure, especially considering some of those members may not be active.
The solution to the problem of exposure is to post your ar ticle to the NT Main Forum as well as to a particular group or groups. However, doing that has the result in dividing the conversation, and not allowing the opinions of commenting members to be shared by all those interested in the topic. Which brings me to how to make better use of your groups.
As you can see, I have posted this article in both the NewsTalkers Community group and in the Main Forum, yet there is only one discussion thread. To do this is a very simple process, which can be done for any article or seed you want to post in a group or groups as well as the general membership.
First you post the article in the Main Forum under one of the main topics or their sub-topics, such as News and Politics, Health, Science & Tech., etc. (roll over a main topic to see the sub-topics). Then you copy and paste your entire article to what ever group or groups where you want the article to also appear.
BUT,.. this is where there is a big difference. As you can see from the bottom of this article as posted in the NewsTalkers Community group, there is no discussion thread for the group posting. Instead, the reader there is given a link taking them to the discussion in the main forum. I also post the re-direct as the first comment on the group thread before closing the thread, I know its redundant, but I do it anyway. I have the re-direct comment in a MS Word save file which is pinned to my taskbar so I dont have to type it every time, (being lazy has its virtues). If a group member wants to start a discussion with only the other group members, that can be done on the group comment wall.
This process only takes a minute or two, and will not only increase the exposure to your articles, it will help increase the exposure to your groups. To help in that respect, I post a comment on the discussion thread with link to the group, or groups, encouraging people to join.
As it stands right now the use of our groups has been fairly moderate. Of the 93 groups we have, only 66 have seen any activity In the last six months and ony 53 of those have seen any activity in the past three months. I believe if theprocedureoutlined here is used, we willsee an increase in activity on the comment threads and and increase in group memberships, and group activity.
This suggestion is now open for questions, comments,criticism, and/or further suggestions.
This article is being discussed in the Main Forum. To join in the discussion go to THIS LINK .
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