While this shouldn't surprise most of you reading this, online community developer Communispace reported in a study they conducted that smaller online communities receive far more participation and engagement than their larger counterparts.
Another finding of the study - which took in 26,539 members of 66 private online communities - is that users desire the community to be completely transparent and also prefer specifically branded communities versus general, non-branded ones.
For communities that are intimate, far more people participate - a huge 86 percent that log in to private, facilitated communities add comments, chat up other members and start up conversations, among many other things. A miniscule 14 percent choose to look on.
"Everybody is talking about communities now, and so the question is no longer 'should we have one?', but more 'what kind should it be?' and 'how can we design it to truly engage people and fulfill our objectives?'" said Communispace President and CEO Diane Hessan.
For the large, general online community sites, very few will participate in the general conversation.
For those sites that are transparent and let people know right up front who's sponsoring the site, there is a 71 percent initial log in rate, in contrast to only 55 percent on non-branded sites.
The key ingredient for participation was how passionate the topic or interests were among the users. The greater the passion the great members would participate. This is one of the reasons why parent groups had the highest level of interaction.
Another interesting finding of the study was that communities geared toward women received more frequent visits, but male targeted communities actually contributed more when they had something to say. Men had something to say almost five times a week while women contributed a little over 4 times weekly.
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