I’m often asked how online communities differ from social media. It's true that on the surface they look a lot alike. But besides the obvious factor of cost – social media is free whereas most community platforms have at least minimal fees – there are some key differences to explore.

I recently got a first-hand look at these differences in a well-known community to which I belong: Marie Forleo's B-School made the decision to move its discussion thread from Facebook to Ning. Since beginning her popular online business marketing program in 2010, Forleo's worldwide community has swelled to something in the tens of thousands. In a mass email to deliver the news to B-School members, Forleo played up the theme, "Change is hard."

But it doesn't have to be. Let's look at what goes into the decision to take a community from a scattered collection of fan pages, expert articles and secret Facebook groups to an online community platform or "forum?"

You’ve attracted the attention of a few prospects. Now how do you empower them to become full-fledged members of your online community? Welcoming newcomers is one of the community manager’s most important tasks during the inception phase of any online forum. Why? Because statistics show that the sooner you engage a new visitor in the conversation, the more likely they will become long-term participating members.

Below we’ve collected some ideas to help you welcome and celebrate newbies with confidence and style.

Measuring Your Community’s Maturity

“Membership growth in my online community seems to have hit a plateau. Should I be worried?”

That depends. You’ll want to make a careful assessment of where you are in the life cycle of your community in order to continue making decisions that keep your membership happy and engaged.

Cultivating a Sense of Community

“My online forum has really started to take on a life of its own. How do I encourage growth and participation while staying true to our mission?”

As we’ve seen in Part I of this series, it takes people and relationships to build an online community. Once you achieve critical mass – that point where the community is generating at least 50% of its growth and activity – it’s time to shift focus to reach multiple members rather than a single member at a time.

Part I – Getting your Online Community Started

“How do I get people to start signing-up and interacting in my online community?”

It’s the right question to ask, whether you already have an active community and seek to add more spokes to your hub, or you are starting a new online community from scratch. At every stage in the process – inception, establishment and maturity – it’s smart to have a strategy for building and maintaining activity in your forums. 

To that end, we’ve curated some of the best practices used by professional community managers to help attract members and build momentum from day one.