Creating a group on Social Wave is easy. You just fill out a form with information about the group you're hoping to build and your group is instantly created. Your new group will have a membership count of 1. Getting your membership count to go up, may take a little diligence and effort. Here's five key tips that will help you get your new group off the ground.

• Describe your group in detail
  You have room to really spill the details about what your group is about, what it's trying to do, who it's trying to serve, and what the conditions of membership are. People will not join a group if the group's definition is too vague. Make sure that they know what they're signing up for if they decide to join your group.


• Invite select Social Wave members to join your group with the Invite Members feature
  Use the Social Wave search engine to search only profiles to help you find Social Wave members who might want to participate in your group. Then use the Invite Members feature found on the "Manage Members" page of your group control panel to send these members an invite to your group. For example, you can search profiles for "Volleyball" and see a list of people who have mentioned the word Volleyball somewhere in their profile. If you think any of these people would be interested in your group, send enter their exact username into the Invite Members feature and they'll be sent a message to invite them to join.

• Pull existing friends and associates into your group
  If your friends or associates don't have a Social Wave account, get them to sign-up. It's important that your group starts off with a little bit of activity to give it some life to build upon. A group full of complete strangers that has no activity in it, is unlikely to spontaneously erupt into interaction. Get people you already know into your group and use it to communicate with them even if you already talk to them in person. Once there's some activity, other people are more likely to jump in.

• Specifically ask people to post a message in your group
  If you think a certain person would have a valuable opinion to contribute to a topic that's posted online, contact that person and ask that person to put in his or her two cents. As long as you don't do this too often, people generally don't mind being asked to participate. Especially in the beginning, you may want to focus some effort on getting people to chime in at the same time.

• Post an announcement to tell everyone that the group is active
  Just because your group is created doesn't mean that people understand that it's ready for action. When your group is ready, post an announcement in your group's discussion forum if it has one. Otherwise post it in another Social Wave forum and we'll make sure the announcement is seen on the main index. In your opening announcement you should welcome people to come join your group and provide a summary about what the group is about.

• Groups: Resources Available to Social Wave Group Leaders