Administrator-users contribute more to online communities

Lack of user participation and contribution has been a long-standing problem for online communities. We proposed and examined new strategies for cultivating opinion leadership and enabling users to post articles outside of the community theme. We used social role theory to propose that online communities should encourage highly committed users to take administrator roles, which will increase their opinion leadership and contributions to both public spaces and their own user-controlled spaces. We collected multiple-wave and multiple-source data from 1,115 users of a large online community. The results indicate that encouraging users to take administrator roles increases their community contributions.