Community Management

How to Boost Community Engagement in 8 Steps?

It is important to accept that in the first stages of community building, your members won’t — continue reading
Posted by Taco Potze
January 14, 2022

Community engagement tends to be one of the top KPIs that organizations use to measure the success of their community. However, as Feverbee points out in their excellent explanation of the community lifecycle, it takes a while before users start engaging and actively contributing to your community. So in this blog post, we would like to give you some pointers on how you can boost engagement for your online community.

It is important to accept that in the first stages of community building, your members won’t be as active as you’d like them to be. For example, getting likes rather than comments is fine in the early stages. While the chart above states that less than 50% of your members will be active, a more common theory is that for every user that is active you have 99 users that are lurking but not responding. Consider measuring read-time and link clicks instead, in order to effectively measure a more in-depth form of engagement.

You need to come up with a posting schedule (you can use a content calendar for this) if you want to regularly share content with your community. Planning ahead and posting something new a few times a week gives users something to actually respond to! It will also help them understand when to come to the community for new content. You can post more or less frequently depending on the size of your community and how long your content remains active.

The revamped community lifecycle for community engagement

 

8 steps to boost community engagement

Now, make sure the content you do share gets the results you’re looking for. Whether you are sharing links to blog posts on external platforms or posting full articles on your community, these steps should help you get a reaction from your community.

  1. Start and/ or end with a question
    Most people will end with a question, but if you start with a good question you can already get users’ gears turning to consider how they might respond from the get-go.
  2. Ask Open-ended questions 
    Make sure that you use open questions, which means people can’t just answer with a simple yes or no but have to give a more in-depth answer. So don’t ask “Do you think the government should do X or Y?” but ask “The government is considering options X and Y, we think both need work. What adjustments would you like to see to X and Y to get the best result for all stakeholders?”
  3. Be Controversial
    This is a thin line to walk on but blanket statements that everyone agrees with won’t garner as much as a response compared to controversial statements. To avoid offending your members, make sure to distance yourself from the statement, for example, “It may be controversial but a lot of people really believe A, what do you think?”
  4. Mix Content types
    Be sure to post a diverse mix of content types, such as links to external articles, visuals with a short statement, blog posts on your own website, and full articles posted within the community itself. This keeps the community looking fresh and gives you ample room to test what types of content work best for you.
  5. Use Mentions feature
    Open Social allows for you to mention people with an @ and their username in the comments, which will give them a notification. If you know there are people within your community with interesting views or advanced knowledge of the topic be sure to tag them and ask them a question to get the conversation going. This will also show your community members you really know them and appreciate their knowledge and will help you build relationships.
  6. Engage in Comments
    Be sure to show your appreciation for anyone engaging in your content with a like or a mention. If people comment, then let them know you saw it and appreciate their insights. If you don’t have anything to add to their comment or post you can simply like it and when you do comment be sure to give involved feedback. So don’t say “Great insight, thanks!” but say “Wow, I never thought of it that way. Do you think X, Y, and Z will improve if we start approaching it this way?”.
  7. Use Analytics
    At least once a month, review both your own content and user-generated content on your platform to see which content performed best for your engagement KPIs. A monthly review of the performance of all content will give you an idea of which content performs the way you need it to, so you can create more content that your community likes and boost your engagement. If there is stand out content from a specific user you can approach them to see if they’d like to create content with you for the community on a more regular basis.
  8. Send Emails
    In the early stages of your community, things may be a little quiet. This means that some of your users may not be checking the activity on a regular basis. An easy way to ensure people engage in any discussions on your platform is to send a (bi)weekly email with short summaries of open topics and what the response has been so far. This way you can lure your users back into the community to give their input.

To know more about Community engagement, download our free guide for community engagement by clicking the image below:

Community engagement ideas

Did we miss any tips and tricks? How do you boost engagement in your community? We’d love to read your insights in the comments. 

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