Community Engagement

Community engagement is a measurable signal of peoples’ attention, interest, and willingness to contribute. Community engagement is also a reflection of the work you’ve done to make your community a place where people want to engage.

The most important thing to work towards is Member Value Perception. “Are we providing enough value to our members that they want to be here, connecting with other members, answering questions, and contributing to the community?” Also “do members feel like they’re valued in this community?”

The best strategy is to commit to making the community a hugely valuable piece of the customer experience. Then use the engagement analytics to tell you whether those efforts are paying off.

Commitment to Value

With a support community (or a technically-focused community) we know people want to ask questions, find solutions, show off their expertise, and feel connected to each other and the brand.

If you prioritize member needs, you will realize business goals.

People will participate in a community where they find value and feel trust in both the community management team and the broader community. Environments don’t spontaneously erupt in trust – the community management team has to pay attention, provide empathy and member encouragement, and help move the community from ask-and-answer to relationships.

We’ll get to measuring engagement but tracking those numbers without doesn’t tell you how much value you’re getting or giving. For example, your metrics could tell you that posting is as high as it’s ever been… but that’s because people aren’t finding their answers or the platform is buggy.

To create an invaluable community, listen, analyze, tweak, iterate, nurture, then measure.

Community Nurturing

Build trust through nurturing in order to unlock the support of what otherwise would be strangers; when trust is built, peers rely on each other instead of your official support channels. This is often an analog process but it is absolutely critical.

Schedule ongoing nurturing behaviors

• Actively directing members to content resources when applicable (in replies to posts).
• Introducing members to each other, @mentioning users in replies.
• Decide who will be the community facilitator. You have moderation covered, what you need is someone to facilitate discussions and actively engage members on a weekly basis.
• Teach, promote, and reinforce prosocial behavior springboarding off of Badges, Ranks to create additional member recognition strategies.
• Provide clear, succinct opportunities for an individual to contribute with their talent, skill, or expertise. This can be low hanging fruit - the point is to get people talking to each other.

Strategic community content and events:

Design and deploy content for community members to interact with each other and the business; the best way to get people to engage is to talk about what they want to talk about.

Guidelines:

1. Use Community Analytics to figure out the busiest day of the week in your community.
2. Plan interactive and or educational content to be deployed on those days on a consistent cadence (week/month/quarter, depending on ability to maintain + execute).
3. Challenges around new feature releases or just create a problem to solve. Incentivise with a prize.
4. AMAs with experts or industry leaders.
5. Highlighting your top community members every month — this could be a monthly post in the Community lounge area

Start discussions that allow for connecting as people:

• Common challenges
• Controversial, but relevant, topic to see what your community thinks about it
• Asking your members what their first project was
• Meme thread
• Anything you think this group might have in common with each other.
• Use custom components to promote/advertise community events, new content, challenges, etc.

Host events:

Hosting online events such as webinars, live chats, or Q&A sessions can be a great way to bring members together and encourage participation.

Be a true facilitator

Open ended questions or vagaries don’t help move the conversation forward. When you go too broad, or don’t share the intention, people don’t know how to engage. For example, a “what’s your favorite OS post?” is fun but is just a laundry list. Figure out what kind of answers you’re looking for and how they connect people before dropping a dead end question in the forum. For example, “Weird Wednesday: Share the weirdest challenge you came across when trying to build an xxxxxx and what the fix was”

Finally, measuring engagement.

As mentioned above, engagement is contextual. Your measure of what “engagement” means relies on a variety of factors including the purpose of your community, the culture you’re trying to foster, what the members value, etc.

So if you’ve put all the strategies in place to provide the most value you can, here are some metrics to look at:

1. Quantity metrics: questions, topics, replies, views, visits + ratios
2. Quality metrics: solutions accepted, kudos given/received, solutions viewed
3. Member: member returns, entrances, time spent in community

Tracking the metrics above is easy and it gives us some information on how we should formulate strategies to improve the numbers.

Monitoring / Benchmarking

Once a month, calculate & record the following ratios:

Join Ratio

Participation Ratio

Consumption Ratio

Contribution Ratio

Engagement Ratio

Depth Ratio

First Reply Ratio

Listening

Every week, keep a record of what’s going on in your community. This will help you form a really solid picture of what they care about and what direction to head.

You can use “listening” spreadsheet to record rants, raves, hot topics, unanswered questions, unusual behavior, future super users etc.

Examples:

What are the most common problems your users run into today?

How many tickets require an engineer?

What are they raving about? What are they ranting about? Are there any threads that need to be bubbled up to other businesses?