chapter 7

Keeping members engaged

A few years ago, my colleague and I flew into a New York blizzard to meet with a prospect in the publishing industry. They were about to launch a brand new community and wanted a community strategy.

As we went through our usual list of questions, we noticed something strange. They had invested a six-figure sum into the community platform and still hadn’t decided who would be managing the community. Their plan was to dragoon someone from marketing into the project once they were ready to launch.

Needless to say, we thought this was a really terrible plan. It’s nuts to make a huge investment in a community and have an untrained rookie at the helm. All the money in the world won’t make a community thrive if you don’t have a talented community professional to hook members in, keep them engaged, and ensure their needs are satisfied.

Tragically, this isn’t an isolated occurrence. Far too many companies have invested small fortunes into developing their community website and barely given a thought to who would be running the community. Many aren’t even sure what the day-to-day work of a community leader looks like.

Whether you are creating a simple WhatsApp group for a few buddies or trying to build the next Facebook, you need to master a core set of skills to drive engagement and participation. Too often this is perceived as a job anybody can do. After all, it’s just ‘chatting to people on the internet’ isn’t it?

Leading a community is a completely different ball game. It requires empathy for what’s really driving your members, an understanding of what kinds of discussions do or don’t work, and an appreciation that every single word you use to communicate will have a big impact upon someone’s likelihood of participation. If you’re leading a community, you need to be able to sell the vision of the community’s future, get people excited about participating, and persuade them to share their expertise (often with their biggest rivals).

This is less like talking to your buddies on Facebook and more like going to a conference filled with strangers and trying to host an afterparty for them. How would you get people to show up, participate, and contribute? How would you make sure everyone had a good time? How would you get people to open up and talk honestly about their problems?

In this chapter, I’m going to outline the skills you must acquire to lead your community and give a step-by-step breakdown of what these skills look like at beginner, intermediate, and world-class levels.

The community leader’s toolkit

The community’s leader’s toolkit is more limited than you might imagine.

In most communities, there aren’t many things you can do that your members can’t.

Sure, you can tweak the website design, remove or reward members, and publish content and newsletters, but that’s about it. If you work for an organisation, you might also be able to leverage your role to influence members with exclusive information or benefits.

The real work of leading a community is less about exercising unique administrative powers and more about subtly influencing and persuading members to do the things which are best for them and for you. And, for the best part, you’re going to be using the exact same tools your members do every day. The only difference is you’re going to use those tools at a far more advanced level.

Breaking down engagement skills

Let’s break down the core community engagement skills into five categories.

1. Starting interesting discussions. This is the core work of asking questions and starting discussions members want to participate in.
2. Keeping conversations going. This is being able to reply to discussions, keep them going, and ensure members feel better for the contributions they’ve made to the discussion.
3. Creating content. This is your ability to create content (which members love) and solicit and curate content from others.
4. Hosting and facilitating events. This is hosting events members enjoy attending and helping them host their own events.
5. Engaging directly with members. This is how you privately engage and interact with members of your community in direct messages.

This sounds rather simple doesn’t it? But then so is a paintbrush. It’s mastering how to use the paintbrush which really sets the great artists apart. Each of these five skills have hidden techniques you should master to properly lead your community.

The art of asking a question

It really doesn’t take too much skill to ask a question or start a discussion. Your members are doing it every day. You’ve probably asked a few questions already today. Did it feel difficult? (See, I asked a question right there!)

However, in most communities you will notice there are questions which seem to start a fire of endless debate and those which flicker without ever really catching on. The exact words you use and context you establish in your question will determine how many responses you receive.

Six rules for asking popular questions

If you’re running a large community already, you probably don’t need to ask too many questions or start too many discussions yourself. Your members should be doing this for you. But it can still be handy to edit and guide their questions.

However, if you’re launching a new community or managing a small community, you’re going to spend a lot of time asking questions and initiating discussions. And if you want to receive a good number of quality responses, there are some clear principles to follow:

1 If you want an answer, ask a question

If you want an answer, ask a question. This sounds simple, but you might be surprised how often people don’t do this. More importantly, if you’re using a forum-based platform, put the question in the subject line so people can quickly scan and visit if they know the answer. If you’re using a group messaging tool, put the question right at the beginning and then provide the context later.

2 Be specific in the topic

Reviewing the community of Geotab right now, I can see two discussions. One has the subject line of ‘Idling Report’ the other has ‘I’m trying to run unverified logs report. I don’t have the option to select all of my drivers. Is this an option or is it a setting issue?’

Which topic do you think gets the most responses? The short or the longer discussion?

The longer topic. It’s specific and clear. Any casual browser who feels they know the answer is more likely to provide it. The subject line of ‘idling report’ doesn’t tell us much. Is it a problem with the report? Can they not access the report? Are they sharing how much they love it? Are they just keen to talk about idling reports? Heck, what even is an idling report?

Equally important, when you make your subject line specific you’re more likely to attract search traffic from people searching for that question. This search traffic is important. It drives most of the growth in most communities. In addition to asking questions, you should spend time tweaking the subject lines of questions from members to be more specific and aligned to search traffic.

The bane of many community leaders’ existence is dealing with countless members who ask questions with subjects like ‘What do you think about this?’, ‘Need help!’, or ‘Urgent problem!’ After a few months, it’s likely that most of the new visitors to your community will arrive through search so optimising these titles is critical. Go through questions from a couple of months ago and tweak them for better search visibility.

3 Use multiple types of discussions

Can you imagine going to a party where the host constantly asked ‘What do you think about [topic]?’

After a few questions, you wouldn’t only get bored, you would get suspicious too. The same is true in online communities. I’ve worked with some community leaders who thought simply asking members what they thought about a different topic each week was enough. Members can quickly sense if you’re trying to drive engagement just for the sake of engagement. It just feels phony.

It’s a good idea to have a genuine reason for asking a question (i.e. you should genuinely want to know the answer) and not just hope to count a large quantity of answers. The answers should have some practical value for you as a person or an organisation.

Make sure you use different types of questions to drive different types of conversations. Over time you should see a rising number of your members asking questions and starting discussions. This is the moment you can gradually begin easing off starting discussions and asking questions yourself.

4 Create questions with high emotional rewards for answering

Compare these two questions below:

Question 1: ‘I can’t get my printer to work, it says I have the wrong driver installed. Can anyone help?’

Question 2: ‘Hi everyone, I’m looking for a few printer experts out there. I’ve tried installing [type] of driver but it keeps coming up with [type of error]. I also tried [x], [y], and [z], but still nothing?

‘I would call customer support but it’s not open until tomorrow and I need to print this out tonight and take it to the passport office tomorrow to get my new passport in time for my honeymoon to Barbados.

‘Can anyone else? I’m getting scared I can’t fix this in time!’

As someone with the answer, would you feel better about answering the first question or the second?

It’s not even close, the answer is obviously the second. This isn’t just because you know what the original poster has already tried and can give more precise advice, but also you can see what answering the question means to them – which in turn makes you feel a lot better about answering the question.

Remember the motivations of members you read about in Chapter 2? One of the biggest motivators is a desire to help. The bigger the payoff (feeling of helping) the more effort your members will put into their response. You might not want to help a relative move house this weekend. But if you found out they had recently broken their leg and couldn’t reschedule the moving van, you probably wouldn’t hesitate to help. The emotional payoff from helping is suddenly a lot bigger.

The best thing you can do to increase the response rate of discussions is to increase the emotional payoff from answering that question. Don’t just go fishing for information, but highlight how the answer would help you both in both tangible and emotional terms.

However, you should still try to keep discussions relatively short. No one wants to read long messages online. Anything between 150 and 350 words is usually fine. Also, put the call to action as close to the top as possible. Don’t make members spend a minute reading a post to find what you need from them.

Put the question near the top and then add the context and the reasoning behind it. This lets members quickly determine if it’s a question they’re likely to have the answer to or not. Finally, make sure you tag (@mention) in people who might have the answer. You’re a lot more likely to get an answer from the crowd if you point out a few specific people from the crowd to give an answer.

5 Ask questions and start discussions at a steady cadence

If you’re just getting started, you should aim to have at least one new question in the community per day. As you grow, you usually want to initiate a new discussion when activity dips. You don’t need to plan these out to a specific day, but you should definitely have a few interesting questions to ask when you need them.

A quick word of warning here. If your previous discussions aren’t getting many responses, asking more probably isn’t the solution. Either you don’t have enough members visiting to see the discussions or your discussions aren’t interesting enough (sorry!).

If it’s the former, you need to drive more people to see your questions before asking more. If it’s the latter, you should remove discussions with no (or few) responses and replace them with fresh discussions until you find those which catch on.

As a general rule, try to keep the number of questions in your community growing at a slow, but steady cadence.

Making members feel great about themselves

We often treat community support like a customer service job. Here is a response from a post in the Yahoo community a few years ago:

From: Jaimie – ADMINISTRATIN’ HOO

Re: Error 554 (sais I dont have a yahoo account!) [New]

@MartinaDavidson – Your email address ends with @yahoo.co.uk and not in the @yahoo.com email extension. That is the reason for the bounce back errors.

Do you think the person who asked the question feels better about the company or feel like they were listened to? Do you think they are going to want to regularly participate in the community again?

I doubt it.

Now compare this to the response below from Colleen Young, Director of Community at the Mayo Clinic.

Can you see what Colleen is doing here? She noticed it’s the member’s first post and welcomed them to the community. She made a personal connection with her own experiences. Then she ‘@mentioned’ six other members who she felt could also participate in the community. Finally, she asked a further question to encourage the member to come back and participate in the community a second time.

Colleen’s response seems dead simple, but it showcases the amazing power of what a great community manager does. She’s a community artist with a paintbrush. Not only will the recipient of her message receive useful advice, they’re also more likely to connect with other members and feel better about participating in the community. Better yet, the other six members are going to feel like they can make unique, useful contributions.

Six elements to a fantastic community response

You’re probably going to have three kinds of messages to respond to.

The first are those posted in your community. These will be questions or discussions that require a response as quickly as possible. The second are those that come via email or a private message. The third are in person. In each case, your response should embrace the following principles as best as you can.

1. Speed. You should respond as quickly as possible. Our data shows that members are 27% more likely to participate again if they receive a response to their first post within 24 hours. Any longer and they might as well search the web or go online. If you can reply quicker than this, even better!
2. Personalisation. Members want to feel unique. You should reference the unique aspects of their message and use the same language as they do to describe their problem. If you have shared experiences or interests, drop that into the response too. Ask further clarifying questions to sustain the discussion and gather more information.
3. Friendliness. You should use a warm, positive tone to reply to discussions. Apologise and acknowledge the emotional struggles they’re going through. Use informal language where you can. Pick up on social cues about what the members need by the tone and language they use in their discussions.
4. Knowledge. Share any knowledge you have to help resolve the question. Don’t just link to an FAQ or a resource, extract the information and drop that into the discussion. Add any previous insights shared in the community. If the answers require considerable detail, use bullets points, images, and videos if you can.
5. Connection. When possible, bring other people into the conversation. Your job is not about replying to every question yourself, but encouraging other people to answer the question. You can use @mention features or drop them a line and see if they can respond. The more you do this, the more it becomes a habit for others to participate.
6. Resolution. There is a big difference between providing an answer and making the member feel fantastic afterwards. Sometimes a member comes to a community with frustration and your job is to provide the answer but make sure she is no longer frustrated. You can check in and see if there is anything else you can help them with. Try to show the member the impact they have had: ‘Thanks for this. I passed it onto our engineering team who are making changes’ etc.

You’re not expected to master all of these skills tomorrow. But you can gradually practise them and get better at sustaining discussions and engaging with members. You don’t even need to wait to have a community to begin practising it. Practise it in your responses in your emails today and in responses to your messages. You will notice a rapid improvement in the quantity and quality of responses you get from your friends and colleagues.

Creating and curating content

One of my first community roles was for the unfortunately named ‘UKTerrorist’ website (the name was based on a game, Counter-Strike, in which terrorists battle counter-terrorists). A couple of times a week, I would post the latest updates about the game on the community. This news would typically include the latest versions of the game to download, new maps (levels) to play, or quotes from the creators about what was coming up. I must admit, I wasn’t the best 15-year-old gaming journalist out there, I simply copied content from other sites to save time.

One evening, when I was short of news, I drafted a story about a friend who had recently switched from one gaming team to another. This single story prompted more comments than any other story I had ever posted.

It turns out gamers were far more interested in others playing the game than they were about the game itself. I started regularly writing about the gamers instead of the game. Activity continued to rise. Before long, I barely bothered writing about new game updates anymore. I wrote about the achievements of the players instead. If there wasn’t any news, I would publish interviews with players, survey members and post trend reports, and write opinion pieces ranking the top players.

I had stumbled upon a simple truism about community content: members love reading about themselves and people like themselves. People have a craving to know what people like themselves are doing.

The best content for a community is content about the community.

Pick up the local newspaper this week. What do you notice? It’s filled with stories about people in the community. Editors long ago realised that people want to see if they or someone they know has been featured in the newspaper. It’s what drives readership. And you can use this as the basis of the content for your community.

If you want your content to be read, watched, and heard, you have to make it worthwhile to your audience. This is such a simple rule, but it’s staggering how often it’s ignored.

A common mistake is to publish the same repetitive content on a weekly basis whether members are engaging with the content or not.

For example, one community I’m following recently posted a full long news post to announce episode 55 of their podcast. Skimming through the site, it’s clear these weekly announcements have the fewest number of views, likes, and comments of any content posted in the community. It’s a repetitive release of show notes each week. If members want to subscribe to the podcast, ask them to do that. By episode 55, I’m betting most members have already decided whether to do that. Don’t post repetitive announcements in the community.

I raise my hand and take some responsibility for repetitive content.

In my first book, Buzzing Communities, I advocated that community leaders should create a content calendar with repetitive content each week. This meant you might have a member interview on Monday, product announcements on Tuesday, and new product reviews on Wednesday etc.

Over the past decade, I’ve realised this often didn’t work as well as I thought. After the first few weeks, the metrics on repetitive content drop sharply as the novelty factor wears off. This is the same for weekly discussions such as ‘What are you working on?’. After a few weeks, the number of people participating tends to dwindle to a handful of superusers.

The problem is largely one of quality and value. Once you have a content calendar in place you have to fill the empty spots with content. Alas, ideas that sound great on paper (like member interviews) often don’t work as well in practice. Sometimes the member isn’t well known or doesn’t say anything which is especially unique, useful, or interesting to other members. Once you’ve got through the top few members in the community, it’s hard to find known members with especially unique or powerful advice for other members.

A much better approach is to keep content unexpected, exciting, and incredibly valuable to members. The advice I’ll recommend here is based upon an additional eight years of experience since publishing my first book and a far better understanding of what your members are actually looking for within the community.

There are generally six types of content which work well in most types of communities:

1. Case studies/interesting experiences. Instead of interviews, post case studies with members. Case studies encourage members to share something interesting they have done which could be valuable for other members. Any videos or long-form advice articles which highlight specifically how members resolved a common challenge or improved their results are usually popular within the community.
2. Analysis and breakdowns. Do a detailed breakdown or analysis of common situations members face. Be as specific as possible. Take what members are doing and do a detailed breakdown of it (what’s working well and not well?). This is similar to case studies but highlights areas of improvement as well as what’s not going well. Almost every community lends itself to breakdowns of situations members face.
3. Templates and resources. Create templates members can use. For example, templates that help them structure their work, plan out a project, or evaluate their success can save members a lot of time. Likewise, resources on topical issues can also be very useful.
4. Surveys and data. Your members will probably enjoy seeing how they compare to other members. A survey is a useful way to collect data and get the current pulse of your members on a wide array of topical issues. This might include time spent on a project, current level, salary level, or anything that might be interesting. You can then publish the results. This works well when members can compare themselves to the average or use the data to support their own work.
5. Interviews with a VIP. Better than an interview with a member is an interview with a VIP in your sector. These work best when the person is well-known and respected by most of the audience. If you wouldn’t invite this person on stage at a major conference, they’re probably not a good match. Aim high for these interviews. You might be surprised how many book authors are keen to talk to community members.
6. Adapting existing content. If you’re short on ideas, the easiest thing to do is to communify your existing content. This isn’t a real word, but let’s pretend it is. And let’s pretend it means adapting your content to make it socially engaging. Here are some examples:

You get the idea. Almost every type of news or announcement content can communified. If you’re just starting out and looking for some interesting content ideas, communifying your existing content is usually a good way to start. It’s relatively easy to get the opinions of a few members on a topical issue and publish the results.

Whatever kind of content you create, be ruthless about measuring and honestly assessing its impact. Far too many community leaders persist in creating content which is not widely viewed, shared, or appreciated by the community – yet still takes them time to create and produce. Good content takes a long time to create. Make sure you’re spending the right amount of time creating each content.

Big win content

In almost every sector there is the opportunity for ‘big win’ content (sometimes known as 10x content).1 This is content so unique and so valuable that it moves the needle for the entire sector and provides enduring value to your members.

Sometimes this is a detailed guide or comparison tool based around equipment or software your members might use within the topic. Other times it’s a definitive ranking of the top people in your sector. It might also simply be something completely unique to your sector.

Backpacking communities might create an interactive to compare backpack techniques, sports communities might create a place for members to share their best highlights, software-based communities might create a knowledge base all members can contribute to.

Soliciting and curating content

It’s one thing to create content yourself, it’s another challenge entirely to get members to create and share their own content. In the past, I recommended all communities should encourage members to create and share their own content.

In practice, this doesn’t always work so well. Your community might soon become flooded by poor-quality contributions from self-promoting members. If you’ve visited LinkedIn recently, you know what I mean. Poor-quality and self-promotional content is the easiest way to drive members away. A much better approach is to flip the dynamic. Make posting content a scarce activity which members get to do if they meet certain criteria.

You can do this in one of three ways.

1. Restrict who can post content. You can limit who can publish content. If you limit who can publish content, you might only give the ability to post content to members who have shown a high level of expertise within the community and a commitment to post high-quality content.

   You might also create roles within the community (i.e. [topic] expert) and invite members to apply for it. Members get to feel a unique sense of value (and perhaps a sense of superiority). They also know if they don’t produce high-quality content on a regular basis, they might have to relinquish their position.

2. Restrict how much content (or when) can be posted. A second approach is to restrict how much content can be posted at any given time. This creates a sense of competition for members to submit the best content during a given time. For example, if you only feature one member-submitted post per week, members might compete to create the best post this week.

   However, be aware this approach only works when there is a high demand to be featured within your community.

   If you’re just getting started, there isn’t much incentive to have a featured content article within your community. But if you run a large community, where a featured contribution can attract a large amount of attention and help a member build a good reputation, this can be the perfect approach (academic journals, for example, are a classic example).

3. Restrict what type of content can be posted. You can place limits and set high standards on the kind of content you would accept. Not all types of community content are created equal. As a general rule, I’d try to limit members from posting opinion pieces or basic advice articles. Basic expertise can be useful but too often veers into self-promotion.

   In most cases, the best content your members can create is sharing their own experiences from which others can learn. You usually want your members to share their case studies, their breakdowns of their creations, or reviews of what they have been doing, trying, and using. This kind of content is typically much better for members.

Newsletters

If your community platform lets you send newsletters, use them wisely. Unfortunately the bar for community newsletters has been set low. Too many communities send newsletters filled with content which isn’t relevant enough to most members. The best newsletters are short and filled only with the highest-quality contributions. If you don’t have enough high-quality material, don’t send the newsletter.

The single purpose of the newsletter is to bring members (especially fringe members who aren’t deeply engaged) back into the community. This means you need to include links to the kind of content these members might find interesting and useful.

One of my favourite examples of this is The Overflow newsletter published by the Stack Overflow community.2 The Overflow newsletter typically contains around a dozen links – each with a small snippet, nicely formatted, for members to see. The newsletter is divided into three areas:

1. Best of the blogs (notice the scarcity factor at work here).
2. Most interesting questions.
3. Links from around the web.

By including links from around the web, Stack Overflow is positioning itself as not only a community for its members, but for everyone interested in the topic. It also provides regular members a reason to see a curated list of content from around the web that they might otherwise have missed.

A second interesting approach is to simplify the content to the top five items shared in the community each week. If you don’t have five good enough items, then shorten it to the top three.

Even if your platform doesn’t allow you to send out newsletters, you can still gather the email addresses of members and send an email roundup. Or even share a simple Word or Google document with the latest news via whatever tool you’re using.

Digests

Many community platforms might send out automated digests to community members. Digests are not the same as newsletters. Newsletters have a gatekeeper who determines the content which should appear. Digests are typically an automatically generated list of the latest or most popular content within the community. On some platforms (i.e. Salesforce), members receive a digest based upon what groups they have joined. Others send the same digest out to all registered members.

Digests serve a similar purpose as newsletters – they bring people back to the community. They also let members scan the latest questions and discussion topics and see if they want to participate. In your digests you usually have some key decisions to make.

Do you want members to see what’s new, what’s unanswered, or what’s most popular?

The problem with sending digests filled with new or unanswered questions is the content might not be engaging enough for most members or might prove too difficult to answer (there’s a reason these questions don’t have an answer yet after all!). However, the problem with sending digests filled with the most popular content is the majority of recipients might have already seen it.

The simple option is to show what’s most popular, new, and unanswered in a single email. However, not many platforms let you do that. An alternative approach is to send members a monthly digest with a limited number of posts so those who don’t visit often can quickly get back up to speed.

The best option, however, is to send two digests. Your top 10% of members get a list of new and unanswered posts they’re likely to have the expertise to tackle. Everyone else gets to see what was popular last month.

Activities and events

An activity is any time-limited engagement hosted by or within your community. These complement your content efforts and let members participate in a shared experience. This helps both drive activity and unite members.

Some common types of activities include:

• A sprint/hackathon. Amongst the most famous kinds of events are sprints or hackathons. This is where a group of people work rapidly over a limited amount of time (often 24 hours to 1 week) to create something of value. For example, you might set members a challenge to post their definitive list of newcomer resources, create a guide to a resource, tag or update a large amount of content, or simply develop their first app/story/project using your software/tools/advice. These tend to be the most valuable.
• Quiz. Live quizzes can be fun. The key is to set the question and give awards to the member who can post the answer first. Members get their ranking at the end. These should increase the knowledge and expertise of members.
• Mentoring groups. Create a time-limited mentoring group where people can put themselves forward to mentor other members. Make sure you have members who want to be mentored too.
• Live webinars. Host live webinars tackling a definitive topic. You can even invite members to put themselves forward to host a webinar for other members. During this webinar they can do a breakdown of what they’re working on. Keep the recording and share it within the community.
• Offline gatherings. Members can put themselves forward to host an offline event for people in their area. You can promote events to other members. Even better, you can set a specific day for them to do this.
• Conferences. We have already covered how best to connect offline events with the community; just remember to facilitate plenty of time for community members to meet and connect with other community members.

You don’t have any shortage of possible events you can host here. The best events are those which help members feel like they can make a useful contribution, are exciting and engaging to participate in, and leave behind a valuable asset for other members.

However, similar to content, regularly scheduled activities like webinars, live chats, and guest speakers tend to prove popular at first – but their novelty soon fades and participation dwindles. There are some exceptions – but finding those exceptions is like finding the winning lottery numbers – it could happen, but you probably shouldn’t keep buying tickets until it does.

Don’t plan activities on a weekly calendar, but space them apart. Ensure each is closely aligned to a particular goal members have. It’s a lot easier to have three to five big activities than try to do one every other week. The purpose of activities is to increase engagement, build a stronger sense of community amongst members, and try to create or do something most members find valuable.

For this reason, I’d recommend staying away from the frivolous events. A secret Santa might be fun, but it’s probably not going to resonate for members a year from now. Any event you want to host should benefit the entire community and be valuable over the long term.