Tried (& Tested) Community Engagement Tricks To Revive Your Community
Tags: Community Management, Community Development, Community Manager, Community, Community Engagement

Good job! You created a community, you have gathered a lot of people at one place or multiple and everyone seems friendly with each other but wait…

Why are only a few people chatting?

If this is a problem that you are currently facing (getting more people to talk) then read ahead.

Chapter 1: What is Community Engagement and Why It Matters?

Chapter 2: Make it Comfortable

Chapter 3: Allow Them to Build Relationships With Each Other

Chapter 4: Focus on Community Moderation

Chapter 5: Make it Easy to Participate

Chapter 6: Reward Contributors (90–9–1 Rule)

Chapter 7: Properly Welcome Newbies

Bonus Chapter (Case Study): How We Grew Waves’ Engagement Rate Up To 60–80%

Chapter 8: Conclusion

Sadly, community engagement has to be one of the most overlooked metrics in the moderated communities.

It is calculated by the percentage of people participating in the conversations divided by the total number of people within the community.

Around 40–45% is considered ideal whereas below 10% there is a lot of room for improvement.

Communities are formed around people. If there are only certain individuals dominating the conversations, an outbreak of toxicity, or just that the members do not feel invited to speak and express themselves, it will not feel like a community at all.

In the following article, we have outlined our best practices and strategies to boost community engagement or to start building it.

Do not make the atmosphere too serious. People should feel like they are in a warm atmosphere talking to other warm people who are just like them.

If the atmosphere feels too serious or the people feel cold and distant, the newbies will hesitate to speak up because they wouldn’t want to break the ice.

Do not try to push an agenda or a culture on the people within your community. People will quickly notice if you are trying to make them think or feel one way.

If your community is around a cause, be motivational, not strict about it.

PRO TIP: Differentiate your community with honesty, inclusivity and openness. Let people know that it is okay to share their opinions and feelings and encourage empowering others.

As we mentioned in our previous blog about community building, you need to build pathways for people to connect and make friends with each other.

People would often struggle to create relationships over chat and this is why you need to make sure that there are other ways between people to connect.

For instance, some communities offer playing games between the members, others try to get their members to meet in real life.

What we do at Waves is that we schedule video calls between our users and our members have had great conversations and made genuine friendships within our tribe.

You need to ensure that people feel safe. That includes removing any trolls, bullying, and offensive, inappropriate behavior.

The entire atmosphere of your community could change if a few negative influencers are given the freedom to post offensive comments.

INDUSTRY FACT: Many social media networks and communities have suffered due to poor community guidelines and negligence to community moderation.

There is also one thing that ruins communities. Self-promoters. They are easy to identify but hard to remove. People who promote themselves could ruin a community because newbies will not take the community as seriously.

Important to notice here is that you should not go too overboard. If you ban people for little to no reason or over suspicions, people would get very irritated.

Banning people and removing toxicity could be a double-edged sword, especially if this has been the norm until now.

Before sanctioning somebody, make sure to be deserved as well as provide reasoning to what has happened and caused you to punish them.

You need to create multiple entry points and ways to access the online community and to use a call to action to turn observers into contributors.

Those may include: ‘’participate in the challenge‘’, ‘’What do you think about X‘’, ‘’Post your blog‘’, or ‘’Talk about your startup‘’.

Give community members a place to express themselves — make it easy for members to share their stories, experiences and grow their passions — they should feel heard, listened to, and valued.

Invite the members to speak by asking thought-provoking open questions. This opens rooms for discussion that many people would be willing to participate in. These questions may also serve as ‘’ice-breakers‘’.

PRO TIP: What we do at Waves is that at every 48 hours, we send out questions to our members such as: ‘’What is the 1 thing that you want to get out of this community?‘’ or ‘’What is 1 thing that you feel like you are currently lacking and are you working towards improving it?‘’.

Usually, it is relatively easy to spot out the people who are passionate about your tribe. We are firm believers of the 90–9–1 rule of social networks according to which 90% of people are ‘’lurkers ‘’, 9% are intermittent contributors and the 1% are heavy contributors.

After you have identified the 1% (as well as the 9%) pushing forward your community and if you want to further motivate the 90%, it’s time to reward them in some way. We have outlined different rewarding practices:

Badges | Special Roles

The community-building platform Discord is putting this strategy to use. What they allow you to do is that you can assign special roles to the members of your server.

It can be as simple as ‘’[Veteran]‘’ or it can be something more of a ‘’[Contributor]‘’. These roles will be then the differentiator between them and the rest.

Facebook has thought of an interesting badge in their Facebook Groups called ‘’Valued Opinion’’ where you automatically gain it if your comments are gaining a lot of likes because that would mean you have previously solved a problem or helped the community or ‘’Conversation Starter‘’ for the people who start new conversations within the community.

Gamification

Every 48 hours, Sweatcoin offers a game to its users. A question, that if gets answered correctly, you get a chance of winning their cryptocurrency sweatcoins.

Of course, as big as their community is, a lot of people would get the answer right. They then hold a draw to who will win the prize from the people who got the answer correctly.

At Waves, people receive ‘’coconuts‘’ for participating in the discussions and engaging. Then, at the end of each week, the person who has received the most coconuts is announced on our ‘’coconut leaderboard’’ as the winner.

PRO TIP: Waves also uses the coconut scores to track the inactive users within the community and then try to re-engage them to start participating. That would include chatting them personally to see if they have a problem or simply busy. Talking to your community members individually does not scale but it is especially important in the beginning.

Social Validation

The badges, special roles, and gamification all ultimately contribute to the social validation that the users receive from the rewards. They are social signs that they have indeed contributed and moved the tribe forward.

What we love to do every two weeks is that we feature on our social media the current Waver who has the highest coconut score. This way, we are differentiating our superstars and showing our gratitude to them.

Last but not least, welcoming the new members within the community. You do not want them to feel like intruders.

Discord is my personal favorite when it comes to welcoming newbies. A discord moderator is allowed to create an entire welcoming funnel where the new user would need to first read the community guidelines, agreeing to them, and only then to meet the community where there will be a funny message in the general chat saying something like ‘’Person X has just landed.‘’

The new member would then find the chat for ‘’introducing‘’ where they would introduce themselves properly before diving into the conversations.

Welcoming new members can help you not only show them that there is nothing to be scared about but also to make them engage and participate in the main discussions and conversations.

PRO TIP: You can have one person from your moderator staff to ‘’greet’’ the newbies properly. They would often appreciate it.

We used to have a community of 400 people who would hardly chat and engage with each other. We thought that we have a strong community based on numbers.

But the engagement rate was lacking. We thought this is normal — that some people are just more outgoing and the other… 97%… are just shy, right?

Does this sound familiar?

It was like a cold rainy night at Stoke. We just couldn’t win the engagement rate that we wanted. It all came down to thinking outside the box.

We realized that our community, despite small, was too big already. That was the problem. People hesitated to talk, nobody felt welcomed. It was just a cluster of people gathered at one big group chat.

So we split it. We created smaller communities that we could personalize better to each individual. We began by sending out a survey, asking about their main interests, hobbies, and stage of entrepreneurship.

We then split our community into group chats of 10–12 people based on their common interests. They were more interested to talk to each other because they were simply not any different from one another.

Imagine a group of 10 people who are interested in digital marketing, are between 19 and 21 years old and are thinking about starting a business but don’t currently have something off the ground. These people would have so much in common.

That’s how the average Wave looks like. Same entrepreneurial stage, around the same age group, and based on 1 topic. The topics range from as specific as Food Tech to as general as personal development.

Did I mention that we promised them to delete the community after 1 month? We matched them with like-minded people and the time was limited. That sense of urgency drove people to engage, learn together and participate.

Then, since we were confident about their compatibility, we took a risk.

We offered them weekly video calls with people they had never met before who were from their group chat. The reasoning behind this ‘’blind video call’’ was because they were similar. They were like-minded.

Those blind video calls ended up being the backbone of Waves, increasing our engagement rate up to 80% as well as the show-up rate for the video calls never falls down below 60%, even on weekends.

Main takeaways:

Smaller is bigger. By making the communities smaller, Waves showed its users that the definition of an online community is not a gazillion of people gathered at one place where only the regulars (usually around 2–3% of the whole) participate in the conversations.

A solid pathway to building relationships between the members is still king. Repeat after me. Chat is not enough.

Urgency doesn’t kill. It is risky, yes, but does it work? Hell yes.

It is natural for people to want to be around like-minded people, just like them. Sharing experiences and common struggles can build a strong empathetic relationship.

People talk when they feel psychologically safe enough to express themselves. By properly onboarding the new members and rewarding the active people, you will differentiate your community as inclusive and rewarding to be a part of.

If you are currently struggling with the engagement of your community or you are a community manager and feel like there is room for improvement, let’s talk.

Main Takeaways:

Community engagement rate is calculated by the percentage of people participating in the conversations divided by the total number of people within the community

Do not make the atmosphere too serious — the newbies will hesitate to speak up

Do not try to push any agenda or artificial culture

Build pathways for people to connect and make friends with each other

with each other Build proper community guidelines and enforce community moderation , removing trolls, self-promoters, and spammers.

and enforce , removing trolls, self-promoters, and spammers. Make it easy to participate as you send our curated content, questions and making people feel that their opinion is valued

as you send our curated content, questions and making people feel that their opinion is valued Reward your best contributors by validating them socially and keep them with variable rewards

by validating them socially and keep them with variable rewards Properly welcome your new members — build a welcome funnel

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