Understand your community

Not all followers participate equally

All large-scale communities on social networks that rely on users to participate share one common property: most users don’t participate very much. Often, they simply lurk in the background. In contrast, a tiny minority of users usually account for a disproportionately large amount of the content and other system activity. This phenomenon is called participation inequality.

We can divide community members based on their participation behavior into three subgroups:

• Fans followers who rarely participate, they lurk around, read and observe, but don’t contribute.
• Contributors followers who contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time.
• Donors followers who participate a lot and account for most contributions, they care the most, they are ready to commit financially to support you. It can seem as if they are here for you all the time, they often post just minutes after whatever event they’re commenting on occurs.

How to keep your community engaged

Take a look at the upside-down pyramid image below: as an influencer, you start with a huge pool of people, these are all individuals who will find you and your work through word of mouth, social platforms recommendations, and other opportunities.

We know there are many steps taken between a person being a “fan” to a committed “donor”. Some creators are great at what we call “filling the funnel” — meaning, you have huge social followings, so it’s easy for you to send a lot of people to your Ignyte page. Most will remain as audience members, fans, and followers. The more passionate ones will covert more easily to donors, and because of the sheer amount of people sent through the funnel, you’ll soon see sustainable success.

The other possibility is that you don’t have a massive following, but your audience is hyper-engaged and loyal, so the majority of them convert to donors. They want to see you succeed, so they take action on the spot.

Offer Donors exclusivity

Your donor’s pool may vary from 0.01% to a whopping 2%. There are few intrinsic and extrinsic motivations that keep them attracted to your profile, your relatability, your content, and style. Send personal notes, funny greetings, share your progress, your personal milestones, offer special coaching sessions via video chats to your audience. Whether you choose to update your donors daily, weekly, monthly, or on a random schedule — your donors will come to expect and enjoy that connection with you.

Increase your reach rate with contributors

While not all of your followers are ready to commit financially to support you, there is a group of active contributors who are ready to spend time to show their love and support, by actively helping to boost your posts, thereby growing your audience and giving you more exposure. Your active contributor’s pool may be anywhere between 1% to 25% based on your audience size. More followers you have, the smaller the percentage of contributors.

Over the years, as the Instagram algorithm evolved, it affected the reach rate as a result. Reach rate is the percentage of followers that see your Stories and Posts.

The Instagram ranking algorithm will expose your content to larger followers, based on factors like, how many likes and comments it got within hours after being posted, how many active followers you have who constantly engage with your posts, and comments. Ignyte offers you a currency called “Spark” as capital to incentivize your followers to engage with your content in a timely manner.

Convert fans into active contributors

Converting your passive followers into active contributors takes some incentive. Reward them for being active, run giveaways & creative challenges. Ignyte allows you to run giveaways. It offers a selection of exclusive gift cards and merchandise for influencers to purchase for Sparks and use as giveaways for their followers.

Grow your audience

In addition to organic growth that comes with engaging content and good hashtag strategy, Ignyte offers several ways to boost your growth with its “Spark” currency.

• Reward new followers who will discover your profile through our platform.
• Run giveaways and ask your followers to invite their friends.
• Use Sparks to pay other influencers with the relevant audience to mention and promote your profile in their story