All relationships are temporary
Nothing is forever when dealing with online communities.
When you work in the field of digital communication, online marketing, social media and so forth you’ll come across two magic words: engagement and retention. They’re the most important metrics to measure if you’re relevant to people.
Do people engage with your brand?
Are they coming back to using your product?
If you’re able to increase the percentage of people’s engagement and retention for your product, you’re doing a great job. It’s what digital marketers get paid for and what makes CEO’s and board members jump with joy.
How long can you provide value for?
What we often forget when dealing with these metrics is that relationships have a certain lifetime value. We automatically assume that the idea we’re building a community around is so amazing that people want to stick with it forever. The truth is that only few ideas, products or services are so universally strong that they can provide value forever.
With the false assumption in mind that people should be part of our tribe forever we create wrong expectations. We get stressed when retention numbers go down. People are moving elsewhere! They don’t open our newsletter anymore! We must do something!
Negative retention is course an alarming signal that requires you to take action. But instead of panicking I’d suggest to see if there might be another reason why people are leaving. Maybe they’ve reached the end of their journey with you and are now ready to move on.
Learn to let go
Today is all about relevance. Both as individuals and as community leaders we strive to be constantly relevant to our people. That’s why we add to our feeds, send out newsletters, come up with new campaigns and end up measuring our success by engagement and retention numbers.
We should know better. We know from our real life relationships with friends, partners and family that nothing is forever. Friendships come and go, intensify and diverge. But when a friendship dissolves it doesn’t mean that the time spent wasn’t worth it. The relationship remains. You might just not engage with it that much these days.
Only if we’re unsure about ourselves and the value we provide we get stressed when people leave us. The same counts for the communities we build around an idea or a product.
All relationships are temporary
But the value you create once for people will stick. So whenever you see people leave your community, maybe you just let them go. Trying to win them back by aggressive re-engagement campaigns might as well ruin the relationship you established in the first place.
As long as you were valuable for someone for the time being, they’ll come back to you sooner or later.
That’s how long-lasting communities are created. You might just not always see it in your engagement and retention numbers.
