14 Tips to Implement & Increase Member Engagement|Experts Roundup

If you’re involved in community management, you have likely heard of the 90–9–1 principle. It represents the speculated percentages of online community engagement with 90 percent of participants only viewing content, 9 percent responding to content, and only 1 percent actively participating in the creation of new content.
And it’s difficult not to get discouraged by such speculation when your member engagement is so critical to the success of your community as a whole.
Member engagement is not an easy, snap-your-fingers kind of thing. But when you have an engaged member base, the work is totally worth it.
So now you would be thinking how to keep your community members engaged? Here we go..

Since every community is different, there isn’t a magical “one size fits all” method to increase and maintain member engagement.
So we’ve compiled the best 14 tips on member engagement from our last experts’ roundup discussion we had in our Online Community Community Folks.

To check other Experts’ Roundups, follow our publication here.

1. Celebrate the success of fellow community members: This can be one of the nicest things you can do to your community members. Make them feel special for the efforts he/she has put to achieve something which is worth a celebration.

2. Create rituals: You can think about any big, long-lasting communities and you’ll find a number of rituals in play. Rituals are powerful because they help your members create a habit of participating and they know what to expect.

3. Finding common goals and build content around it:
You can find common goals by doing a small survey with your community members on what content they want to see in the near future, ask them their field of interest around which they want to know more and learn regularly.
On the basis of this survey, create a content calendar or you can also run some campaigns, include few questions in your daily post to increase engagement in your community.

4. Delivering values to members in terms of relevant connections:
A good connection is always helpful and whenever you help your members with making a relevant connection, they will keep coming back for a sense of belonging and engage with your community.

5. Talking and understanding member’s problems:
You can start 1:1 talking with your members and try to understand their problems and help them in solving them through your community.

6. Appreciating & rewarding contributors:
Have new member perks and participating member perks and even a simple way is featuring them for extraordinary contribution.
There can be many ways to appreciating and rewarding members for their active contribution and these things will eventually increase engagement in your community.

7. Ask members to express their views: By sharing a content template with members, you can ask them to express their views on the same and work on the feedback. It makes your engagement easy and free-flowing.

8. Give them a day to share their story: This is a great way to know more about your community members. You can randomly choose someone and tell them to come up with their story which includes things like what they do, why they are a part of your community and so many things which help them to connect with others as well.

9. Create a leaderboard: Having a leaderboard can encourage participation in your community. But before that, you can think of a few activities a member can perform, and then assigning points to each activity can create excitement and give you good engagement within your community.

10. Start sending the bi-monthly newsletter: A newsletter that can consist of quick updates from your industry or curated content for reading can be really helpful. You can also feature top contributors and give shout outs to contest winners too.

11. Organize events using collected data: To get a good number of audiences in your events, you should definitely try this hack.

12. Conduct poll based engagement: That’s the simplest and best way to bring engagement and you will also get to know what your community is looking for.
13. Mark post as an announcement and tagging people to participate: If your community members post anything interesting, just mark that post as an announcement and tag other members to participate in the same thread. This will definitely encourage people to post interesting things in your community.

14. Build an ecosystem where value generates for everyone:
Understand your members and try to accommodate and then build an ecosystem where value is being generated by the community and for the community.

These were the highlights which summarise the discussion that happened in our Community Folks group. The folks who have shared their views are themselves the Community Managers/Builders. We would like to thank all of them for sharing these valuable community learnings.

It’s a pleasure to have you in our community.
Akshay Aggarwal, Arbab Usmani, Mohit Mahajan, Amit Pandey, Teja Bitra, Sweta Jain, Ritesh Aggarwal, Azhar Shams, Mustafa Saifee, Varu Dwarak, Priya Sood for sharing your views and contributing to the post. A big thanks to Himanshu Khubwani for initiating & helping me summarize this valuable piece.

Are we missing any important point here? It’s a community-driven blog, if you have anything to add, do put down your thoughts in the comment section and it will be updated here.