How Do You Warm-Up Members Inside A Community?
How do you get a group of people to talk to one another?
The Challenge
- How do you warm-up members inside a community?
- How do you build-up the frequency and quality of engagement inside a community?
- How do you go from infrequent small talk to everyday conversations about the things that really matter?
The Solutions
I. Focusing on questions (curiosity) over sharing our own insights and opinions.
II. Giving space for members to share their own thoughts and opinions thoroughly before providing comprehensive answers.
III. Establishing regularity. It seems that the regular engagement might be making the community members more comfortable. Having something regular, predictable, and routine helps set expectations. When members are expecting a regularly scheduled activity, it starts to form a habit or longing for a particular event.
It might be too soon to say that a strong bond or connection has been formed, but we are observing significant positive changes in the engagement inside the Discord server.
IV. Focusing on content that is relevant: What makes content relevant?
First: it is relatable. Content that members can associate with their current lifestyles, interests, passions, and aspirations. Second: because it’s relatable, it becomes interesting for them.
V. Giving access to relevant quotes from Twitter Spaces conducted has successfully gathered attention and interest based on responses from members.
The Results
- We’ve observed that the quality of engagement is improving as the members are more open to sharing more in-depth responses about their thoughts and opinions.
- We’ve achieved an increase of engagement of more than 100% compared to the first week of community engagement.
- By week 2, we’ve started measuring their average word count or Words Per Response(WPR) to gauge how warm our audience is. Throughout the week, we were seeing a steady increase of WPR except for Friday when the frequency of engagement was higher.
- We are beginning to see a transformation of members from being an audience to truly forming a community by definition. We’ve observed that members are starting to converse amongst themselves without facilitation from moderators or co-founders. As Tom Ross has mentioned in the podcast Marketing in the Metaverse; the difference between having an audience and having a community is that the former is one entity speaking to many, while a community is a group of people communicating with one another.
The Outcome
- We’ve learned that there is value in collective knowledge when it comes to community and that sometimes less is more just like what was emphasized in a podcast about building a sustainable community in The Community Experience by Smart Passive Income (SPI).
- We’ve also learned that letting your community members interact with each other by focusing on content that is relevant to them and by giving them a safe space to communicate will drive more engagement and interest to the community.
The Impact on the Business
- We’ve observed a noticeable increase in people talking about the brand on their personal social media accounts.
- Because people are talking about the brand, this decreases marketing expense, while increasing awareness. Just as the Digital Marketing Institute has identified, “interacting with your customers consistently, allows you to connect with new customers in a meaningful way.” Gaining a better understanding of your current community members and establishing a stronger foundation together makes it easier to drive people towards sales and further down the customer journey or funnel.
- This brings to light a glimmer of an opportunity for the brand or the values that it stands for to become trending in the future.
Hope this helps!
Prepared by:
Jessica Gulapa | Jesscadoodles and Rhadli Marcos Dumali
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