How to do an AMA

Author: Katerina, Co-Lead, TogetherCrew

AMA (Ask Me Anything) events, are an old, stable feature of online communities. They began in the 1990s (yes that old!). And Reddit’s IamA subreddit brought this form of interview style to the forefront of everyone’s mind.

The format is simple: Ask the interviewee any question you want. Everyone can chime in. Often, the person being asked questions is famous, leading to the allure and attraction. It’s a way for the everyday Joe to engage with influencers and celebrities. But AMAs aren’t just for those on the red carpet. They’re a way to familiarize community members with each other and share knowledge.

Benefits of an AMA

You can create a lot of buzz with an AMA. Create engagement and get members to repost and share along the various touch points of an AMA: Announcing the event, the speaker, sourcing questions from members, and summarizing the shared insights.

An AMA is also a great tool for attracting new members. Even if you have it in a public space like Twitter, LinkedIn’s live audio event, or Farcaster’s Aburra, new members will join your community. By hosting such an event, you signal your expertise and cement your status in your niche.

For members, the real value of an AMA is to learn something that is directly applicable to them. This can be how a successful leader approaches hiring, how to prepare for a crowd-sourcing campaign, or the failures of a growth manager. Of course, members also hope to gain visibility in the community or from the speaker, by asking insightful questions. Play with this! Offer rewards for most upvoted questions, such as 1:1 with the guest speaker or leaders of the community.

How to organize an AMA

Just because preparation on the speaker side is low, doesn’t mean you can do them last minute. Unless your community is high caliber or the speaker is very well known, play it safe and prepare.

1. Announce the event and the speaker.
   Some AMA’s are live, while others are text based, or even asynchronous. Make sure the format is clear for everyone. For example, Elpha, a community for women working in tech, runs monthly AMA events where members have a week to post questions. The AMA guests then answers them one by one on the forum. You can also have a list of questions for the speaker to answer. This can help if you fear a cold start problem, with members not posting questions.
2. Remind people to ask their questions
3. Host the event. No matter the format, it helps to let the speaker see the questions beforehand. If it’s a live event, have someone in your team share the answers in your community or social media to keep the buzz alive. Have an opportunity for members to ask new questions
4. At the end, don’t forget to thank the speaker and share how members can get in touch with them.
5. Pro tip: run a competition for the best question and announce the winner at the end (also encouraging members to stay). You can reward them with some tokens, a POAP or NFT, or by tweeting about them.
6. A couple of days later, share a summary of the event.

Pay attention to this

If your AMA is live, no matter if it’s text, audio or video base, know in what time zone your community is. If it’s global, consider rotating the time. It’s annoying if people from one region constantly have the shorter end of the stick. You use TogetherCrew’s feature of “When is My Community Most Active” to find a good slot.

Weight the pros and cons of a sync or async AMA. It’s easier to create a buzz with a live event, but it’s also riskier. If no one shows up, you don’t have much wriggle room to change things up. With an asynchronous event set-up, you can easily add your own questions in case community members don’t ask many. Non-live AMAs also give the speaker more time to thoughtfully reply to the questions. But with a live event, people leave with an emotional high. This reaction has a positive impact on your community. People feel like they got value.

Experiment with the ideal time between sourcing questions and getting replies. Too short, and you end up starting your AMA with no or only a few questions. Too long, and members forget what they asked.

How to measure success of an AMA

You can measure the success of your AMA in different ways. It depends on why you are doing it.

• Increase engagement: Measure if a number of posts likes, and replies increases during and after the event. If it only increases during the event, members find the content of the AMA engagement, but do not see a point in talking with other community members. You can do this using the engaged member panel on TogetherCrew.

• Professional development for members: You’ll have to run a survey or read through posts to see how members perceived the value of the AMA for their own personal growth.
• Grow the community: Check the number of new members, and retention of members. You want members to join and remain active. In TogetherCrew you can check this easily. For new members, go to your onboarding panel to see how many new members joined, and how active they are. To figure out retention rates, check the number of disengaged members.

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