You know how it is; full of energy and enthusiasm you create a Twitter profile, build a user forum or set up a LinkedIn group. You invite some people, it starts well and then... it becomes increasingly quiet in your 'community'.
Building a forum or starting a page is one thing. Activating the community is a whole different matter. How do you make sure that members become active? How should you approach them, facilitate them and what further development of your community site is important to keep your members enthusiastic? In this article I will name the different roles and needs of community members and give concrete ideas. I will also visualize ea using examples of YEON as a community site.
Social technographics ladder
Forrester analysts Charlene Li and Jos Bernhoff have defined 6 types of community members in their book Groundswell . They call this the “social technographics ladder”. These roles are based on the level of participation, how much activity the community members show. The more activity someone shows, the higher he or she will be on the “social technographics ladder”.
6 steps ground well
Each of these roles and phases requires a different approach. If you want to activate your community, you need to stimulate members in the different roles in a unique way. Below you can read how to do this per role.
If you want to activate your community, you need to uniquely stimulate members in different roles.
1. Creators
The “creators” are the members who contribute the most, actually write articles/blogs and respond a lot. In most online communities the 90-9-1 rule applies. 90% only come to get input, 9% participate sometimes and 1% is often active. This is a rather black and white figure by the way. If we look at the exclusive community of YEON for example, we see the following. Of the 10,000 visitors per month, 111 are members, of which 60 are active writers. So 54% of the community is creator, but compared to the total number of visitors this is indeed only 0.5%.
What do the creators need?
Of course, you want these active members to feel at home in your community and continue to participate. Keep in mind that it is very important for a “creator” that his contributions matter, which translates into being read often by visitors, being seen by other community members, having an impact with an article (think of reactions and retweets). As a website cambodia phone number list builder, it is therefore smart to make sure that you make these statistics visible to the participant. But you can do even more. Think of:
add social media share buttons;
promote contributions through a newsletter, tweets by the editorial team;
article of the week, most read article, popular author;
score on article page.
sidebar
In the YEON community we try to facilitate this as best as possible. For example, next to each article and on the profile page you will see an overview of the statistics (and popularity) of the members. We also email the posted contribution to the community and to the newsletter members once a week. In addition, we use Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ to draw attention to the contributions of community members. The share bar on the side of an article gives the participant a good idea of the popularity of his article.
In addition, conversations with our members show that they do want to share knowledge, but the threshold for writing an article is high, because where do you start? That is why we came up with something new this week: a tool with which you can easily create a case article. By answering a number of questions, you will have a structured article and valuable contribution to the community in no time. I am very curious to see if it will work!