Below I want to share with you a proposal of how to drive community engagement by creating richer member profiles as well as enriching community content and lacing this together via notifications, subscriptions, push-notifications, badges etc.
Why do we want this? Because more than 95% of the users come to the community, register, ask a first question and disappear.
But as Community Managers, we want to create an experience that pulls the users back into the community and engage, contribute & share and become regular members of our community.
So, how do we achieve this? The basic idea is that if you know what people are interested in and which content correlates to this “interest”, you can increase community engagement because you can deliver exactly the content tailored to the individual interests (at the right point in time).
However, when a Community Manager now tries to achieve this, s/he currently faces several challenges:
- Sub-Forums are a rough topic container, with larger communities, they however contain a multitude of topis – think of an Apple-Forum that contains discussions about iPhone X, iPhone 8, iOS, etc. So, if a Community Manager wants to select relevant content s/he has no option to break down the content into more relevant segments, say all the content for “iPhone 8”.
- The user profiles don’t contain any information about the users interests or needs, nor match existing meta-data, and if you have a custom field in the profile, it’s not matched with other system-data.
- Tags are available, but as they are public multiple versions of the same tag exist (iphone; iFone; iPhone x; etc.) and as they are not mandatory, >90% of the content is untagged.
In summary: Community Manager now cannot reach out to users with specific interests, nor can he select a group of users with specific interests e.g. for generating feedback about a certain item, nor can the users tailor their community experience to their personal interests or navigate in the community by their interests.
Therefore, to overcome these challenges and create personalized community experiences, I propose to introduce “interest” meta-information.
“Interest”
Technically, an “Interest” is a meta-information which can be “attached” to any content type or user:- Interests are defined in the backend by the Community Manager
- They are defined for the community as a whole or for each sub-forum
- They cannot be altered by the standard users
- They can be made mandatory, e.g. when a users creates a topic/blog/profile he must select an interest from a (dynamic) list before proceeding
- They can be exchanged by users with the appropriate permissions/roles
- They are searchable (frontend & backend)
- They are available as triggers for notifications (e.g. notifications for all users with interest “iPhone X”)
- They can be subscribed to (frontend)
- They can be combined with other triggers, e.g. “iPhone X” + “last 6 days”
- They can be made visible by sub-forum (filter)
- They can adhere to different communiation rules
- They are manageable by users in their profiles
- They can be targeted in gamification, e.g. badge for profile completion
Content enhancement
Adding “interests” to content is done while content is created - based on the topic title and text a list of "fitting" interests is shown to the content creator (dynamic list)
Profile enhancement
As we know, users don’t pay much attention to their profile and fill it only with the most basic information when they sign up.However, with interests there is the opportunity to help them update their profile easily and quickly, I imagine a flow like:
- A users browses to the Apple forum
- He reviews x threads which have the interest: “iPhone 6”
- He’s automatically prompted by the system “Hey, you seem interested in the iPhone 6, want to receive updates when new information is available? Just add this tag to your profile (you can always remove it when you’re done)
”
Profile management
Users can manage their interests and settings in their community profile.In order to give users an incentive to update and complete their profile, a badge can be created (e.g. for profile completion)
Reaching out
Community Manager
As Community manager you can create notifications for exact target audience, increasing your impact with this audience- They can be used as triggers for notifications, e.g. you can create a notification for all users that have the interest “iPhone X”
- the interests can be combined (stacked), e.g. all “iPhone X” users plus all “iPhone 6” users
- the interests can be combined with other triggers: “iPhone X” users who “have not been to the community in the past 6 days”
- It is also possible to half-automatically create email-newsletters for interests containing a (curated) list of topics
User
Any user can subscribe to interests (see profile) and receive notifications or email based on these subscriptions. That is, as soon as any user creates a new topic, the users with the interest in their profile would get a notification that a new topic of interest for the user has appeared. They can also choose if they want to have triggered email notifications on top of that.Navigation
As described above, “interests” can be displayed in the sub-forum to allow users filtering the content based on their interests
In short, I believe that with the introduction of an "interest" meta-information,
- users could have a much personalized community experience
- and Community Managers have a lot more options to trigger engagement
Cheers,
Florian