Engaging your audience is the key to creating a healthy, sustainable community. It’s not enough to just design a community and hope your target audience joins – creators and entrepreneurs alike need to adopt savvy strategies, creating dynamic content plans that will appeal to the specific wants and needs of their community. With 88% of community professionals admitting that communities play an important part in achieving their company’s mission, it’s never been more important to harness the right engagement strategies for success.
If you’re wondering how to increase community engagement, we have 21 ideas you can start from. Curate an engaging space where existing community members won’t want to leave and new members won’t be able to stop themselves from joining.
Increased community engagement isn’t always linked to the number of likes you get on a post or the number of members in your community. Here are a few examples of what online community engagement might look like:
All of these types of engagement can help contribute to a self-sustaining community.
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Creating a community engagement strategy designed to appeal to your specific members is the only way to create, increase, and sustain community engagement. However, it can be hard to know where to start.
Here are 21 community engagement strategies you can implement, no matter your niche.
If you want to build a sustainable community with high engagement, think long-term. Plan each community member’s journey from their first awareness to becoming a stable participant. When creating a roadmap, include touchpoints where potential members will interact with your community, whether through posts, emails, etc. It’s also important to map out milestones and incentives for engagement.
Saleforce’s Trailhead community provides a great example of this, designed to turn novices into experts through a structured teaching plan. Users complete modules and projects on different topics, earning rewards through badges and points. This structure creates a sense of achievement and encourages engagement throughout the community.
Adopting this strategy is essential if you have a learning community. Platforms like Teach.io make creating a space that complements your roadmap easy, letting you harness gamification features to encourage engagement.
To have an engaged community, you need to find an audience that fits into your niche – whether that’s music, writing, art, DIY, SEO, or even fitness coaching. Your members should actively benefit from your community, as this will encourage retention and contribution.
Create detailed member personas to ensure your community aligns with your audience. For example, if your community centers on fitness, consider what type of people are more likely to join. Depending on your fitness niche, this might be singles between the ages of 20 and 30. With this information in mind, you can tailor your community’s branding and messaging to appeal to those specific profiles.
LinkedIn groups showcase their content by targeting specific industries, interests, and roles. This ensures discussions are kept relevant and valuable to their audience. By adopting a similar strategy, you can engage your community and increase engagement in the long run.
To encourage community engagement, members must identify with your community. Creating dedicated spaces or channels will encourage your community members to engage more with each other and the specific content related to that subtopic. A great example is Reddit’s subreddits, where users can find and react to a range of niche topics.
Community members won’t engage with your content if they don’t feel safe, which is why it’s important to create a welcoming and friendly atmosphere. Do this by setting and enforcing rules.
Map out a clear set of guidelines you expect all community members to follow. Guidelines should encourage respectful behavior and prohibit offensive, disrespectful, and discriminatory behavior. If you’re stuck on the type of guidelines to enforce, check out our article on community rule examples.
Ensure new members can’t participate in the wider community until they agree to the rules. You can see this in action with Facebook Groups, as members must agree to the rules before joining. Furthermore, many groups will include questions relating to the niche, such as “What is your favorite crime novel?” or “What is your favorite recipe?” This will help vet those who may not have good intentions when joining the community.
If a community member breaks the rules, it’s important to act accordingly. This could be in the form of a suspension, access limitation, or even a permanent ban, depending on the severity of the actions. Keeping the peace will ensure that your community remains a safe space where members feel happy to participate.
To create an engaged community, it’s important to make new members feel welcome as soon as they join.
This doesn’t have to be extensive or time-consuming. Introductory posts and automated welcome messages will immediately alert the community to new members and encourage them to interact with each other. Discord allows you to create separate channels for member introductions, helping everyone who joins feel welcome.
If the initial experience you create for your community members is positive, they’re more likely to stick around. This small step will increase retention, resulting in higher engagement in the future.
One simple way to boost community engagement is to encourage conversations, especially when low activity strikes. Post thoughtful questions or resources that relate to recent trends or topics. This will prompt discussions and interactions within the community.
This simple activity is a good way to encourage community engagement by prompting discussions. Curate a series of prompts and ask your community to complete the sentence. For example, if you have a book club, try something like, “The last book that made me cry was ____.” This will spark conversations surrounding books and get your community engaging with each other.
You could even create a bank of questions for the future and release them weekly – or even daily. This will ensure a constant cycle of communication.
Furthermore, this activity is a great way to gather data on your community members. If they all resonate with one topic or question, note this down and use it for future content.
This or that posts are a quick and fun way to boost community engagement. The concept is simple – create a post or a poll that asks members to choose between two options. For example, “This or That? Morning jogs or evening gym sessions?”
This idea may encourage debates among community members, boosting engagement even further.
Choosing questions that align with your niche is important, as this will be more relatable to your community and create more engagement. Use Canva or a similar app to create appealing posts that catch your community’s eye.
Competitions incentivize community members to participate and collaborate, thus increasing community engagement. Plan competitions related to your niche. For example, if you host a photography community, you could always host monthly themed photo contests. It’s also important to choose interesting prizes that encourage members to participate, such as feature spots on the community page or blog, cash prizes, or even physical prizes.
Advertising competitions on your social media in advance is also a great way to convince new members to join your community.
To increase community engagement, it’s important that community leaders actively respond to members. This will help you fix issues preventing engagement, inspire member confidence, and drive engagement.
To be more active in the community, leaders should participate in discussions, give feedback, answer questions, and make sure they’re visible and active. This will inspire others to follow their leads.
Encouraging members to share their stories and experiences is a fantastic way to increase community engagement and build bonds between members at the same time. Sharing personal stories creates a deeper connection, allowing community members to relate to each other on a deeper level. In fact, a report by Amity found that 77% of survey participants visit online communities to discover new things and connect with people with similar interests.
Convincing community members to open up can be difficult initially, but once a few people share their stories, others are bound to be inspired. You can create prompts, questions, or events focusing on storytelling. For example, with Instagram communities, brands might use a campaign that will encourage users to share their stories through a hashtag. This encourages a wealth of stories, boosting engagement.
One way to increase community engagement is to give your community members the value they deserve. Not all community members will desire the same level of value. This is where membership tiers and subscription models come into play. Different tiers set at different price points will encourage members to invest in the community at a price they can afford.
For example, some people may only be able to afford the lowest tier, which means they’ll still have an opportunity to sign up for your community, something they might not have had if you only offered a flat price. Furthermore, those who want to join the community but don’t want to commit a large amount of funds may opt for the lowest tier to begin with but decide they want more value and then subscribe to a higher tier.
Patreon is a fantastic example of this, with creators from all niches offering different rewards tailored to specific memberships. With Patreon, you can also cap specific tiers when you reach a certain number of members. For example, if you offer monthly courses or physical products at a $100 dollar tier, you could cap it to 15 people, creating exclusivity and allowing you to provide the best value to your community members without being overwhelmed. This will create a thriving community where members will be encouraged to engage.
Hosting live events, such as Q&As, webinars, or meetups, is a fantastic way to increase community engagement. Depending on your niche, you could invite industry professionals, influencers, and celebrities to partake in specialized talks. One example is Reddit AMAs (Ask Me Anything), where public figures, celebrities, and other Redditors directly interact with community members, giving information on specific topics.
Brands or companies have also started hosting live events to encourage engagement with their social media accounts. For example, Broadway stars or actors often partake in “Instagram Takeovers,” where fans can send in questions.
The real-time interaction that comes with live events is a fantastic way to create engagement, as participants could actively send in questions, and comment, or chat with other community members about the event. It’s also a great way to generate buzz around your community and find new members.
If your community centers around a popular niche, such as DIY, books, or website design, it’s easy for community members to feel overwhelmed and less likely to participate. But by splitting your community up into subgroups or smaller spaces, you can cater to more specific interests. For example, if you have a DIY community, you could set up subgroups based on places, like garden DIY, kitchen, or living room. A book niche could be split up into subgroups in terms of genre, such as romance, crime, horror, non-fiction, etc.
Nextdoor is a community app for neighborhoods where users can buy and sell items, get local tips, and more. The app contains different groups for interests, activities, and issues, which creates smaller, more engaged sections of the community.
Like conversation prompts, asking your community thought-provoking questions can encourage discussions and drive engagement. Use community polls, discussion prompts, or even Q&A sessions to get your community talking.
Quora’s entire community platform is based around this activity. Users ask and answer questions, which create detailed and in-depth conversations. This ensures that Quora’s platform remains thriving.
Appealing to your community’s competitive spirit through challenges is a fantastic way to encourage engagement. Create niche-specific challenges that will appeal to your members. Try gamification strategies, incentives, and rewards to encourage participation, such as certificates, a leaderboard, and points.
Strava, a fitness app, routinely hosts challenges where members can compete for achievements. Goodreads has yearly reading challenges that encourage users to engage with the app. Audible and Kindle offer badges when users complete reading milestones, such as reading daily.
Encouraging your community members to give feedback will help you engage your community and get insights on what’s working directly from your audience. Furthermore, taking the feedback onboard and implementing suggested changes will make your community members feel seen and valued.
With various ways to cultivate feedback, such as suggestion or ask boxes, surveys, and even feedback-specific discussions, you can find a method that works best for your community. Discord regularly asks users for feedback and uses it to introduce new features or adjust existing ones. This shows that they care about creating a top-tier platform for their community.
Encouraging engagement between community members will help boost engagement. Peer-to-peer interactions will also help build a supportive network for community members, strengthening community bonds and even creating long-lasting friendships between members. This positive environment will also help you retain users, as they will feel supported and valued by you and other members.
Encourage members to collaborate or assist each other with problems. One example of this is Duolingo’s study groups, which encourage users to support each other while learning new languages. You could do the same by setting up sub-groups dedicated to peer support or using break rooms during live events or classes.
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Focusing on your unengaged members will increase overall engagement. Develop strategies and re-engagement campaigns to target members who aren’t participating as much as others or those who might not be participating at all. You could reach out to them personally or send automated “We Miss You” emails. If your community is linked to a product or service, you could offer them a special discount.
Furthermore, it’s worth simply asking them why they’re not engaging with your community. This data can help you pinpoint what’s working and what’s not. For example, they may not resonate with the type of content you’re posting, or they may not find value in your courses.
You can also gain feedback when your members leave the community by asking why. This data will help you see which areas need improvement so you can tweak your content and increase community engagement in the future.
An audience won’t engage with content it doesn’t resonate with, which is why it’s important to regularly test the type of content you’re sending to your community, from the format to the substance itself. This will ensure any content you put out aligns with your members’ interests, increasing engagement.
Tracking metrics, such as likes, comments, and shares, will offer direct feedback from your audience and help you gauge the effectiveness of your content. Twitch is a platform that allows you to do just that, letting you adjust streaming times, games, or interaction styles based on your viewer engagement. Replicate the type of content that gains the most engagement, and consider cutting content that receives fewer likes and comments to ensure you’re putting out the best content for your audience.
Lastly, the best way you can increase community engagement is by keeping your community fun. Members won’t want to interact with boring course content, rude members or leaders, or uninspiring posts. Furthermore, new users won’t join if your community isn’t enticing. Design playful content to post, craft funny messages and questions, and try game nights or competitions to bring out your community members’ fighting spirits. As long as it aligns with your community’s core interests and values, the sky’s the limit.
Here are some of our top tips to ensure your community stays sustainable and active.
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Engaging your audience is the key to unlocking a sustainable, thriving community. Above, we have given you 21 excellent ideas to increase community engagement and take your community space to the next level. Whether you need to engage disengaged members, tweak your content strategy, or create a more fun and inclusive atmosphere, the ideas above provide a fantastic starting point.
