How to nudge new users to take actions in an online community?
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Optimize the path from creating an account to creating content. When someone lands on your platform for the first time, they don’t usually know how to find interesting discussions to participate in. Bring to the new users’ attention active discussions that might be interesting to them and where they can show off their skills. An effective way to accomplish this is to display the content that meets certain criteria on the most visited pages, like the home page, and include it in a welcome email that is sent to confirm registration on the platform. The shorter the path from landing on the platform to an action, the more people will take the action.
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Create a way to take actions for new users who have nothing to offer the community the moment they register on the platform. One common way to do that is to welcome every new user and ask them to write something about themselves in a special section. This allows a user to have a complete experience of participating in your community that is most likely to be positive. This kind of self-disclosure also has a positive impact on the user’s engagement.
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Allow users to subscribe to content by email, rss, etc. Subscription creates a direct, personalized communication channel with the users and helps keep them engaged. Allow to subscribe to both the content on the platform and the content about the community itself.
This is a fragment of a draft of the book “Lessons Learned While Working On Stack Overflow”. Read the full book on kindle or the paperback version.