What are the motivators for users to participate in an online community?
There are two primary types of motivators: extrinsic motivators and intrinsic motivators.
Extrinsic motivators help stimulate short-term interest among existing users who are already interested in your community. External motivators are based on incentives and rewards that fall into two primary categories: material (swag, gift cards, etc.) and intangible (special status, additional privileges on the site, etc.). Extrinsic motivators play the secondary role.
If you are planning to create a new community, increase the number of users or increase the engagement of the existing users, you need to think in terms of intrinsic motivators. Intrinsic motivation is the primary driving force to participate in a community. Intrinsic motivators are based on a sense of satisfaction and pleasure derived from doing an activity itself.
There are two big categories of intrinsic motivations:
- Personal motivation. Primary components of personal motivation are a sense of autonomy, the ability to decide what, when and how to do something, and a sense of competence, the ability of being good at what you do.
- Social motivation. The most prominent social motivators are the ability to connect with other members of the community and being able to share your work with peers and help them.
Personal and social intrinsic motivations add to one another.
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.