Three critical growth points: incoming traffic, new users, and engagement.
The primary growth indicator for an online community is the increasing number of active users on the platform. There are three critical variables in that equation:
- The number of new users who register in the community each day.
- The number of users who take some actions after they have created an account.
- The number of actions done by regular users.
These are the three key stages of the engagement funnel. Each of these elements involves different activities and can be optimized independently of the others. Optimizing incoming traffic is a business task. Making new users act for the first time largely comes down to optimizing the platform. To keep and engage regular users, we need to run community building activities.
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.