To understand why the list of the engagement techniques we used to build Hash Code / Stack Overflow looks as it does, let’s first dive into the theory. (I promise it will be a very short dive!)
What is engagement?
Engagement in online communities refers to the level and quality of interaction that users have within the community. It’s a measure of how actively and meaningfully people participate, not just whether they show up, but what they do once they’re in the community.
In general, we can say that the higher a user’s engagement, the higher their sense of belonging, and developing a sense of belonging, in turn, is the ultimate goal of community management.
Engagement matters for the business as well. A community with highly engaged users fuels business growth by driving repeat sales, spreading word-of-mouth referrals, and boosting trust-based conversions, and etc.
What causes low user engagement in an online community?
1. Users cannot connect with others, their posts do not get responses
When conversations are ignored, users quickly get dissatisfied. A lack of reaction from others kills engagement. If you see this problem in your community you need to step in and either act yourself by responding to their ideas and concerns, showing you value their input, or help other users connect with each other.
2. Users do not feel that your community is “their place”
High levels of engagement (and a sense of belonging) usually come with a high sense of community ownership. This means that users feel that the community is theirs and have a stake in its success and they care about the community’s fate.
To foster the sense of ownership you need to facilitate meta discussions about the community itself. Moreover, you need not only listen to what they think but also be part of the discussions and then, when you, together, find a consensus, act on that best solution. Without implementing the solution identified or explaining why it is not the one you want to give a try the enthusiasm among users will come to an end soon.
3. Users cannot find others who they like
There is a popular phrase “People come to a community for other people.” No matter what you do, it is impossible to engage users in an online community at a high level until they find other users for whom they would like to be part of your community.
To increase engagement, you need to “make users get to know” each other. For example, hold contests where users need to work together, share about the achievements of users in the community blog and hold video interviews with them. The better users know each other, the higher the engagement in your community will be.
Some specific engagement techniques that certainly work*
*(At least they worked for us!)
Here are some engagement techniques that the team and I used when I worked on HashCode / Stack Overflow. As you can see, most of them were directed to connect users with each other.
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Hosting offline meetups. Once in a quarter we facilitated dinner for our users. During the dinners we took photos and published them in our blog. (In terms of offline events, once we even ran a conference!)
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Hosting online town halls and Q&A sessions with employees. Quite regularly we hold “official” Q&A sessions with the company employees where everyone could ask us a question either live or submit it some time before the event. Some events were on a video call, some were in the text format. Besides the official events, I usually was fully dedicated to engaging with users at least once per week in a chat. Those days could be different, starting from answering users’ questions to just socializing with the folks.
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Making users get to know other users. Especially from a personal perspective. We ran offline meetups, did blogging with stories about users, and organized a vlog that was dedicated to interviews with the users.
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Running contests. We ran contests to “clean” the site from bad posts and to answer all questions with no or low quality answers. We organised events like Winter Bash, where users needed to take some actions to get special visual on-site gifts, and New Year’s Algorithm, where users needed to ask and answer special types of questions.
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Hosting off-topic (but very related) conversations. Such discussions allow users to open up from a different perspective. In addition, it is an opportunity for those who cannot show off themselves in primary topics of the community to show off themselves.
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Hosting a meta discussion about the community itself. Soliciting users feedback makes users feel a strong sense of ownership. The sense of ownership skyrocks the moment you start implementing what users have discussed.
Some related topics to look at: