I recently spoke with four community managers consecutively, and each mentioned that their communities reached a stage where boosting engagement became more challenging than driving growth. Although their member counts continued to rise, overall activity plateaued, and the engagement rate even declined. They pointed to various reasons for this… but I’m holding off on sharing those to avoid speaking for them.
Has anyone else experienced this? What do you believe causes it, and how have you addressed it?
Drop in engagement, when growing, is the sign that the community became too big to be part of. Usually, communities grow via iteration — from 1 to 10, from 10 to 100, then split the group of 100 into smaller groups of ten and make each group independent and grow on its own.
My understanding of that is that people lose their sense of belonging to a group when it is too big. People in academia connect it to Dunbar’s number (~200). When there are too many folks in a group, we cannot remember all of them and start seeing too many strangers we cannot associate ourselves with.