#announcements
Important info for Customer Marketers & Community members
Thread
Hi everyone! Would love to hear about your tried and true ways to drive peer to peer engagement in your communities? Our community has been live for about a year now and our membership is growing steadily as is the number of questions that customers are posting. Today, we're mainly working with internal teams to get answers but we'd like to shift this to have more customers answering each others questions. What are some of the things you do to drive this behaviour?
Lots of “it depends’” in here but some things I’d think about are:
• Are members truly equipped (re: educated) to help their peers?
◦ If this is a no, then you have a bigger problem to address before community engagement.
• Never hurts to try a V1 gamification program around this to kickstart and help encourage and normalize the desired behavior with “reply to 5 posts by the end of the month and we’ll [insert reward/badge].”
• Talk to members and understand WHY they don’t do it today — it could be a million reasons and you won’t know until you ask them.
◦ Are they told not to do so because their space is heavily regulated (e.g., government, financial services, etc.)?
◦ Do they not trust the space and feel psychologically safe to share and help peers publicly in the community?
Hope this is generally helpful 😊
Great answer!
Appreciate it, @Joel Klettke 😊
Hey @Kayleigh Bateman I’m starting a course next week on driving more customer engagement in community programs and turn them into advocates. We’ll be working through issues like this.
I know not everyone can join but I wanted to share just in case.
Like @Joel Primack says, customers may not be equipped to participate. Do they know why they are there? Do they know why the community exists?
I would start a small seeding/founding group of customers that want to make this successful (even your internal team can do this). Organize posts and comments from these members to get them active. Now you have something to bring to other customers.
You need just 10 (or so) people to help activate this and make it interesting for customers. From there, it’s easier to drive engagement.
Agree to all of the above. We started off with identifying 5-10 of our power users and worked with them in driving more peer to peer engagement. Gamification and other value added benefits to this small group made sure they got something in return. Today it’s heartwarming to see so many of our customers proactively spending time and coming forward to spend their time and help their peers.
We also proactively tagged members on posts encouraging them to respond where we felt they can add value.
We have a subject matter expert page published on the community that lists top members (internal & external) along with what their areas of expertise are so new members can bring them in directly on conversations.
Another thing, building off of @Annapoorna’s note: In a past role, we had an community ambassador program. When members joined it, we sent them a survey to complete and one of the Qs was a picklist of topics for them to mark that they felt comfortable speaking/helping others on/with through the community. That helped us learn who to tag on what types of posts in the community to decrease time-to-reply (engagement there wasn’t an issue at all).