#10-community
Thread
Hi everyone! Two questions for the group: 1) Curious what your go-to or “proven” tactics are for sparking engagement in some slow phases? I am still new to community management and feel that my efforts to spark engagement are not working. Peer-to-peer engagement is incredibly low for us right now and I’m struggling to come up with solutions. 2) How are we approaching people using AI in very obvious (and mostly inaccurate and definitely inauthentic) ways to create responses to members questions?
• Not sure if you have a forum section in your community, but I post fun forum questions throughout the month, just to spark engagement. I create a forum post weekly in our community.
• Also, I send a monthly newsletter and mid-month push to get customers back into our community. That helps a lot with reminding them to get into the community to see what's new. I always see an up tick in engagement after sending those communications.
@Jenelle Stevens thank you! Yes, we have a forum!
You're welcome! I hope it helps a bit.
I tend to think about engagement in two distinct but connected ways. At the core, my focus is always on helping members solve real, current pain points through peer to peer sharing, which sounds aligned with where you are right now. I like to cultivate a small, rotating cohort of highly engaged members who consistently surface those pain points in the forum, rotating participation every 1–2 months to prevent burnout. They can expect to show up on particular days and in turn other members can expect a similar cadence.
The first layer is content activity. This is likely what you’re referring to most, likes, comments, and shares within the forum. I treat these signals as a pulse check, helping us understand where energy already exists and where it’s worth investing time to create deeper engagement. In the communities I build, content activity directly informs relevance: higher interaction tells us where to focus and where to go deeper.
The second layer is deeper engagement. This is where we intentionally design roundtables, meetups, and more robust content or discussions, once we know there’s a critical mass of people working through the same problem. These experiences are built with purpose, grounded in validated pain points, and designed to help members move from awareness to real problem solving.
My suggestion would be to focus on building an initial cohort that is your “super users” share how you would like for them to surface signals through questions, polls, etc. each week. As you already know the magic is relevant resources and questions from your members. Knowing this, it is definitely not easy to build cohorts like this, but if the value proposition is high for your members, you almost always get the content activity you are looking for. Why are they coming to your space, where is their hair on fire? Show them they could put it out together and the rest will follow.
Super curious what is the reason for their gathering?
I love the super users concept that Ryan is talking about here. This is how most of the people we work with ensure consistent activity. Its about giving your super users a little bit of ownership into the community so they feel a responsibility to keep the community alive.
User Groups programs and events are a great way to do this. Building personal relationships gets people to come back into the community and engage. It gives them a reason to check the community.
We’re also coming out with an AI tool that will help automate engagement in a way that brings your super users and subject matter experts back into the community too. Happy to chat about that and get your feedback on this new feature too -
Thank you for the thoughtful responses!