Adopt a 24 Hour Response Rule

You should try to ensure every post in your community gets a response within 24 hours.

Members that don’t get a response to their posts, especially their first posts, don’t return. In addition, single-post threads is the community equivalent of boarded up houses on the street, it shows a lack of engagement in the community. Why would a member post on a forum when so many aren’t getting replies? It’s a downward spiral.

Set two times a day when you respond to posts without any responses. You don’t have to have all the information, you can ask for others to help e.g. reply with “great point, Mr. X, I’d love to know what Harry, Joe and Melissa think of this” or “I love this topic. We had a big debate about this a few months ago, check out the thread here: www.link.com”.

You can also enlist volunteers here. Have people responsible for topics reaching out to those whom post in that area. It doesn’t matter how you do it, just make sure that every post gets a quick reply.

Comments

[Account Deleted]

I agree. It's hard to keep track of all posts in a busy community, but I've got a team of volunteers who do precisely this. They keep an eye out for new members and welcome them to the community. It really helps to engage the new person, and makes them feel part of the community right from the start.

[Evan Hamilton]

This really can backfire - you don't want to be the only reason you have a (seemingly) vibrant community. If you haven't built a community that wants to interact with each other, manually inciting interactions isn't going to help.

Instead (which you touched on, Richard) we should be focusing on encouraging interactions between community members. That way we create a real, sustainable community with it's own momentum. Because eventually (if you're succeeding) there are going to be too many posts to respond to personally.

[Nike Air Max Wright]

Great post. Then again you can get back into the whole argument about what makes Jewish music, Jewish? If you have a klezmer band that is played by non-Jews is it Jewish? The fact that the word "mazal tov" is a word in the song make it a Jewish song? No doubt Jewish music may mean different things to different people.