Most organisations chase visible engagement metrics.
It’s soul-crushing work that condemns you to posting click-bait on social channels in pursuit of valueless activity. It robs you of a great chance to help your audience.
A better approach is to use psychology principles to target deep mental engagement.
A great way to do this is to increase their sense of competence.
Think of something you find deeply engaging. You’re almost certainly thinking of something you’re good at. That’s not an accident. The better we become at something, the more we enjoy it (and the more we do it).
If you want your members to be more deeply engaged, increase their sense of competence.
Six Competence Factors
There are six broad factors that enhance the sense of competence.
These factors apply broadly across online communities, internal collaboration/knowledge sharing efforts, software, managing teams, and your own social groups.
The challenge is to design a journey to steadily increase your audience’s perceived sense of competence. This might not even be a single journey. It’s likely to be multiple journeys for different segments of your audiences (regulars, newcomers etc…).
The great thing is it feels a whole lot better to do engagement work with a clear mission to make members feel more competent than tricking them into meaningless posts and clicks.
This is the combination of psychology, case studies, and value that we study in depth during Advanced Engagement Methods. If this is the kind of work you want to learn how to do, you should join us.
p.s. A podcast about doing valuable engagement work with LinkHumans.
