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One sure-fire way to annoy people who ask questions is to send them somewhere else to get answers.
Don’t do this. If someone asks a question in your community, don’t just link to the answer, provide the answer. Go to the FAQ or page content if you need and take the time to adapt the answer for them.
Most members don’t take action because they’re not aware of the initiative you launched.
Even if they visit the community, receive your emails, or get notifications, there’s a good chance they didn’t open, read, or remember the information.
That’s not a helpful response.
Think of the absurdity of that statement too.
Did someone new to the community take the time to search for every previous thread related to the question (every answer) to see if any of those solutions worked?
Copywriters keep swipe files of great copy they can adapt for new clients.
That’s why you see so many headlines like “The Lazy [X] Guide To Achieve [Y]”.
Reviewing more data from a batch of communities, we keep seeing a trend with a normal distribution around the 300, 100, 10 mark.
The communities that take off tend to get..
300 monthly posts.
From 100 active participants per month.
With 10 new registrations/activations per day.
Almost everyone can list people they want to connect with. It’s usually people like themselves.
Very few of these connections pan out over the long-term.
In communities, this leads to a LOT of inactive sub-groups.
As a community grows, the rate of growth naturally slows (no. new members / no. total members (or DUAs)).
You might get lucky in a fast-growing industry (data science etc…), but otherwise, you will at some point hit saturation*.
If you’ve set expectations (and constantly reported) on rapidly rising engagement metrics all this time, what will you do when you naturally go past the peak?
Reflecting upon the people we (and others) have hired recently, most seem to fall into the community plus category.
They bring community talent, but they also bring something extra to the table.
It might be a relationship with every top person in their field.
It might be creative content skills (video etc..)
It might be copywriting.
Run a cohort analysis (Google Analytics/Community-Analytics can help) and identify the most common drop-off points.
Be aware that the biggest will always be between week 0 and 1. There are ways to tackle this, but ignore this group for now. This group skews your data too badly.
Look at where the remaining 20% or so of survivors begin to drop-off.
