When you begin work today, what are you working towards? What’s your process for systematically improving the value of the community?
Here’s a useful practice. Build up a few profiles of representative community segments and better cater to their needs.
Set up interviews with 3 to 5 community members per week. I promise you the results will be invaluable. Reach out to them with questions.
- Who are they (demographics, psychographics etc) and why do they come to the community?
- How do they arrive (search, referral or direct visit)?
- When do they visit (what triggers the visit?)
- What annoys them within the community?
- What do they find most valuable in the community?
- What are the biggest problems they face at the moment?
Once you have 10 you can begin to build some profiles of your audience. These might be divided by levels of activity (high contributors, low contributors, lurkers), length of membership (newcomers, veterans), location, or any other variable.
Use this information to improve your community. Look at each unique user journey and ensure you’re minimizing the annoyances, satisfying their reason to visit, and identifying a next logical step they can take to resolve their problems.
This is a repeatable process you can use indefinitely to increase the value to your community not just to an elite few but to the many unique types of members you’re working with.
