More than anything else, your members want the community to be about themselves and the people they care about.
A decade ago now, I made a discovery.
I wrote a post about a member who was getting married.
The response rate was far higher than any post that month. Everyone wanted to congratulate the member, ask questions about the wedding, tease him about the wedding night.
We repeated this several times. I wrote a post about a member that had a baby. Same response. It was far bigger than any other informational post.
Soon, we had members writing in with their own news. Job changes, babies, marriages, moving home, climbing Mount Everest, other achievements, even new girlfriends (we drew the line here).
Jeremiah Owyang understood this when he write about people on the move. Soon, everyone wanted to be featured on this page.
Mark Pinsent and co created a thriving community of London Tech PR professionals by making fun of members.
We began including this as a community news roundup. Then we expanded this to be the main news and put the traditional topic news in a roundup.
If you're struggling to get activity in the community, try writing about what your members are doing. Reach out to a few members to ask what they're working on. Ask what they have recently achieved. Create a weekly or monthly segment focused on members job changes, achievements, or life changes (marriages, babies etc…)
Make the community about your members and their peer groups. Trust me, the response will be huge.
