What makes your online community buzzing with activities? Yep, it is the user generated content that keeps it alive. If nobody is posting a thing on it in your community, it is going to lose all its charms and you will soon witness an exodus of members.
Of course, you don’t want to see this happening to your community and that means, you need to do something proactively to make sure that members of your online community are always posting interesting things, debating and exchanging ideas. To encourage people to become active on the platform, here we are going to give some tips that might help your community stand apart –
Rewards the Active Members
If the dormant and the active members of your communities are treated the same way, it will make some active members feel frustrated. You need to reward the active members for their contributions to the community and you would not necessarily have to spend money for that. A simple virtual badge as a recognition for their contribution to the community is enough to keep them hooked to your community and encourage them to contribute to its growth.
Take the example of Thefootballforum.Net forum. This forum has simplified the concept of rewarding active members. They give different names to different members based on their level of contribution to the community. For example, newbie starts with ‘First Team’ but later they might acquire higher ranks like – Lifetime Supporter, Supporter etc. It is a cool way to encourage interaction.
Contest
Running a contest every now and then is the best way to encourage generation of users generated content. The contest does not need to involve expensive gifts. Just make sure that it catches the popular imagination. Ask your members to share a story or their personal experience kinda thing. By making those users generated content live on your website; you will be able to give the existing web presence of your community a massive boost.
Blizzard Entertainment: Community has done an incredible job in this regard by launching different types of contests to engage its members. Its contests are colorful and probably this is the reason, why this community is thriving with so many members from different parts of the world.
Notify Members
You want people to communicate with one another via your beloved platform i.e. your community. But to do so, you need to make sure that members of your community are getting notified whenever someone responds to their comment. Otherwise, a valuable conversation will never take place among members. People like debating; sharing ideas and therefore, you need to facilitate this conversion by incorporating notification option in your online community.
Editorial Content
If you find your members are shy to start a conversion, you should play the role of an icebreaker. Post a cool content on something interesting or something that can spark a fiery debate and hopefully, it will encourage the members to jump on the bandwagon and they will start communicating with one another and share their ideas.
