Divide and Conquer: Amplify your Community Engagement

There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to community engagement strategies. Your user base is probably very diverse. As such, it is important to question the online behaviours of your users.  

Have you identified the different clusters of users that exist in your community? Have you understood how your community members behave, and what matters to them? Have you made sure everyone is receiving relevant content that matters to them?

Well in order to do that, you would need to firstly identify who are the most active and engaged community members so that you can cluster them as one segment. Then, repeat the same exercise for less engaged members and finally create a segment for users with no engagement at all.

Accurate segmentation is one of the cornerstones of an effective community engagement campaign.  Segmenting or dividing your audience into groups means that you can target messages to members with similar characteristics and needs.

This level of personalisation means that content will be more relevant to the individual consuming them. With greater relevance, engagement rates are likely to be significantly better than they would be for a non-personalised campaign.

This helps community managers to craft reward systems with further exclusivity. By allowing you to identify your most engaged followers, you can reward their loyalty by giving them special benefits. Equally, by identifying your least engaged followers, you can encourage them to get more involved by incentivising their participation.

In order to ensure a thriving community, segmentation and subsequent personalisation will push dormant online communities to move from a 90-9-1 (90 percent consumption, 9 percent contributor, 1 percent creator) participation model seen on social networks, to something closer to a 65-15-20 model, with more than a third of the overall audience contributing on a regular basis and about a fifth who create and collaborate on content.

Think about how segmentation will enable you to better identify high-value micro-segments. You could personalise experiences for them and then use the results to compare what messages work for different audience segments.  This will further feed behavioural messaging and recommendations. Recommendations are a well-known strategy for increasing engagement, user retention and time on site. The idea is to inject product, content or email recommendations at critical touch-points for the users.

Say you’re a tech blogger who shares insights on the types of mobile technology that your community members are interested in. By analyzing their engagement rates with blogs related to specific mobile tech topics, you could send relevant blogs to other uninformed community members. Micro-segmentation would ensure that you send Android based blogs to interested Android users instead of targeting them with non-relevant iOS based articles.

Case study: In order to deliver the most compelling and relevant content to its users at the right time, Lego has defined its social media strategy on the basis of segmentation. Here is a case study on how Lego used insight-based segmentation towards successful social media marketing.

While segmenting alone does not guarantee smooth functioning of your online communities, it definitely helps you to arrive at the ideal Member Persona who would stay, contribute and grow with the community. And this is very important. When you match the Member Persona (i.e. the various behaviours that the ideal member of your community should exhibit) to your goals to improve your community marketing and engagement, you start to see more positive contributors coming in. That helps your communities become more relevant and result-oriented.

There are endless ways to segment your user base and create a customized experience for each member. So get thinking. And get creative!