Keeping members engaged and committed is essential for any online community. New members are a win, but the real goal for online communities is to keep them coming back.
Juggernauts like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Reddit have set such a high bar for user engagement that users now expect immediate, personalized interactions, relevant content, and seamless communication.
When platforms like Google+ and MySpace failed to meet these expectations, they struggled with low engagement and ultimately faded away.
Much like Google+ and MySpace, a lot of community managers encounter a similar challenge.
Did you know that 73% of community members become inactive within the first 30 days on generic platforms? After analyzing several community platforms, we’ve seen a clear pattern: one-size-fits-all solutions are failing to keep members engaged.
Generic platforms lack the personalization and interactive elements needed to create lasting engagement. But your community isn’t generic – so why settle for a platform that treats it that way?
If you’re wondering how to increase member engagement, this article will highlight why your current generic platform is holding you back from achieving optimal engagement and growth.
The Ultimate Membership Engagement Strategy
Have you ever looked closely at how your members interact on your platform? If your answer is “not really,” you’re not alone.
Many companies overlook analyzing engagement data on their community platforms, yet this data can reveal crucial insights into what members want, need, and how engaged they actually are. Every interaction, post, or reaction provides valuable information that can help you understand why your members may be slipping away.
Consider our work with Groupies.io as an example. They required a platform that could bring their unique community together in a more interactive and engaging way.
Clearly, no generic platform could meet their specific needs – members felt disconnected, limited by basic engagement tools that didn’t align with their communication style and community culture. This led to declining participation and reduced overall member satisfaction.
To turn things around, we developed a customized platform tailored to Groupies.io’s specific community needs. What we did was build a suite of engaging, community-centric features that transformed their platform. The situation needed a specific solution, so that’s exactly what our team delivered.
- Home Screen
The Home Screen often overwhelms with irrelevant content on generic platforms. Personalizing it to show relevant circles or groups helps members quickly find where they belong, increasing engagement.
- Circle Details
The Circle Details screen provides important group info. Generic platforms often lack meaningful descriptions, but detailed circle pages help members understand the group’s value and encourage participation.
- All Posts
The All Posts screen can be cluttered in generic platforms. A clean, organized feed showcasing popular or recent posts helps members find valuable content, boosting interaction.
- Chats
The Chats screen enables real-time communication. Generic platforms often have weak messaging systems, but strong chat features foster connections and ongoing conversations between members.
- Chat Box
The Chat Box is where members engage directly. An intuitive chat box that supports quick, seamless messaging along with media support increases member interaction and strengthens community ties.
The results of this platform were transformative: member retention surged by 312%, daily active users increased by 189%, and content sharing jumped by 256%. Groupies.io’s members not only became more active but also felt a renewed sense of connection and belonging within their community.
The lesson?
Customization drives engagement.
When you align your platform with the unique identity of your community, you empower members to engage in ways that feel natural and meaningful to them. Generic platforms may save time in the short term, but the long-term costs in terms of engagement and retention are too high to ignore.
Just as Groupies.io discovered, tailoring your platform to your members’ needs can be the key to a thriving, active community.
The Real Cost of Using a Generic Community Platform
Engagement isn’t just about keeping people active – it’s about creating meaningful connections and driving real value for both members and the community as a whole.
However, there’s a hidden cost to using generic community platforms that fail to foster that connection. A disengaged member doesn’t just hurt your activity metrics; it impacts the financial side of your community, too.
Let’s break down the numbers:
- Average member acquisition cost: $34
- Typical community size: 1,000 members
- Member lifetime value: $175
With generic platforms, 73% of these members leave within the first month. That’s $24,820 in acquisition costs wasted and $127,750 in lifetime value lost. If members don’t feel personally connected to your community, they won’t stick around.
Generic platforms simply don’t offer the level of engagement needed to foster strong, long-term relationships. This isn’t just a matter of activity – it’s a matter of creating a space where members feel they belong.
When Groupies.io approached us, they were facing these exact challenges. Their members were frustrated by the limitations of their platform. Specifically:
Limited Interaction Options: The platform only offered basic “likes” or thumbs-ups as interaction options. Members wanted more ways to express their emotions and reactions, but were restricted to generic responses.
Challenges with Media Sharing: Sharing multimedia content – such as videos, images, or GIFs – was cumbersome or outright impossible on their platform. This limitation hindered their ability to communicate creatively and personally, making interactions feel one-dimensional.
Disconnected Community Feel: The platform didn’t allow for much personalization. Members couldn’t modify their profiles, set their preferences, or make the platform their own in any meaningful way. This led to a lack of ownership, and as a result, members didn’t feel a personal connection to the community.
Custom Community Features to Increase Member Engagement
If you’re serious about boosting engagement, take the case of Groupies.io. The problems faced by them aren’t isolated. In fact, they reflect common issues with generic community platforms.
These platforms often come with one-size-fits-all solutions that fail to address the unique needs of your community. Members don’t feel that the platform is tailored to them – they feel like a number, not a part of something special.
We implemented three key custom features to turn things around. Here’s what we did.
1. Contextual Reactions
The problem with basic “likes” or generic reactions is that they don’t allow members to express the range of emotions they feel.
With our custom platform, we introduced custom emotional reactions – emojis and reactions that reflect the unique culture of the community. This feature allows members to respond in ways that resonate personally, rather than simply “liking” a post.
This simple change led to a 287% increase in post interactions, as members felt more connected to the content and each other.
2. Rich Media Sharing
People communicate in various ways, and text isn’t always the most engaging option. Members today want to share videos, images, GIFs, and other rich media to express themselves fully.
We transformed the platform’s media-sharing capabilities, making it as easy to share videos and images as it is to send a text. Now, members can:
- Share instant video responses to add depth to conversations.
- Create image galleries to showcase their work, events, or ideas.
- Post rich media directly in chat, bringing their personality to each interaction.
After this upgrade, we saw a 156% increase in content creation. By enabling rich media, we made it easier for members to engage creatively and feel more connected to each other.
3. Community-Specific Features
Generic platforms don’t allow for customization that reflects the specific needs of a community. For our client, we introduced several tailored features:
- Custom Notification Preferences: Members could choose the notifications they wanted to receive, ensuring that they only received information relevant to them. This helped reduce notification overload and made members feel more in control of their experience.
- Tailored Content Categories: We reorganized content based on what mattered most to members, improving relevance and making it easier for them to find the topics they cared about. This personalization ensured that members stayed engaged with content that was aligned with their interests.
- Community-Specific Achievements: We created unique rewards and badges to recognize contributions that were meaningful to the community. This not only incentivized members to participate but also gave them a sense of accomplishment, further strengthening their connection to the community.
These custom features made the platform feel like it was built specifically for the community’s needs and preferences.
The more personalized the experience, the more likely members are to stay engaged. By tailoring the platform to reflect the unique culture and priorities of the community, we helped our client foster a more dynamic and loyal user base.
The Impact of Customization: The Results Speak for Themselves
For Groupies.io, their journey from disengaged members to a vibrant, active community was a direct result of implementing customized features designed to meet the unique needs of their users.
The results were not only remarkable but also demonstrated the real power of tailoring a platform to enhance both the quantity and quality of interactions.
Here’s a deeper look into the phenomenal results we achieved.
A 312% Increase in Member Retention
One of the most significant outcomes of implementing custom features was a dramatic increase in member retention. The average online community struggles with member churn, especially when users don’t feel like they’re getting the value they expected from the platform.
Our client’s members were previously abandoning the platform at an alarming rate. After introducing features that allowed for richer, more engaging interactions, retention rates skyrocketed by 312%.
Why was this so impactful?
- Personalization: Members began to feel that the platform was designed for them. With custom notifications, tailored content, and personalized reactions, members could now shape their community experience to suit their preferences.
- Emotional Connection: The ability to express themselves through custom reactions, such as unique emojis or tailored responses, allowed members to connect with the content and each other on a much more emotional level.
By meeting the specific needs of users through customization, we turned a revolving door of members into a more stable and engaged user base.
189% Growth in Daily Active Users
Another striking result from the platform transformation was a 189% increase in daily active users (DAUs). This metric is critical because it’s not just about how many members you have – it’s about how often they’re returning to interact with your content and fellow community members.
Here’s how customization played a role in this significant growth:
- Rich Media Sharing: After enabling members to easily share videos, images, and GIFs, the community became much more dynamic. Rather than relying on text-only posts, members could showcase their creativity and engage more meaningfully with content.
- More Engaging Conversations: Custom reactions allowed members to engage more deeply with posts, leading to longer, more frequent discussions. When people feel they can contribute in more meaningful ways, they are more likely to return to the platform each day.
This increase in DAUs didn’t happen by chance – it was the result of making the platform more interactive and tailored to users’ preferences, ensuring that they always had something to engage with.
256% Increase in Content Sharing
One of the hallmarks of a thriving community is its ability to produce and share content. When members are actively contributing, it signals that the platform is not only engaging, but that it also serves as a valuable outlet for creativity and expression.
For our client, the introduction of custom media-sharing features led to a 256% increase in content sharing.
This surge in shared content came about as a result of the following key custom features:
- Media Flexibility: Enabling users to share rich media, like videos, images, and GIFs, transformed the platform into a much more visually and interactively rich space. Members could post instant video responses or create content galleries, allowing them to express themselves in ways that text alone could never achieve.
- Encouraging Creativity: With media sharing, members were able to engage creatively, whether it was showcasing their own work, highlighting community events, or just expressing their thoughts through images or short videos. This not only made interactions more dynamic but also helped create a solid ecosystem.
By allowing members to share their creativity in ways that felt natural, the community saw a massive uptick in content creation, which in turn encouraged even more interaction.
The Impact on Interaction Quality
While the numerical metrics – such as retention, DAUs, and content sharing – are impressive on their own, the real success of customization lies in the quality of interactions that these metrics represent.
It’s one thing to increase the quantity of interactions; it’s another to ensure that those interactions are meaningful and valuable to members.
- Genuine Connections: Custom reactions enabled members to express themselves authentically, whether through a simple “thumbs-up” or a nuanced emotional response that better reflected their feelings. This fostered more genuine, meaningful conversations where members felt understood and heard.
- Personalized Experience: Features like tailored content and notification preferences meant that members could interact with content that was more relevant to their interests. This personalization encouraged members to participate more frequently, as they felt the platform was giving them what they wanted.
Ultimately, the result wasn’t just more activity – it was higher-quality activity, with members feeling truly engaged, connected, and motivated to contribute.
These metrics show that customization isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s essential to boost engagement and retention. But what’s even more important is the quality of the interactions. Members now feel like they’re part of something meaningful, leading to a vibrant, engaged community.
Final Thoughts
Every community has its own unique DNA, and a generic platform simply can’t accommodate that. The customization options we offer allow your platform to evolve alongside your community, adapting to their needs over time.
So are you ready to boost your member engagement and create a community experience tailored to your members?
Start by analyzing your community’s unique patterns and behaviors. With the right custom features, you can transform your platform from a generic space into a true community hub where members feel valued and connected.
You can get in touch with our team for a free community platform assessment. Discover:
- Your community’s unique engagement potential
- Custom features that would drive the most value
- Expected ROI from platform customization
If you’re considering switching community platforms or thinking about moving to a custom community platform, our team can help you make that transition seamless and effective.
