How to Encourage Quality Discussions in Your Online Community

Customer acquisition is key to a business’ growth but customer retention is important to a company’s stability. That is where a thriving community plays a crucial role. Quality discussions in your online community help to build your members into advocates for your brand, which enhances your brand’s authenticity. Let’s look at what makes quality discussions and how to facilitate them in your community of customers.

Why Quality Discussions Matter in Online Communities

Encouraging quality discussions in online communities fosters meaningful conversations. Meaningful conversations can’t happen unless community members feel safe to share their opinions and experiences with the main focus of the community.

The Role of Meaningful Conversations in Community Growth

The more frequently meaningful conversations happen, the more inviting an online community becomes. The end result of this is an empowerment of participation, which is a hallmark of many thriving online communities.

How Engagement Affects Member Retention and Satisfaction

A thriving community with high online community engagement provides its members with a deep sense of connection. It’s only human nature to bond over a shared interest, experience, or problem that needs solving. A well-moderated online community provides a forum for people to scratch those itches, where they can engage with others from their local community or half a world away.

Online engagement also provides a sense of purpose by having community members not only gain information, but also provide their own information and perspectives in service to other members. When a member answers a question asked by another member, one person finds a community where their needs are met, and the other feels that their participation provides value to the community.

Creating a Strong Foundation for Engagement

The best way to foster community engagement is by adhering to community management best practices. Let’s look at two practices that help achieve this.

Establishing Clear Community Guidelines

Guidelines outline the expectations for the behavior of community members. Guidelines can include defining what constitutes respectful communication and appropriate content and limits on the use of personal and copyrighted information.

Setting the Right Tone as a Community Leader

Community leaders can reinforce guidelines by setting the right tone. A community leader sets the tone by their actions, attitude, and communication style, which fosters collaboration among community members.

Proven Strategies to Encourage Meaningful Conversations

These forum discussion strategies will help you prompt discussions among your community members.

Asking Thought-Provoking Questions

Thought-provoking questions are designed to elicit self-reflection and critical analysis when formulating an answer. Examples of thought-provoking questions begin with: 

• “What’s the most influential…” 
• “What do you feel is…”
• “If you could change one thing…”

Using Polls and Surveys to Spark Discussions

Polls and surveys are good for putting a value on how the group feels about a particular topic. Carefully crafted surveys can also collect individual data about community members who deviate from the general feeling of the group. This can help identify members who may feel underserved by the community.

Hosting AMAs, Webinars, and Live Discussions

“Ask me anything” events, webinars, and live discussions allow the community leader to see how members engage with each other while also being able to drive the topics of discussion.

Encouraging User-Generated Content and Storytelling

Encouraging your community to generate content gives members a chance to make their own experiences part of the discussion. Members can be incentivized to create content by making them the center of the discussion or by distributing their content over multiple channels (blog, social, etc.).

Rewarding and Recognizing Valuable Contributions

Member-generated content that proves valuable to the brand or other members can be rewarded to encourage further content generation. Rewards can be visible like badges, points, or member status. Rewards can also include access to exclusive content or the ability to preview upcoming releases.

The Role of Moderation in Driving Quality Discussions

Moderators are often mischaracterized as the enforcers of community guidelines. While that is part of their role, it’s more nuanced than that.

Balancing Free Speech with Constructive Moderation

An online community should be a place where ideas can be exchanged freely, but good digital community building also means keeping discussions on-topic and ensuring exchanges are constructive and respectful of all members.

How to Handle Conflict and Disruptive Behavior Effectively

Effective moderation should include addressing conflicts immediately and diffusing them before they escalate. Egregious or repeated bad behavior can result in restricting a member’s ability to participate or removal.

Using AI and Automation to Enhance Moderation

AI and automation can be leveraged to make a moderator's life easier. AI’s pattern matching capabilities can be used to identify things like ad hominem attacks and hate speech. Automation can then step in to immediately restrict that user’s posting ability until a moderator can more thoroughly investigate the matter.

Measuring and Improving Community Engagement

Analyzing metrics is critical to your community because it determines how effective your community building strategy is and can identify any changes that need to be made.

Key Metrics to Track Online Discussions

• Engagement - this measures a member’s level of interaction by tabulating the number of comments made, number of discussions initiated, the number of times the “Like” button is pressed, etc.
• Reach - measures the total number of members actively engaged in a discussion.
• Unique contributors - Are many different members participating or is it the same group over and over?

Gathering and Implementing Member Feedback

• Surveys - surveys can be used to collect qualitative and quantitative data on your online community.
• Social media - if your community is active on social media, then social can be used to get quick, in-the-moment feedback from members.

Continuous Improvement: Evolving Your Engagement Strategies

Good data can be used to modify your engagement strategies where necessary. Improving engagement could involve improvements to the member experience such as spotlighting contributing members, hosting an online event, or member leadership strategies such as having a member present at an online event.

Final Thoughts: Building a Thriving Online Community

A community thrives by keeping the conversation moving. An effective online strategy enables the shared growth of both the community and the brand creating it.

The Long-Term Benefits of Meaningful Interactions

Meaningful discussions among members increases knowledge sharing, improves problem solving, and brings diverse perspectives into your community, all of which can benefit your brand, and create a beneficial environment for your customers.

How to Keep Discussions Fresh and Engaging

Being responsive, encouraging user-generated content, and welcoming new members are ways to keep members motivated to engage. Engaged users are a renewable resource that can help your community thrive while disseminating information about your brand.