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I get a lot of questions about how to revive community engagement or increase activity in a group that is not showing up consistently.

In many cases this is the wrong question.

What I’ve found is that many of us don’t actually have an engagement problem, we just have a naturally quiet community.

What’s a quiet community?

Not all communities are about constant async chatting on a community platform. Communities can be valuable for reasons beyond members always seeing new posts and comments pop up.

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There are many reasons for a legit, helpful community to not feel active:

• Chatting is a secondary benefit to why members join (maybe they’re clients or students).
• The primary way members interact are in live events, not asynchronously.
• Your type of member is not in the habit of interacting via posts. For example, if they’re busy CEOs or fancy execs.

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If you find your members aren’t posting as often as you’d like, consider these questions:

• Do you have a clear idea of why posting and responding in the community would help members achieve their goals? Is that clearly defined and reinforced for them?
• Do you have examples of what they should be posting on a day-to-day basis? If you were them, would you regularly engage in that way?
• For any given member, how often per year would posting benefit them? (If you multiply that per the number of members you have, that should give you a rough idea of your very best case scenario number of yearly posts.)

If these questions feel really hard for you to answer, but your members are generally happy, consider that you might already have the right amount of engagement for your specific community.

If you’re helping your members achieve their goals, then the community may already be serving its purpose.

That being said, even in communities that aren’t meant to be active 24/7, new members will judge the experience by how much activity they see on the platform, especially when they first join.

Unless, we embrace the quiet and set the right expectations.

If your members expect things to be super active and they’re not, they might immediately feel disappointed when they join. That’s why it’s our job to educate members on what they should expect.

If you’re running (or want to run) a quiet community here are some phrases you can use during onboarding to make it clear that they’re in a community that may not always be chatty:

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“We value deeper connection which means longer, more thoughtful posts. That means you might not see a new post every day or even every week.”

“We take things slow here.”

“You are busy and this community is designed to help, not distract. We recommend keeping notifications on for new posts and checking in here at least once a week. If you see a conversation you want to be a part of, don’t worry if it’s a few days or weeks old.”

“Our members don’t need to chat every day to feel connected to each other and to the community.”

“Most of our interactions will happen at live events, so we recommend prioritizing your community time towards showing up live. Think of this space as a library, more than a meeting space.”

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Before you spend all of your time trying to get your members to connect in a specific way, consider whether the quiet can be a feature, not a bug.

What else do you say to new members to set expectations? Have you been in a quiet community? How did it feel? Reply and let me know!

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Friendly Nooks helps people get paid for the work of bringing more connection to the world. We do that by helping community founders build profitable small businesses that are engines for connection and belonging. To learn more about our work, check out our website → friendlynooks.com ✨