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Why You Should be Active in Your Community
Each day I’m finding out more and more how important it is to be active in your online community each daily. Recently, my forum had a period in which I only had limited time and limited access to a computer for about three weeks. During this time I was extremely busy and adapted to not doing much work on the forum. As a result, my forum’s daily post rate dropped down from an average of 350 posts/day to about 150 posts/day for most of the month of November.
Once I returned to the site, I made a few minor changes and improvements the users were asking for, and began to participate more on the site. Almost immediately after I returned the post rate increased steadily by nearly 80+ a day more than the previous day. Now we’re sitting around 550 posts/day and still growing. Moreover, instead of having around 80 users login in the past 24 hours, we’re now back to around 105.
If you take a look to the right you can see a chart of the posts from each day. I’ve marked it with when I returned. You can clearly see the posts/day rate. Keep in mind that the 100-200 posts/day were consistent for the whole month of November.
I don’t take sole credit for increasing the posting rate because it really is the members that did it. I just supported them as they posted. I helped spur on conversations. The only real changes I made were rearranging some forums in response to suggestions and improving what subscribers received, which I honestly don’t think had much effect. I think there are several reason for this. One reason that comes to mind is simply the psychology of having a leader - if the board feels there’s someone in charge, it makes the board more strong and official. If an administrator never logs on, the user begins to think that the administrator no longer cares.
While I cannot say with 100% certainty that the forum posts/day increased because I became more active, I feel that this did strongly play a role. If I were to leave the forum for another three weeks, I feel confident that the posts/day count would drop back down to below 200 posts/day instead of the more healthy 550 posts/day. I believe that if I continue to be active in my community each day, the number of posts each day will continue to increase.
To summarize, you should be active in your community daily, because this can significantly increase activity.
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