Stop Pretending Your Community on Social is Fine (It's Not)

TL;DR: The shift from “inactive community” to “healthy community” is simple:

Stop broadcasting. Start listening and talking.

Either start being actually interesting to spark conversation, or put yourself where the conversation is and be interesting there. Ideally both.

Let’s dig in:

Your “community” might look ok on the surface. 10K followers, 50K, or 500k.

That’s not a community – that’s a following. And we’re in a post-follower world today. If they’re not engaging, then most of those people are dormant at best. At worst? Long gone.

The interest graph is what matters. There are two drivers: 1. algo love on your posts, gauged mostly by watch time and likes, and 2. genuine interest from viewers on what you posted – particularly what’s worth TALKING about. Gauged by…the talking.

You have to figure out the algo stuff on your own. There’s plenty of gurus hacking around on ways to decode and test that (it’s a lot of work).

If this is you:

You post content into the void hoping someone will care enough to comment, but they rarely do, if ever.

Most of the time it’s because the content isn’t remarkable (literally, no one wants to remark).

Then there are few ways to improve immediately:

1. Post content that has a call to action (duh)

2. Post content that provokes conversation (so, provoc-ative)

3. Go to places where there is already conversation happening, and get in the mix. Like a post that’s going viral. Get in the convo in a relevant way to whatever’s happening in the post to make it go viral (hint: it’s isn’t all about you, but you can still be interesting. The results are often lovely – users actually want to talk with you, about not you.

Real engagement matters. So maybe stop making everything about YOU, and think of THEM. Because 1 genuinely interested community member who participates in a comment thread is worth at least 100 silent readers. Sometimes 1,000 depending on the industry.

So…

Stop: Focusing on follower count,

Start: Tracking what actually matters: Conversations, convo depth, response rates, and

Continue: Learning earn how to generate real community bonds that last and grow. It’s the most important thing you need to do well on social.