User Engagement 🌶️ Features don’t matter if your members don’t engage

[joelr]

Agree or disagree?

Does having the most advanced / premium / amazing features matter if your users don't actually connect?

 

[Ravenfreak]

I 100% agree, why go out of your way to add flashy features if there's no one else around to enjoy them with you? Add the cool features once you've got members coming back to your community, they will appreciate the new features and keep coming back for more.

 

[Tracy]

First, you have to define "advanced/premium/amazing features".

It depends on what the purpose of the site is, and how you define "connect". I run mine for my benefit and allow others to use it. It also allows me to have a place to post information in a format that I am comfortable with and retrieve that information if I need to refer back to later and makes it available to me anywhere I have an internet connection. It also allows others free access to that information/product in a fairly easy to find format, and participate if they choose to do so.
For many, its all about the active participation of others in the site. For some, it's more about distributing information than lots of posting, etc.

I know I get quite a bit of traffic from the content in several of the add-ons I have installed. It just doesn't equate to posting activity. A part of that may be due to the fact that what you can see/access as a member is the same as a guest can. The philosophy of "data to share" doesn't equate (for me) walling it off and forcing someone to join to get to it. I don't care about member/post counts. It would be easy enough to do, and would generate some activity as one of the downloads I host is hard to find now on the internet and several other "big" sites link to where it is hosted on my site.

 

[Sonya*]

Features should not be “amazing”. They should be required by your community.

I have spent a lot of time developing features nobody needed. Then I created a voting on new features, where members can suggest new features, discuss them and vote (thumb up, thumb down).

I use it myself to propose the features, I think, would be helpful. But the most features I have suggested myself are downvoted. When members suggest something, and it is upvoted in short time, then I start to implement. Those features are not really amazing, but they are heavily used and loved from the first day they are available.

This is a prototype for ideas.

Just a kind of built-in canny.io in my community.

 

[Dilip]

Partially. Some features can have a positive impact on member engagement. Say, a clean and neat theme, notifications, awards, " New posts " button etc can help people find content and interact better.

 

[Ja sa bong]

Not having the features at all is a let down because there will always be members who are going to use and connect with it. It doesn't matter if they are few, taking away that doesn't look a good decision.

 

[Darth Cognus]

Your features should be carefully selected to bring value to the community you want to attract. Amazing unused 'fluff' detracts from that mission.

 

[Cory]

Members engage with my features.

I built a skin generator and rebuilt an imageless skin color generator on my resource board for users. If they're coming online to use the generators and not engaging in posting activity, then I think they are still engaging with the forum's focus. Just like when they login to use the resources, their viewing activity reflects what my forum is focused on.

 

[Nomad]

If your users do not care about the "great" features you have in your community your "so-called great" features are actually "not so great" features. If your users do not use the features you have implemented, there is no point in having it. One of such features that I see on most forums is forum credits. A lot of forums offer forum credits but the users are not using forum credits in a proper way.

 

[Henrywrites]

Agree or disagree?

Does having the most advanced / premium / amazing features matter if your users don't actually connect?

I totally agree. This is the reason a site owner should set up a channel that can help get user feedback from visitors to the site on what features they would want to see on the site. This is because having a feature that 90% of visitors to your site don't use is totally useless even if you pay to have such a feature installed on the site.