Motivate Me

By Sanya Weathers

When your customers buy something from you, it’s because they’re motivated to do so. You’ve got something they want badly enough to give you money. But motivating someone to be part of your community isn’t as simple as making a good product or providing an exceptional service. As many a veteran of “like our page and get a free sparkly thing” campaign knows, the reward give you a temporary numbers boost, but no long term results… unless you were able to take advantage of those new eyes and offer them some longer lasting motivation.

As every parent and most pet owners know, the best kind of motivation comes from them, not you. Here are a three tricks to up the internal motivation factor:

Keep score. Post counts are the most basic method of scorekeeping – a simple measurement of how many times has the user spoken up. This alone invites spam and post farming, so I always recommend keeping score with better things – questions answered, guides submitted, contests entered, quizzes taken. Whatever activity contributes most to your community, track it, and display each user’s “score” prominently.

Show them where they stand. Displaying the score is not enough. Find out the community average – fifty questions answered, ten shared links, twenty hours of testing – and make sure new people get a message with that statistic. Consider having an icon on your landing page, where a logged in user can see if he’s above or below that average.

Thank them, praise them, appreciate them. The best motivation is feeling good. How do you make people feel good? You notice their efforts, you tell them you noticed, and you tell other people you noticed. On your forum, give people special titles. On Twitter, shout out those people for Follow Friday. On Facebook, invite those people to send a picture for a Hall of Fame album. And don’t underestimate the power of a private, personal expression of gratitude.