Have you ever wondered what your regular users are looking at your community. There need to optimization of your community to suit a regular member of your forum board so that they get all what they are looking for.
Let us define who is a regular member. The regular member is the one who frequently visit your community, and participate in the activity of your forum. To start with a regular poster would try to open up by posting in other threads rather than starting too many own threads. He would like to be absorbed into the community and would play it cool. Once gets responses specific to his posts, he would start returning more and start new threads, and discuss more freely. He would start knowing other members by name and would frequently use their name acknowledging something in his posts.
This is where he becomes a regular member and need special treatment by community administrator.
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Make ‘Vew New Posts’, ‘View Today’s Post’ prominently placed at your forum pages:
A regular member is the one who visit more often in your board, and after they have explored your forum fairly, they tend to focus on recent discussions and it is where you too must focus upon. Make ‘View Todays’ Post’, ‘View New Post’ prominently placed in your web page. Vbulletin for example does have ‘View New Post’ prominently at the top, but for viewing ‘View Today’s Post’, you need to click on the drop down list of ‘Quick Links’.
Similarly IPB has ‘Todays’ Active Topic’ at the bottom of the forum board statistics. I suggest you place this link prominently at the top, and on all web pages you have. -
Rewards:
A regular member is hooked on to your site, and involves his part of life at your community. He is looking for some intrinsic rewards, especially rewards like reputation, recognition of his activity, e.t.c.
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Create good promotion strategy:
Learn your forum activity stats and how much do you visualize average regular member post counts say for the next 3 years. Based upon the activity statistics, decide about your promotion strategy. On one of my board, 300 post is the benchmark.
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Learn When the Regular Member is looking for Reward:
Regular Members tend to quantify them self with number of posts they make. But often they loose motivation if their number of posts are not recognized. So make sure that you recognize when the member needs a pep-up and reward him suitably.
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Create diversified labels in your community:
After all each human is different and they would like to be different from others. A regular contributor to your site is way too important for you. But after crossing the post benchmark, regular members need more than that. For example, a regular member once crossing 1000th post need to get his 10000th post to really make him unique than others. Therefore, create departments in your community, and assign your regular Members to them. Remember to assign them based on their level and type of involvement.
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Number of Moderators:
Many of the regular members aims to become Moderator of your community, and they would like to involve themselves in the decision making process of the forum. You need to cut-out those members who just want to flaunt themselves as Moderator of your successful community and they are involved only upto the level of ego safisfaction.
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Choosing a right Moderator:
Judge your moderators need, and split the moderators into those interested into decision making and those interested into day to day running. For a running community you would like to focus on Moderator capability of Members on day to day basis. You always need to keep the upper hand into your community, and if Moderators start helping you in policy making they will tend to absorb your powers. Thereby big decisions of your community becomes multi-handed. Therefore, try to upgrade our current Regular Member to the Post of a Moderator, rather than brining down a new person just because he is successful in other forum, or is your friend.
I hope once you realize the potential of keeping your regular member your members would never let you down.
