Why people participate in online communities
Story byAyelet Noff
Ayelet Noff is the Founder and CEO of PR Firm SlicedBrand , a global PR agency headquartered in Europe. Ayelet has 20 years of experience in(show all)Ayelet Noffis the Founder and CEO of PR FirmSlicedBrand, a global PR agency headquartered in Europe. Ayelet has 20 years of experience in public relations and marketing. She has successfully led the PR activities of over a thousand technology companies in various fields, including AI, healthtech, blockchain, mobile, cybersecurity, fintech, lifestyle, and many more.
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Online community participation
Let’s start with the obvious question….Why?
Why do users comment? Why do they write blogs? Why do they upload pics toFlickr? Why do they send links to friends?
What are the motives behind user participation in social communities? Understanding why users participate can lead us to understand further how to engage users and increase their participation in online communities. Let’s first learn a bit more about our users.
Membership life cycle for online communities
Amy Jo Kim was the first to propose the idea of a member’s life cycle in an online community (2000). The cycle suggests five phases of a user’s lifecycle within a community:
Power Law of Participation
According toRoss Mayfield:
All users activities in online communities whether low threshold or high engagement activities co-exist within a community to create a form of collective intelligence. Therefore it is key for virtual communities to allow both low threshold and high engagement participation so that users in all 5 phases of their lifecycles will be made to feel comfortable within the community.
Participation Inequality
Social Platforms – the 1% rule
OnWikipediafor example, participation inequality is even higher. More than 99% of Wikipedia’s users are lurkers. Only 0.2% are active participants. Wikipedia’s most active 1,000 people — 0.003% of its users — contribute about two-thirds of the site’s edits.
We see here that small groups of people often turn out to be the main value creators of social communities. Over time, their actions fuel widespread interaction that engages the lurkers and attracts new users. If continually nurtured, the community can become a self-sustaining generator of content and value.
So let’s go back now to our initial question:
Why do users participate in virtual communities?
According to Peter Kollock inThe Economies of Online Cooperation: Gifts and Public Goods in Cyberspace, there are three major reasons for why users contribute in online communities:
Yet there are also other elements which can motivate users to become active in online communities:
For more reasons why people become active participants in social online communities and the key to Web 2.0’s success, please see my posts:
So now you ask…
