Apr 28, 2023
How to identify the most engaged members in your SaaS customer community?
Madeleine Lewis
Community manager @ ManyChat
The value
Firstly it’s important to know why identifying your most engaged community members is important. Your most engaged users are often called super users, and these users really are super because they can handle a significant amount of community moderation for you. Super users will often be the first to answer fellow members questions, report spam, and down the line cultivate a good community culture. They are any community manager’s greatest asset. Due to their level of engagement they’ll be knowledgeable experts on your product, and cultivating an environment where this group of members deflect a good proportion of support tickets, by answering other members questions, is fundamental in reducing your support costs.
Identifying potential
To spot a potential super user you need to look out for signs of someone going slightly above and beyond the usual. Look out for valuable contributions, it’s about quality not quantity. Identify members who:
Answer other members questions
Provide the most feedback for your tool
Deliver content that will inspire others, for example best practises or case studies
Interact the most with your announcements and stay up-to-date with your latest product news
Make suggestions for new features
Volunteer for beta testing
DM you for information or to give product feedback
Get chatty in threads and share ideas and thoughts with other members
Take time to fill out a full personal community profile
Gamification is a huge aid for identifying your most engaged members - check your top contributors and member ranks. Have they climbed a rank or are they about to? This is particularly pertinent for your medium gamification rank (usually the first rank above the default entry level). You’ll have more members making it to this stage than to your highest gamification level, so it’s important to catch as many members as possible in the act of growing in prominence in your community. You’ll also be able to discern the value of contributions via gamification. A very effective way of doing this is through an upvoting system, where you can let the community decide for itself which contributions are the most valuable. By spotting the most upvoted posts you’ll quickly be able to identify your most effective and valuable members.
Curating super users
Once you’ve identified a potential super user, it’s important to build a relationship with them. Direct messaging these users one-on-one to thank them for their participation and offering them early access to product releases, more influence in managing and moderating the community or links to more exclusive content, is a great way to connect with them. Keeping track of information, such as what incentivizes these users, how do they like to be rewarded and with what type of content do they interact the most can really help in keeping your super users just that, super users.
Once your efforts are successful, you begin to draw in more of these members and you are growing your community towards critical mass. Only now can you start adding your super users to a sub-community or private channel. In this private channel you can keep your super users stimulated by giving them access to information that your main community doesn’t have, such as beta testing opportunities of additional features that might serve them. It’s also important that you allow these members to have a bigger influence when deciding what valuable community initiatives and content is. These members have proven that they create valuable contributions to the community, so by giving them more influence you’re creating a loop of constantly improving your community’s value. This is a huge asset for your community management activities.
Curating a group of super users will be endlessly beneficial. Informing them with what’s coming up on the roadmap and what will likely create questions in the community, not only gives them a VIP experience, but also means they’ll be ready to answer their fellow members questions and therefore deflect tickets from going to support, while being the glue in keeping all your other members engaged and delivering a real community experience.
Conclusion
In summary, understand the value these users could bring you, look out for members who are making valuable contributions, build one-on-one relationships, bring those super users into your sub-community or private channel and give them influence over community initiatives. Cultivate a good space for these super users and they’ll be by your side for the long run.
