You notice the change from sending one-way messages to encouraging your audience to participate actively. You see how being participatory is essential for your brand’s survival in a world overflowing with information. You quickly identify the features of the content that lack engagement or relevance in today’s content landscape. You have the responsibility of inviting, planning, responding, and repeating to make your content more engaging.
Define Participatory Content Goals
You first have to make sure that you are precise about what you want your audience to do, for example, share a story, comment, or share your post. You also choose the platform where your audience is and which supports conversation more, like Facebook or Instagram. You make clear what you expect from participation, for example, getting insights or co-evolving ideas with your audience. You create simple formats or rules you’ll need for your platforms to foster participation. You then measure what works by determining your level of impact by how well your audience engages or the kind of insights you get.
Design Simple Invite Formats
You have to create questions that are simple and can encourage your audience to participate easily. You can come up with fun prompts like filling in a blank or completing funny captions. You should offer a thank you or small award to those who make creative suggestions to encourage heavier engagement. You can ask your audience for ideas or guest content that can make them feel recognized. You can even use a trending format to ask for input in a fun way that makes people more ready to provide a reaction.
Build Feedback and Response Habits
You must make it a routine to reply to comments as well as messages, doing your best to do it in a timely manner. You should acknowledge your audience’s posts with their own words, and your audience will appreciate it and want to engage more with you. You can also exhibit user contributions so that your content patterns genuinely reflect your audience’s ideas. You can ask additional follow-up questions to make more profound and meaningful conversations every time, to make the audience feel that their contribution is valued and important. You should ensure that you always credit the contributor, and this will, in turn, make your audience more proactive.
Turn Participation into Content
- You need to analyze your follower responses and extract significant patterns or themes that may arise from them.
- If you want to showcase audience ideas, you can make highlight posts that are rich in content, and they will love reading them.
- A simple request to re-share or remix user content, as long as you have permission, shows that you actually value and trust your audience.
- You can also create idea or FAQ forms based on common inquiries from your audience, further simplifying the content creation process.
- You should keep on testing which pattern of audience participation provides the most knock-on effect on content generation to know what kind of content works better.
Track Metrics that Matter for Participation
You would want to keep track of how many individuals actually answer your calls to participate to examine response rates. You should check not only the number of likes but also how far the audience goes with their comments, as that demonstrates the depth of engagement. You must also measure the impact of participatory content, which means that you have to know whether it is leading you to a greater reach or a higher number of saves by your followers. You must also be comparing the consumption of both passive and participatory content to point out what works better for your audience. It is also a good idea to have benchmarks, which will help you to see growth in participation more clearly.
Encourage Repeat Participation
You can make your consistent contributors feel appreciated by rewarding them with exclusive access or a simple shout-out. You can create a simple format series extending your request for future inputs, and elementary content can be part of your routine. You can even solicit assistance in adjusting or improving the participation experience to improve the participation process. By emphasizing the ideas that have a greater impact on you get to inspire your audience and make them more interested in participation. You should keep a schedule of when to rotate material whenever you see that your audience is losing interest in what they are currently doing.
Guard Against Fatigue and Noise
To ensure they will not lose value, you should limit how often you invite your audience to get involved. You should also filter user contributions and interact with good ones to keep the quality standards high. You should not forget to mix the invitations with regular content, such that you do not over-ask and keep them re-engaged. You also need to be aware of repetitive or off-topic responses and be ready to modify your prompts if necessary. You should withdraw promptly when your engagement levels drop so that you can keep the overall participation quality.
Conclusion
You need to undergo a shift that can be summarized in five basic steps, which are: inviting, responding, amplifying, measuring, and repeating the process. It is basically critical to plan and pace your invitations intelligently to allow them to stay relevant to your audience. In conclusion, you must try one to two of these strategies this week and see how these small changes affect the way your audience and you interact.
SOURCES
https://www.bandt.com.au/from-passive-to-participatory-the-evolution-of-experiential-activations/
https://fuelcycle.com/blog/3-ways-engage-passive-consumer/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1567422319300365
