Just About engagement: how and why it happens on our platform
A focus on one of our most important metrics
Between Hive, BlueSky, Threads, Mastodon, probably some other Twitter challengers we forgot, or somewhere else, you’ve been there: those febrile early days on a new platform when people are making up their minds about what there is to see.
Engagement and retention is critical, more so than member count. When Threads launched, it broke records for uptake, but active members have since cratered.
Just About’s membership continues to grow, and we’re set on making sure that those who do sign up stay active. So let’s put a lens over our engagement tools and discuss why and how they work.
…make them worth doing
Social gurus will recommend endless tactics to nurture member engagement, one of the most common being ‘give them things to do’. It’s so simple as to seem a bit glib, and indeed it isn’t as easy as that. We would add: ‘…and make them worth doing’.
Our bounties are things to do. But they’re different from what other platforms offer, and not just because they come with a financial reward.
As we’ve said, because quality content is so valuable, we believe it’s a matter of fairness to reward members for it, but what we don’t want is for money to become the reason someone does something, because that’s when they stop doing it for fun.
And that’s the real point of bounties: they’re fun.
We look very closely at each community wherever it exists on the internet, and at the thing they’re united around. We then design bounties we think they’ll love, respecting the reasons they would do them for free while still rewarding them for their hard work.
This has been working well - we’ve seen months of high-quality activity and good engagement on our bounties - but the more data we have, the better we can get.
We’re always reviewing our bounties for their impact on engaged members above all, and in 2024 alone we’ve already set records in key metrics such as submissions per bounty. Our latest review is underway now, and you’ll see it bear fruit on the platform in the coming weeks. So come on in and take a look!