One of the biggest problems that Skool creators deal with is engagement.
- 80% of members in The Skool Games are level 1
- 89% of members in the Skool Community are level 1
If people aren't engaging in your communities, especially in paid, don't start labeling people as "non-active" or "dead" just like you shouldn't label followers on social media s "dead" because they don't watch/like your stuff.
It's a YOU problem.
There are generally 3 reasons why people become "inactive members"
Reason 1: People are shy
Skool is very different from other community platforms like Discord(🤢). The key difference is that Discord has an open chat feature where anyone can say anything anywhere.
Skool on the other hand requires users to make an entirely new post every time they want to start a conversation. This keeps the posts high quality, but it adds friction - and people don't like friction.
Reason 2: People want to be entertained.
Just because you think your group is all that and a bag of chips, doesn't mean it is.
If your users don't think your community is a place they want to give up valuable time of their lives to, they won't be active.
There is much more friction to engage inside of skool than there is to hop on TikTok or Instagram and scroll.
Your group is not excluded from this even if you have a paid community. At the end of the day, we are emotional creatures. If your paid community doesn't spark your member's interest, they won't engage.
I'm inside of communities worth $$$ and there are still people who don't engage AT ALL despite paying hundreds - even thousands to be inside.
Reason 3: They don't understand how your community works.
Skool is a new platform.
For those of us who are Skool addicted, we know the platform inside and out.
But for the people who are coming to Skool to join your community from organic or paid content, this place looks...weird.
It's confusing if you don't know what you're doing.
Sometimes, it's not that your members don't want to engage, or use your courses, or show up to the calls, its that they DON'T KNOW HOW.
How can we fix this? Here's what I did/doing:
- Have members to introduce themselves to get them warmed up to engaging in the chat.
- Create. pinned welcome posts to encourage members to introduce themselves. Always have this post pinned so people can see it.
- Utilize the plug-in features to auto-dm new members when they join with instructions to the pinned post.
- Manually ask members to introduce themselves or if they reach out to you in the DMS, ask them to put the post in the chat or answer it with a value post if they are comfortable.
- Utilize a "Wins" section in your chat so members are encouraged to share their accomplishments. (We love winning and showing it off)
2. Know your customers
- If your posts/courses/calls don't look interesting, people won't show up and engage. Don't think about things from your perspective, think about it from the client's perspective. Don't treat your community as a place to showcase all of your personal interests. Treat it as a place for people to bond over a shared interest. Those are two very different things.
- The Skool Games stopped hosting the opening ceremonies for the skool games because nobody was showing up. That was feedback. In the end, they decided to stop doing them. On the other hand, the Q&A with Hormozi is super valuable. It's what people want. So they doubled down on that and decided to make it better by mixing up the topics for them. This is all a process of iteration. Don't give up on your members just because you can't make them interested in your stuff.
3. Teach members how to navigate your community
- Treat every member like they are your 90-year-old grandmother struggling to use her Samsung tablet.
- Inside of your welcome post, have a Loom video showing how to navigate your community. Also the same in your auto dm.
- When you have a live call, make a post about it in the chat multiple hours, then an hour, then 1 minute before the call. You'd be surprised how many people don't check the calendar and miss out on your events.
- LINK LINK LINK. Utilize links when showing a member inside the chat or DM something from the community. Don't just tell them, people are too lazy to figure it out themselves.
Lastly, always think of it as a "me" problem. Instead of a "dead' member or a "dead" follower, usually it's something you're not doing to pique their interest or make them feel comfortable enough to engage.
When you blame yourself, it makes it easier to think about it logically instead of acting on impulse.
Hope this helps. Lmk what you think and put questions in the comments. 👇