Five questions to create more engagement

With the advent of Web 2.0 and a vast increase in user-created content and social networking, web developers now need to consider ways to avoid over saturating their visitor base and creating a genuinely engaged community of participants. These five questions to create more engagement are designed to help web developers identify ways to transform a menu of Web 2.0 tools into a coherent internet presence that serves the needs of their online community.

1) How do my visitors prefer to communicate?

Successful social-networking sites, such as Facebook and Myspace, have thrived by adding features that answer this question effectively, such as status posts and areas to post messages to other users on their personal profiles. Facebook in particular has enhanced this by allowing users to reply to those messages or, more rapidly, express that they "like" them with the click of a single link. Every community, however, communicates in a different way -- answering this question is key to determining which features are necessary to engage those visitors in a new and interesting way.

2) What do my users prefer to share?

In some communities, such as Youtube, media sharing takes the singular form of video uploading and user feedback. In others, users have the option of sharing text, web links, videos or images. It is essential to identify the preferred form of media sharing in your community and focus improvements in those areas.

3) What other communities do my users participate in?

With so many sites implementing Web 2.0 methods and technologies, it is essential to avoid excessive overlap between the features you add to your site and the features that your users already have access to. If your user base has high levels of participation in Twitter, it will not be beneficial to put effort into allowing users to post short descriptions of their current activities.

4) How can users interact with my content?

The centerpiece of any website is content and building community relies upon interactions with that content. While most websites already allow commenting, it is important to think of ways to take commenting to the next level. Can users reply to blog posts with images and video , in addition to text? Do you allow users to submit responses or guest posts?

5) Why?

Too often, new features are added without thorough consideration of whether or not people will truly benefit from using them. Asking "why?" before designing a new tool will avoid the problem of a tool being underutilized once the novelty wears off. A site focused on cars will probably benefit more from allowing users to submit real-life fuel economy -- and displaying an average -- rather than sharing photos, which they can already do at any number of other forums.