Greetings Fabulous Felines and Hoomans of Hivelandia and surrounding areas!
I hope this week has been treating you well so far. Now that you Hoomans are done with "tax season," it's time to get busy!
All Those Hive Communities — Engagement Matters!
I've been thinking a lot about community and community building lately — it has always been one of my pet interests — and I was really happy to see an actual "engagement challenge" taking place in the LeoFinance community last week.
I have long believed that engagement it is the lifeblood of a healthy community. Sure, we can claim that we are here "for the rewards" to our hearts' content, but as I've said before there are lots of different ways to make money... and one of the things that makes Hive and all its subcommunities "sticky" it's the fact that there is an actual sense of community, with people who are interested in each other here!
Absent that, and all we'd have would be a large collection of articles that just sit there as a bunch of information. But it's the people — and occasionally the cats! — that make the information come to life.
What Are We Telling the World?
But engagement is not just about keeping us interested, it's also about the image we project outwards towards the greater world, and people who are perhaps encountering our Hive communities for the first time.
When there's active interaction on all the posts — or at least a substantial number of them — it sends a message that there's "something going on" here, and people typically tend to be more likely to become part of something that feels like it's alive, as opposed to dead.
I realize that's not exactly rocket science, but a lot of people seem to forget this simple fact.
And if you don't think that actually works, I'd like to offer up a completely unrelated example of how activity begets more activity. It's just simple psychology.
The eBay Experiment!
The Dad-Hooman sells a lot of his things on eBay. And he conducted some experiments a number of years ago with respect to the psychology of sales. As many of you probably know one of the formats you can use to sell on eBay is "auction," which basically means people compete with each other to bid for an item.
So he took a number of virtually identical items with identical values and listed them as pairs, available to the same market, at the same time.
That is, he would take two identical items and offer one up for auction with an opening bid of a little bit less than its fair market value so it was still a good deal, and then he would take the other identical item — with an identical description — and offer it up with an opening bid of $0.99 even though the item might be worth $100.
Of course if you're offering a $100 item for $0.99 a bunch of people are gonna jump on it in hopes of getting a great deal, right?
But that's not the point. The point is that he had two identical items, one of which had a lot of activity, while the other typically had none (or very little) and here comes the key part: in the end, the very active item would not infrequently sell for as much as twice the price of the inactive item... even though someone could have just snapped up for the near-market-value opening bid.
What's the moral of the story? People tend to be far more attracted to something that conveys the idea that it's surrounded by activity and everybody wants it! Even though the items were the same, the very active item somehow was perceived to be more desirable because so many people had bid on it!
The "experiment" was repeated about a dozen times, with very similar results.
Bringing it Back Home to Hive!
What does this have to do with Hive and engagement?
Simply, that people are more likely to join a community that gives the appearance of having "a lot going on," as opposed to a community that appears to be largely dead. And that is why I have always been a big proponent of engagement, and why I believe engagement is, in fact, the lifeblood of a successful and thriving community.
Consider our Hive-Engine based "tribes." There tends to be a significant correlation between a lack of activity and tribal tokens becoming worthless... and vice versa. Consider how LeoFinance has lots of activity, and the LEO token holds its value pretty well.
Testament, perhaps, to the fact that community building takes work!
Thanks for stopping by, and have a great remainder of your week!
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Love Cats? Get Involved in Hive's Cat Communties!
If you're a cat lover and often/sometimes post pictures or other content that includes your feline friends, why not become an active part of Hive's growing Cat Communities?
These are some of the more active Cat Communities — why not join them ALL? Remember, you can also "cross-post" your cat posts to them!
HiveCats by 
Cat Snaps by 
Caturday Community by 
Cat Photos by 
Cats by 
Last, but certainly not least, a special shoutout to the recently formed Hive Pets Community which has become quite active and has quite a bit of cat content!
There are a number of other feline communities listed on Hive, but I am not sharing them for now as they have not had any activity (by their Admins OR users) since the Steem/Hive fork. Updates as they become available!
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