A place for fandom comm leaders to meet and get help.
What are your most successful posts?
I am trying to keep my community active. Sometimes it is difficult to get people to respond to posts - even ones that I am asking what would you like to see in the community. One of the types of posts I found is really popular are polls. Which is great, but I don't want to run a community just about polls! I would like to get more interaction. But I do think that posts that require a lot of comment writing end up dying quickly. Thoughts??




The intro posts ;_; And half of the comments were mine ;__;
Ha, I made a giphy PARTAY POST and people are participating! My nefarious plan is working, yesss!
I think I know who you are. GOOD WORK! :D
/daily_positivity mod, represent! 👍
Some of it just takes time, I think. I feel like part of the problem is that because Imzy is new, we're all trying to start comms "artificially" to some extent - rather than starting a fandom comm because there's a new instalment of canon to talk about or a whole bunch of people really excited to discuss Thing right now, it's more "we should have a place to talk about Thing on Imzy!" And people are joining comms for the same reason: because they like a thing and see there's a comm for it, but they haven't necessarily been active in that fandom recently or full of burning thoughts they want to share about it.
So it's difficult on both sides, but I don't think that anyone should sweat too much that it's the "low-effort" posts that get the most interaction early on. It takes time for the in-depth discussion to start naturally, because people joining aren't necessarily in the right sort of fannish phase to be super-active right now and mostly lurk supportively but freeze up when they're put on the spot to come up with detailed thoughts about something they maybe haven't been paying that close attention to in a while. (I know I'm guilty of letting interesting discussion questions sail by because I'd love to participate but it's been like five years and the details are so foggy I'm not sure I know what I'm talking about anymore.)
I feel like a combination of giving people a canon refresher plus discussion question might work well? Like if you post a video/gifset/comic page/lengthy quote and also a starting point for something to discuss about it, that would help people come up with something to say instead of relying on fuzzy memories or hoping for spontaneous reactions.
Has anyone tried organising something like a rewatch/reread in their comm? I feel like that might be a way to get participation, but you'd probably need a fairly large number of members to get enough people together who have the time to take part. (Especially if they might be in other fandom comms trying to do the same thing at the same time.)
I tried a rewatch post but I got no bites at all. I find that weird but I don't know why. Maybe it is because it is the start of the school year and lots of people are busy?
Yeah, I think unfortunately this part of the year is a busy time for all sorts of things. I know a lot of fanfic-writers are gearing up for various end-of-year fic exchanges, especially Yuletide, so they may already be planning to rewatch various things for that. And it's about the time for the new season of TV shows so people may be caught up in new fandoms and have less time for revisiting old ones.
I think the most successful so far was a fashion plate I did in someone else's community (we had a discussion about the fashion, and tried to hunt down similar dresses from the era), and in my own community, asking people to list their top five favourite characters and telling them that it was VERY IMPORTANT.
I mean, I am using the list of favs, but hey! Eight different people replied!
I think I am going to try a prompt fest, that might be useful???
That's my weekend plan. My daily word prompts have been 'eh'. Maybe they'll respond better to a kinkmeme type post.
Yeah that is a good way to go.
So far, the welcome post was the most active, followed by a tie between a best villain poll and the introduce yourself poll. We're still a tiny comm though so we'll see how it goes.
Introduce yourself would be interesting to try
This member's post with graphics and Favorite book poll have joint first place at 13 comments.
Favorite planet (some planets excluded) is #3 at 10 comments.
I guess it's "easily consumable OP that people can have lots of Opinions about without having to think all that much"? Which is on one level good, but also a touch sad.
Hey how do you do the embedded links??
Imzy uses markdown very similar to reddit's. There's a tutorial here: https://www.imzy.com/imzy/post/introduction_to_imzys_flavour_of_markdown_1
Thank you!!
Poll so far, but people are being awfully quiet. I'm getting to the point where I start giving away prizes for comments, lol.
yeah I thought about that too. I solicited a co-leader to help the community and keep it lively but even that isn't working!
My best fandom pal and I are having multiple conversations in each post and I'm starting to wonder if the rest of the community thinks we're crazy. ;) That being said, we're just going to keep on keeping on. Because we want the space to exist.