Latest / Community Marketing with Fexingo: Discord, Slack Groups, and Brand Communities / The Silent Majority in Your Brand Community
Transcript
- Lucas: So there is a number that has been rattling around my head for a few weeks now, and I think it changes how we should think about brand communities. It is ninety percent. Luna: Ninety percent of what? Lucas: Ninety percent of the members in any given brand community never post a single thing. They never comment, never react, never start a thread. They just read. And for years, community managers have treated that ninety percent as a failure — as engagement that didn't happen. But what if we have it backwards? Luna: You are talking about lurkers. And yeah, I have seen the stat — the 90-9-1 rule. One percent create content, nine percent engage, ninety percent lurk. It is usually framed as a problem to solve. Lucas: Exactly. The whole industry of community management is built around pulling that ninety percent into the nine percent and the one percent. More posts, more comments, more reactions. But a study published last year by a researcher at NYU looked at fifty brand communities — some Slack groups, some Discord servers, some custom forums — and found something pretty striking. Luna: What did they find? Lucas: They found that the lurkers — the silent readers — were actually more likely to convert to paid customers than the active posters. Across the fifty communities, lurkers converted at an average rate of about eight percent, while active members converted at just over five percent. And when it came to retention, lurkers stayed subscribed about three months longer on average. Luna: That is counterintuitive. You would think the people who are most engaged — who are actually talking — would be the most loyal. Lucas: That is what most people assume. But think about it from a psychological standpoint. When you are actively posting in a community, you are often doing it because you have a problem, a complaint, or a need for validation. The lurkers, on the other hand, are there to learn. They are reading success stories, best practices, tips. They are extracting value quietly, and that value builds trust over time. Luna: So the act of reading itself is a form of engagement — it is just invisible. Lucas: Right. And that is the blind spot. Most community dashboards measure posts, comments, and reactions. They do not measure reading. So the silent majority gets ignored in the metrics, and community managers optimize for the vocal minority. One SaaS company in the study — a project management tool — actually redesigned their entire community experience for readers. Luna: How do you redesign for readers? You cannot force them to post. Lucas: You do not force them. You make the reading experience better. This company introduced a feature they called 'Digest Mode' — a daily email that summarized the top five threads in the community, written in a neutral tone, with links to the full discussion. They also redesigned their community homepage to surface the most helpful threads, not the most active ones. They prioritized thread quality over recency. Luna: And did it work? Lucas: Over six months, their free-to-paid conversion rate from community members went up by twenty-two percent. And the number of active posters actually dropped slightly — because the Digest Mode users never needed to visit the community at all. They were getting value without ever clicking through. Luna: So the active posters dropped, but conversions went up. That is the exact opposite of what most community managers would want. Lucas: Exactly. And that is the point. The metric that matters is not activity. It is value extraction. If people are getting what they need by reading, they do not need to post. And that is fine. The obsession with turning lurkers into posters might actually be hurting retention. Luna: I can see that. I have been in communities where I felt pressured to introduce myself or comment on a thread, and it actually made me want to leave. It felt like homework. Lucas: Exactly. There is a concept called the 'observation effect' in social psychology — when people know they are being watched, they change their behavior. In a community, when you push lurkers to post, you are essentially asking them to perform. And for many people, that performance is uncomfortable. They would rather just consume the content and apply it in their own work. Luna: So what does this mean for a community manager who has been trained to drive engagement? Do you just stop trying to get people to post? Lucas: Not entirely. Active posters are still valuable — they generate the content that lurkers read. But the goal should not be to convert everyone into a poster. The goal should be to create a system where the posters create high-quality content, and the lurkers can extract it efficiently. That is a two-sided marketplace of value. Luna: So you need to nurture the one percent and the nine percent, but not at the expense of the ninety percent. Lucas: Right. And there are specific tactics for that. One is to make posting feel low-stakes — anonymous posts, no pressure to reply, no requirement to introduce yourself. Another is to give lurkers a way to signal value without posting, like a 'this was helpful' button that feeds into a recommendation algorithm. Luna: The NYU study — did they find any other patterns about what made lurkers convert? Lucas: Yes. They found that lurkers who read at least five threads per month were three times more likely to convert than those who read fewer than two. So frequency of reading matters. And they also found that the type of content mattered. Lurkers who read threads about use cases and success stories converted at a much higher rate than those who read troubleshooting threads. Luna: That makes sense. Troubleshooting is reactive — you have a problem, you find a fix, you move on. But success stories are aspirational. They show you what is possible. Lucas: Exactly. So if you are a community manager, you want to surface success stories prominently. Make them easy to find. And maybe even curate them into a 'best of' library that lurkers can browse. One company in the study — a CRM platform — created a weekly 'Win of the Week' thread where customers shared their biggest achievement. They then pinned the top three each month. That single thread accounted for about a third of all new member conversions. Luna: So the content that converts is not the content that gets the most comments. It is the content that inspires. Lucas: Right. And that is a completely different way of thinking about community ROI. Instead of measuring engagement by volume, you measure it by influence. How many people read that thread? How many of those readers became paying customers? How long did they stay? Luna: But most community platforms do not give you those metrics. They show you active users, not passive readers. Lucas: That is changing. Some newer platforms are starting to track readership — how many unique users viewed a thread, how long they spent on it, whether they scrolled to the end. But even without those tools, you can infer from conversion data. If you see a spike in conversions after a particular thread goes up, you can bet that thread was read by a lot of lurkers. Luna: That is a good point. And it also means that the traditional community health metrics — posts per day, active users — might be misleading. A community could have low posting activity but high reading activity and still be incredibly valuable. Lucas: Exactly. The NYU study found that the communities with the highest conversion rates actually had lower posting rates than average. They were quieter, but more valuable. Because the lurkers were getting exactly what they needed without the noise. Luna: I wonder if that applies to these podcast episodes too. We have listeners who never write in, never comment, but they tell us in surveys that they get a lot out of the show. Lucas: That is a great parallel. And it is actually why we keep the show going without ads or paywalls. A couple of dollars a month from people who find value in it — that is what keeps these conversations alive. If these marketing deep dives have sparked something you have actually used, you can find us at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It is a small way to make a big difference for the show. Luna: And we genuinely mean that. Every little bit helps us stay independent and focused on what matters — real insights, not sponsored content. Lucas: So coming back to lurkers — the takeaway is really about respect. Respect the silent members. Do not try to force them into a mold they do not fit. Instead, build a community that delivers value to readers, and let the posters be the engine that creates that value. Measure what matters, not what is easy. Luna: I think that is a liberating message for a lot of community managers who feel like they are failing because their engagement numbers are not climbing. Lucas: Exactly. Low posting volume is not a failure. It might be a sign that your lurkers are getting what they need. And that is the whole point of a brand community — to deliver value. Not to generate noise.