How to Engage and Retain Users ( Backed up with Steemit Data)

Steemit is an experimental decentralized blogging/social platform created on blockchain technology that allows users reward content creators by way of up votes which are attached with a value.

At Just over 2 years old and with almost 1m registered accounts, because of the decentralised nature of Steemit and the self-governance of politics and business ethic’s, Steemit has become many things to many people.

For some it is a blogging platform, where authors publish content which they hope adds value and is rewarded financially.  For some it’s a social place to share their lives and interact with other, with the added benefit of possible rewards.  For others it’s a place to do business, earn a return on investment, or use their development skills to create awesome apps and projects.

At first Steemit was rather confined to developers and those in the know around the crypto space, but as Steemit becomes more mainstream and the user base grows, the niches that Steemit caters for have and will widen further.

At the heart of Steemit making sure everything works are the Steemit Witnesses.  These people devote their time to ensure we all have a stable and secure platform.  Many of them also create apps and tools offering different user experiences or tools.   As I said, Steemit is decentralised.  There is no centralised organisation running the platform.  Without the efforts of these people there would be no Steemit.

In addition to running a stable secure network the witnesses also have a say in future changes to how the blockchain works.  Any changes made to the code and how steemit works, must be agreed by a majority of these witnesses.

For Example, if someone wanted to change how the rewards are calculated, this would require a change in the code, and an agreement between witnesses to run the new code. Not one person or one organisation can make an implement these changes on their own.  

So these witnesses, a curtail part of the success of steemit are working away providing this stable network and awesome apps.  If we were to compare this to a centralised organisation, this would be the IT and Systems Development and Operations Departments.  A department that is served well under a decentralised platform.

I know some of you will say, well why are you comparing this to a centralised organisation?  Well that’s easy really. At the end of the day, 99% of the people on steemit have a common goal.  Profit. Same as most centralised organisations.  And therefore, like most centralised organisations, other departments are needed to.

And wow is this happening on Steemit.  How awesome it is that random people are starting departments on Steemit.  For Example, on marketing we have promo-steemit and for business intelligence we have blochchainbi both established tags and communities on Steemit. We have all these side communities working on the ground and active within steemit.  It’s all decentralised, yet organised.

Lets get back to the witnesses again.  So we have an awesome bunch representing the IT department as witnesses. But what about the other departments?  The people on the ground.  How are these represented within the witnesses? 

Well there are also some witnesses that are working on the ground helping new steemain understand the platform and grow their accounts.  Running other departments.  Meet @abh12345, half of the steemit witness team @steemcommunity .

@abh12345 has been working on the ground encouraging manual curation and engagement though his Curation and Engagement League.  The ideas rather simple.  There are two leagues, a league that rewards those for maximising their curation rewards with the SP their have and the Engagement league (or league of excellence) which takes in a number of actives on the block and weights these actives producing a weekly leader board. (We could call this department Community Growth and Account Acceleration, it could also fall under the umbrella of on boarding)

Let’s take a look at some data

 

The data above looks a bit empty right? Let me tell you why.  Since Steemit Started 995,824 accounts have been registered on Steemit.  Of which only 133,956 (13.45%) have been active via votes or posts/comments in the last 14 days.  That leaves 861,868 non active accounts in the last 14 days.  These figures are shown on the top of the visualization above.

Below this the first rather blank looking charts shows at what day people drop off Steemit.  Hard as it is to see, of the 861,862 accounts that have not been active in the last 14 days,  +500K accounts which is just 59% have not posted or voted since the first day they registered on steemit.

Based on this the median drop of day on Steemit is 1 and the average is 31.65

Lets put some filters on this data set.  As a majority of accounts that registered on steemit never make it past the first day, we can completely exclude these from our analysis

   

Now at least we can see some of the data.  By excluding all accounts that have not been active since their first day we are left with 487,661 accounts of which 72.53% have not been active in the last 14 days.

 The median drop of day is now 32 and the average is 75.74.  These numbers are really improving however the distribution of drop offs by the day in which they drop off is still very much skewed to the right.

Using this as a base we can now compare Steemit overall to participants in Asher’s leagues.

     

Notice a difference?

Of the 357 participants in the league 93.28% have been active in the last 14 days and only 24 have dropped off.  For the accounts the dropped off, the median drop off day is 81, with an average of almost 104.

Okay so some of you might have spotted this but the sample population taken here is all of Steemit and all of the participants in the league.  By taking the full population the data is slightly skewed because one could argue that the people that joined Asher’s league when it started were already established on Steemit.  

So what if we add some more filters to the data.  This time only looking at Accounts set up since the beginning of 2018.

  

Leaving on the filter to exclude accounts that have not been active since their first day, we are left with 222,971 accounts registered this year.  Of this 40.96% have been active on the last 14 days.  For  the accounts that did drop off, the median drop off day is 18 and the average is 27.46.

Now let’s look at participants in Ashers league

 

From this we can see that 107 accounts registered in 2018 and joined Ashers league.  Of this almost 87% of accounts have remained active.  That’s more than twice that of Steemit in general (and they are all human on Ashers league)

For the accounts that did drop off, the median drop of day is 46.  That means that the people that do leave, don’t lose their interest as fast if they are in the league.  In fact they stay over 2.5 time longer than people that do not participate.

So what’s the moral of this story (apart from saying Ashers league rocks)?

Retention Rates on Steemit are low and churn rates are high.  This can be backed up by the following post

https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@paulag/steemit-churn-rates-q1-2018

Witnesses not only have a role in providing a stable secure platform and a say in changes, but they are also responsible for the continued marketing, on boarding, and growth of Steemit.  They need to engage and retain users.  We can’t expect all witnesses to be all things.  But we can ensure that each department on Steemit that provides value to the continued development of the platform is represented with in the top witnesses.

Asher’s league has become very successful.  All you have to do is take a look at the posts and see the level of engagement via comments to see that.  And the league has spread.  We now have @girolamomarotta doing a league for Italy and I run a league for Indonesia.  Me, being second half of @steemcommunity witness team.

Have a spare witness vote, or looking to make changes to your witness list?  Then I do hope you will consider voting for @steemcommunity

All data for this post was taken from Steemsql.