How to Get More Engagement on Substack
+ the best take I've read on Substack's future and the TikTok ban
In this post!
Engagement vs. Community (they’re different)
Examples of Substack writers and creators doing both really well
How to focus on boosting engagement or building community
Examples and specific prompts to increase engagement in the comments and build community
This month in our Substack mastermind/Cohort (which is amazing because there are so many amazing Substack writers and creators helping each other in there), we focused on building community vs. increasing engagement.
I’ll let one of our members,
of Coffee Break Newsletter, tell you why:Thank you, Sarah, for another great session. My comment may be silly, but I did not realise the difference between engagement and community regarding Substack; I thought they would come hand in hand. So, thank you for explaining it in detail. It helped me clarify my focus. I thought it was building community. After this session, I am leaning towards focusing on engagement versus building community, at least for this year. (She offers “a weekly pause for the curious. Subscribe here.)
Substack success, i.e., using the platform to achieve all your amazing creative, professional, and personal goals, is all about clarifying your focus. Otherwise, you’ll spin in the features and comparing yourself to others.
Why should I care about engagement or community?
Because that’s what keeps subscribers. Chasing new subscribers is a waste of time if you’re losing them just as fast.
People unsubscribe from newsletters all the time, but they don’t unsubscribe if they feel spoken to (engaged) or part of something (community).
Boosting engagement vs. building community
Decide what you’re most interested in cultivating on Substack:
engagement (your audience responding to you) or
community (subscribers interacting with each other).
In other words:
You want engagement if you want your subscribers to engage with you.
You want community if you want your subscribers to engage with you a bit and mostly each other.
I want engagement on my author stack; I want community here on Substack Writers at Work.
Which is better?
Neither! We hear the word “community” and think it’s somehow noble and what we should want. But they’re two different goals. One isn’t better.
Both demand quality and consistency
Community and engagement start with consistently publishing quality posts because that’s what builds trust:
“Quality” is a word we throw around a lot. What is it? It’s a post that comes from inside you (not to sell but to share) that you’ve spent time thinking about and taken the time to revise and edit at least once.
Consistency means posting on the same day/s of the week or month. If we post whenever we feel like it, we never develop that Sunday-paper relationship with our subscribers. We want them to look forward to hearing from us—and we don’t want to annoying them by showing up willy-nilly.
talked about this when he explained why he always posts at 6:30 AM.