The Truth about Wales - scary statistics revealed. How can we impro...

As part of a plan to promote Steemit in Wales @stephenkendal trawled the database to come up with a list of users based in Wales.

There were 63 members in that list to start.

To kickstart the promotion of steemit in Wales I thought it would be good to see if we could set up a meetup of existing users in Wales.

As a starting point I went through Stephen's list to see which accounts are still active.

Of the 60 odd accounts only 11 have been active in the last two weeks (bright green in the spreadsheet below) - that is just 17.7%.

Even if the last active period is extended to the past month (pale green) that still only expands the active user number to 15 or 24.2%.

These retention figures really are poor - although not totally surprising. I had seen similar figures from @paulag in the past.

But it does put the status of steemit in perspective. In Wales, with a population of 3.1 million, there are only 15 active steemians - that is less than 0.000005% of the population.

We truly have a mountain to climb to put steemit on the map in Wales.

More importantly it does highlight the very serious need to improve the retention rate in steemit.

At these current rates to achieve an active user base of 1 million, steemit will need to recruit 5 million new users.

Clearly an absurd situation.

If you ask steemians what can be done to improve retention rates you will get many different answers. Many of those answers will revolve around improving rewards for the newer users.

There are some admirable projects like the Minnow Support Project and Project Curie that aim to tackle the problem. But that is obviously not enough.

Beyond those sorts of projects what can realistically be done in the here and now to help keep new users on steemit.

Two key areas for me are :

1. Modifying and managing expectations in the promotion and signup process.

The 'sales pitch' of steemit needs to go beyond the standard post and earn message. If that is the primary marketing message used to recruit new members many will give up disappointed and disillusioned with steemit within the first few weeks. We need to show that there is a deeper value to becoming a steemit user beyond the simple $ value that might, over time, be accrued.

2. Introduce some form of mentoring or buddy system right from the starting gate.

Amongst the Wales users I analysed 13 had signed up and never started posting (NSB). Several more had posted just once and then given up.
In games like Entropia a mentoring system is baked into the game with rewards for successful mentoring of new players. That is not feasible in steemit so we must look to some manually managed process.

Mentoring is something I am giving a lot of thought to - both in the context of recruiting new users to steemit in Wales, and for helping keep new users on board in the homesteading community that I am an active part of.

I would welcome any ideas for mentoring in the comments below.

So in Wales we have at best 15 active steemians. I am hoping as many as possible of us can meet up in the near future.

For any of us that want to help promote steemit in Wales it does appear we have a fresh green Welsh mountain to climb. But if the sheep can do it so can we.

And the rewards could be great. If between the 15 of us we could recruit and retain just 30 new users we would have tripled the steemit membership in one fowl swoop.

We best not chicken out of this.

If any of these active users would be interested in a meetup do let me know :

@artystuff, @berolena, @bloodycritique, @clydemajiklegion, @artystuff, @berolena, @bloodycritique, @clydemajiklegion, @growthtools, @guided, @kissmyaxe76, @leonjones, @mattjacobmason, @mivstar, @pumpkinsandcats, @she-raa86, @stevejhuggett

You might also be interested in some of my other posts :

[flag image from pixabay - Creative Commons CC0]

The Truth about Wales - scary statistics revealed. How can we improve the retention rate?