Growth What Are the Best Practices for Onboarding New Members?

[InMyOpinion]

First impressions matter, and in online communities, a great onboarding experience can be the difference between a new member sticking around or disappearing after their first post. So, what can we do as community leaders to make sure new members feel welcome, informed, and excited to participate?

1.​

Nobody likes feeling like just another username in a sea of members. A simple welcome message—whether automated or personal—can go a long way. If possible, take a moment to reply to their introduction post or tag them in a welcome thread.

2.​

New members shouldn’t have to dig to figure out where to post or how things work. A pinned "Start Here" guide or a dedicated onboarding section can help them get comfortable quickly. Bonus points if it's written in a friendly, easy-to-read way instead of a wall of rules!

3.​

Some people hesitate to jump in, so giving them a low-pressure way to participate helps. Icebreaker threads, fun polls, or even a "New Member of the Month" highlight can encourage engagement early on.

4.​

If your community is big or complex, consider a mentorship system where experienced members help guide newcomers. Sometimes, having a direct person to ask questions makes all the difference.

5.​

Yes, rules are important, but they don’t have to be intimidating. Instead of throwing a huge list at new members right away, introduce them gradually—maybe with a "Did You Know?" tip series or a fun quiz that teaches community etiquette in an engaging way.

6.​

Check in on new members after their first week or month. A simple message like, "Hey [username], how's your experience so far? Anything we can help with?" can make people feel valued and more likely to stick around.

What about you? What onboarding methods have worked best in your community? Let’s share ideas!

 

[fdk]

When my forums were smaller communities, I always took the time to welcome new members if they posted an introduction thread, and if they didn't post an introduction thread but I noticed they continued to login, I'd send them a PM asking if they needed any help using the site or if they were unsure about posting for any reason. This led to, I'd say, a good 80% of registered members on my forums at least posting an introduction thread on the forum and led to some who were "lurkers" becoming semi-active contributors to the community.

As my largest forum got bigger, it became more and more difficult to continue with this practice unfortunately. I'd still try my best to respond to each introduction thread created with a personal welcome, but doing much more than this, alongside the other duties I had administrating the site, was more difficult. I used to still find some time to check our statistics at this point, and found that our "lurker" count was much higher - we were at about 50% of total registrations making nil posts (but with hundreds of new registrations a month), but it was harder to find ways to encourage more of these to become active.

I suspect that in a large part, due to the community becoming that much larger, there was users creating multiple accounts just for "reading" purposes, or other sites/competitors making crawling accounts or something. I'm not exactly sure and never found time to do some more in-depth investigation.


Nowadays, a use of social media and online influencers I believe could play a huge part in bringing people back to forums. If somebody can get an influencer or social media bigshot with a significant following involved with promoting their forum, that could help to bring in a whole heap of new (and younger, the kind of generation who "missed out" on forums) to forums and help bring them much more into focus. I especially feel this way with the way a lot of social media is going - those of a younger generation, for example teenagers today, are much less likely to be active on Facebook. They prefer more "direct" social networking, such as that offered by Snapchat.

With the way forum software has developed, especially XenForo specifically, there's absolutely everything needed for a XenForo community to run as a "social network" in a sense. We have user profiles, following, direct messaging. The public forum is an equivalent of Facebook's "Threads", or X's "tweet threads", or in some ways could be compared to Snapchat's "Spotlight" feature. It gives you access to a "wider" community, where you can "comment" (post) on other people's "posts" (threads), and you can find new creators, make new friends, discuss making cupcakes, discuss relationships, health, sports, whatever it is you want.

This is all happening with the younger generation today on platforms like Snapchat - we as forum owners need to find a way to encourage that generation to want to use a forum instead. One of the biggest encouragements I can see obviously, without needing to do much thinking, is that as a forum, we can offer a permanent, easy to access, easy to navigate "history" of all of these chats, user profiles, comments, posts, threads etc - and we can offer all of this information in an easier to navigate, find, store & access way than Snapchat, for example, can. We need to build on this, build on marketing methods to make this clear, and ultimately, onboard people of this generation who have the ability to influence their peers towards this way of thinking community-wise.

 

[otisbooard]

give away free t shirts

 

[1stop]

The points you raised are very valid. Let me add a member spotlight feature to what you have up there. It will motivate new members to participate in the discussion and they’ll keep coming back too.

 

[Cpvr]

give away free t shirts

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Free t shirts are an excellent viral marketing tactic. You never know who will be looking at your t shirts. This could also work for branded hats as well. Great thinking Otis!

Giving away free ad space could also work as well depending on the type of community that you’re running.

 

[otisbooard]

or maybe a hoodie