A community without engagement is a smaller version of Google…a space for customers to come to get information and leave.
A community WITH engagement is a microcosm of value:
- Peer to peer collaboration
- Customer à Organization interactions
- Customer insights at scale
As you take a look at which customer engagement ideas to target, be sure to focus on the value to the audience rather than the value for the organization. The two are not mutually exclusive, but in a community, if there is a conflict, winner should always be the customer.
Here are some things to consider:
- Set a goal to track so you can see what works (example, DAU/MAU increases by 20%)
- Community tone – is there room for Friday Memes? Or maybe your customers are focused on solving problems. Making sure
- Be involved – you don’t want to dominate the conversation and space, but you do want to be identifiable as the person to go to for help. This can look like answering direct messages, liking posts, tagging members who could add value to the conversation, and sharing content. Be sure every post gets a response from you!
- Regular content is vital (see the last 4 emails to help here)
- Recognize participants:
- Acknowledge top members both publically through a leader board, a spotlight, and/or a post and privately through an email or message. If you have the ability, send an unexpected bit of swag or other token of appreciation for their efforts.
- Mark milestones. In Gain Grow Retain, I created a ‘Look How Far We Have Come’ post with an infographic showing how our community grew, the number of posts and comments, etc. for the past year. This helps customers see beyond their individual contributions and how those contributions helped make the community an amazing space. You can also announce rank achievements, anniversaries, and other ways your community members are growing.
- Focus on asking rather than asking questions for your audience. It is much easier to ask something than to put their skills on the table for everyone to see through answering something. Bonus points if you give them a space to start this process through a guided campaign with templates and suggestions!
- Keep an eye out on social media, and if a community member shares something awesome (personal or professionally), bring it into the community. Be sure to link back to the original post to help them grow their audience and reach 😊.
- Gamification is another tool that helps encourage behaviors that impact the community. We will take a deeper dive in a few months, but this is always a strong engagement support piece.
- Look for advocates. Who is engaged already and would be willing to be a part of a volunteer program or other advocacy roles. Find ways to encourage them to help in strategic ways but be careful of overusing your allies!
- Focus on events. Events are a great way to bring engagement. We will talk about this in more depth in a couple of weeks but be sure that regardless of where your events live, you are partnering them with community.
- Host a competition. During COVID, our least engaged audience persona were early educators. This was a group of people with limited time to hang out in a community. However, when school went virtual, even for the youngest attendees, early ed programs were struggling with how to maintain connections and impact their students. We hosted a competition with prizes and a space for educators to share their best virtual lesson plans. This group rose to the occasion and posted hundreds of examples. This not only gave them a space to show off their talent, but inspired others who were struggling to get a program off the ground. By far our best competition!
- Great onboarding. Get your new members started off on the right foot! We will spend more time with this topic in the next email.
- Start weekly chats. Each week, on a consistent day of the week, start a conversation that would be relevant to your audience. Help prime the conversation, and if you align it with a component of your product or service, even better!