Are you on the lookout for tried and tested strategies to boost engagement with your community?
It has been heard repeatedly, that the real value of an online following rests not in its size, but instead in its depth of engagement. So it’s not surprising to see numerous brands and companies beginning to put community building and community engagement strategies at the core of their marketing endeavors.
The advantages of community engagement and community building are limitless. For beginners, it’ll drive greater leads, better brand loyalty, and grow user retention. Further, remember that possessing a dynamic and engaged community is far more cost-effective than investing a load of cash on AdWords or Facebook to drive greater leads.
Briefly, community engagement strategies are critical for building and nourishing your users, customers and/or fans. Although every community possesses its individual values, interests and a one-size-fits-all remedy doesn’t exist, the best attempt has been made to distill all the knowledge gained from the hundreds of communities configured into actionable strategies that you can begin applying immediately.
# 1 Grant Community Members A Position To Express Themselves
The most essential element of any community is – not alarmingly – its members. So, bear in mind that an effective community is nearly wholly about them, not about you. People like to speak to each other about things that concern them and you should always support this. Simplify for members to narrate their stories, exchange their experiences and increase their passions.
The more your members experience that they are being listened to, heard, and valued, the more probable they are to stay on your platform. This renders community engagement and building a superb tool for retention.
At Disciple, for instance, all customers are encouraged to grant their community members a place to express themselves by means of “have your say” walls or “fan walls”. Consequently, above 98% of content on their platform arises from community members, leaving only 2% of the content to supply from the community hosts.
User-created content is a splendid way to display the online community that you pay attention to their ideas. With regard to engagement activities, it backs you by assuring you’re not the sole one posting content for your community.
# 2 Concentrate On Community Moderation
Then again, it’s truly important to permit your community to actually express themselves. However, on the other hand, it’s vital that you adopt measures to retain your community a secure space where members respect one another’s opinions. Specifically, you need to temper the community to stop bullying, trolling, and aggressive or indecent behavior.
You’d be amazed at how fast the whole atmosphere of a community can alter if some bad actors are allowed the liberty to post distasteful comments. Numerous social media networks have fallen due to bad community guidelines and an all-too-hands-off attitude to community moderation.
# 3 Slice Your User Base For Gigantic Community Development
As mentioned earlier, there is no single-size-fits-all with regard to community engagement strategies and your user base is possibly extremely diverse. That is a wonderful thing! But, how do you face that and ensure everyone is obtaining information that concerns them.
Well, initially, you need to realize who your most engaged, key community members are so that you can group them into one group – or segment. Next, do similar with members who are not so much engaged and, lastly, build a cohort from members who are totally disengaged.
This is truly helpful for things like reward systems and developing further oneness into your community by recognizing your most engaged followers and rewarding their trust by granting them special access. Additionally, by recognizing your minimum engaged followers, you can motivate them to become more involved by displaying them the access obtained by your most engaged subscribers.
There are unending ways to portion your user base and build customised experiences for every member. So start thinking. And become creative!
Segmenting your audience is amongst the pivotal community engagement strategies.
# 4 Carry Your Social Media Following Into Your Individual Closed Community
The majority of people with a following or fanbase have developed the following employing social media. While social media can be a superb way to begin building a brand community, fanbase, or following.
Nevertheless, there are multiple shortcomings with regard to social media. The largest of all being the failure to build a closed, specific, or even paid community. This stops people like you from developing your personal ecosystem that people truly need to buy-into for becoming a member.
# 5 Get Responsive
Communities entirely involve interaction. Therefore, none of your community engagement strategies will function, if you become unresponsive.
How many times have you become a member of a gathering where hearing from the celebrity or host is a rare thing? Well, while that degree of exclusivity can be a nice thing, your fans and followers should hope to hear from you, regularly.
So get responsive and become involved with your community. Read what contents people are posting, like and share your followers’ posts, comment upon them and become acquainted with your followers.
Rest assured, this will be a mind-blowing move for community engagement…
Also Read: Why Having An SEO Strategy Is Crucial For Your Website?
# 6 Revel To Be Your Fan
Community engagement can be a truly enjoyable thing when performed correctly. The key is to strike the right balance between promotional content and truly fun, innovative content. The balance will rest hugely on the kind of community you’re developing and the community of persons you’re engaging.
However, as a raw guide, attempt to retain the balance at nearly 50/50. Nearly half of your content should be completely authentic, fun, and specific content. Things like book excerpts, song lyrics, drawings, videos, photos or whatever you’re tasking on. This will then generate the community engagement you require to next configure monetization avenues. And that’s when you include your promotional content. That’ll achieve the trick.
# 7 Inspire Your Members To Spend Some Time And Effort
There is a popular misconception that asking your fans, followers and community members to invest some effort and time will turn them more probable to exit the community. That myth must be allayed immediately. The truth is, requesting your users to spend effort and time into the community will increase their likelihood of coming back.
Here’s an instance. Developing your LinkedIn profile needs time and effort. You imagine carefully about the correct information to place up there and consume a while choosing the photo that displays not just your professionalism, but even your personality. And this is precisely what will make you come back. You’re invested and you’ve procured into the idea.
Therefore, how can you promote this inside your individual mobile community? Well, you can inspire your users to compose a complete profile. Run a competition for the finest profile or the finest bio. Energize the competition with a truly memorable prize to motivate people to devote some time on the task. You’ve received another community engagement strategy drawing your community nearer together and nearer to you.
# 8 Greet New Members
Welcoming new entrants to a community is not the latest idea, but you’d be amazed at how multiple community hosts do not remember this critical step. Configure a welcome email, use a platform to initiate a welcome message that lands in the latest members’ in-app messaging inbox. Ensure you do something to accept and thank people for associating with your community. Make them think welcomed.
After your members feel welcomed and a worthy part of the community, they’re much more probable to be engaged and become actively involved within your network. You can also utilize the welcome message avenue to describe the aim of the community and offer them ideas for their conversation or post. This is among the easier community engagement strategies, but it’s amazingly effective.
# 9 Gamify
Gamification is a splendid community engagement scheme. By including a gaming aspect into your community you’ll promote positive competitiveness in your community. That’ll make your members return for more.
One thing that’s been witnessed working really nice is alloting Top Fan Points. Each time a member of a Disciple mobile community shares, comments, likes or posts, they’re rewarded a number of points on the basis of every action. Normally, the greater your activeness in the community, the greater points you’ll possess.
And, if you declare and reward the member/s with the maximum points on a monthly basis, other members will lift their game to win the following month’s prize and mention. It’s an easy idea and it’s an indigenous element of the platform, but it constitutes a truly big distinction to community engagement.
# 10 Employ Visual Content
Visual content is essential for your community engagement plans. Photos and videos are considerably more engaging than simply a paragraph of text. Even though you don’t possess an image or video for your matter posted, you can utilize free stock images from areas like Unsplash and Pikwizard to render your post more visually engaging.
You’ll be surprised at how vast a difference this will cast on your community engagement. Visually appealing content will instantly grasp attention and attract people into the information you’re offering them. Video actually is the silver bullet for community engagement so employ it whenever possible!
Wrapping Up
These are the top community engagement strategies to aid you acquire customers associated with your brand. If your engagement strategy is correctly focused you will witness a larger return on the time spent in developing and nurturing your community. Another outcome will be a growth in customer satisfaction and drawing of new customers.
