How to engage your audience

Clients ask us regularly about how to get their audience more engaged and participating in their social media groups, online forums or blog comments.  Our first answer is…it takes time. Time to craft your message, curate conversations, remove the trolls and keep things fresh without overdoing it with your messaging. Our second part of the answer is the list of ideas below. Remember each audience is defined by their age, computer skills and time.

HOW TO ENGAGE

Now that your membership numbers are growing, let’s think about helping them use the group even more.  

  • Be a leader (or some call it “the host”)
  • Interact with your community
  • Post inspiring content
  • Ask questions that matter to the community
  • Conduct a poll
  • Find your fans on social media & build a community around them rather than asking them to gather somewhere else
  • Have a friendly environment
  • Have them participate (ask for volunteer admins)
  • Have some fun every now and then
  • Thank your members for participating
  • Create an onboarding process for your community
  • Create a guided video course about how to use your group/forums best
  • Spend time in the community yourself
  • Promote members of your community to special positions
  • Identify and nurture your power users
  • Send weekly “what’s new in the community” messages and give shout-outs to people doing great stuff
  • Get your community together in other ways (in person or on live video calls)
  • Encourage robust profiles
  • Create spaces for users to build rapport (ie introductions or icebreaker areas)
  • Facilitate opportunities and collaboration and support

BENEFITS OF AN ACTIVE GROUP

If you put in the time to cultivate your group, it can:

  1. Bring your audience together in a central location where they can interact with each other
  2. Increase brand authority, since your website is where all of the discussion is happening
  3. Add additional content to your website
  4. Reduce the number of overall questions directed at you and your team
  5. Be an incredible resource for market research
  6. Increase retention rate across your community

CONSIDER THESE FOR YOUR GROUP

Some ideas for your members to stay active:

  1. Create a video or slideshow about how to use it
  2. Comment on great bio content and photos
  3. Monthly what’s new sent by Constant Contact or as a post in the Group (with links)
  4. Do something fun once a month or quarter – ask to see photos of their pets!
  5. Highlight members with special post “Meet the members”

The Your Plan B team can help you help your group grow!  Give us a call to brainstorm some ideas today!