5 Ways to Keep Your Community Engaged & Interested

Anyone who says that community management is easy is not being completely honest with themselves. Doing an effective job of engaging your community and establishing relevance is a 24/7, 365 endeavor. As a community manager you know that keeping your community actively engaged requires a deep understanding of both the consumer and the business as a whole, so that your message is both captivating and brand on.

Do you have an engagement plan for your community?

In this article from Social Media Today, you’ll get a great 5 step plan for engaging your community more effectively.

How to Build a 5 Step Plan for Creating an Online Community
In my last post, 3 Questions to Ask Before Starting an Online Community, the first question I recommended asking yourself is “Should I be using social media?” I also mentioned that you should have a plan established well before you get started, but it can be difficult to figure out just where to start. My 5 step guide makes it simple to create a plan for establishing your community! This guide covers everything from the basics, like understanding why you are using social media, to more complex topics like understanding which metrics you should track, how you’ll keep your community interested in your content, and how you’ll sustainably manage the huge time (and potentially financial) commitment that your online community will eventually become. Step 1: Why Am I Using Social Media? Before we do anything else, we need to first understand why we’re using social media channels to establish an online community. Some get started with social media because their competitors are there. Others will start a community because they’ve heard that just like every business worth its salt has a website, it now also needs a Facebook page at a minimum. These are all the wrong answer. You should be creating an online community because you have clear business goals that you can accomplish using social media. If you’re there for any other reason, then you’re there for the wrong reasons, which means that your efforts won’t be a priority for you or the organization you work for, that they won’t be funded properly, and that in the long run (or possibly much sooner) your social media efforts are going to fizzle out or be shut down. Even worse, your efforts could go on for years providing no clear value for you or your organization. So, obviously these goals are an essential place to start when planning to create our online community. Lets take a look at what these goals might look like in step 2. Step 2: What Do I Want To Accomplish? Once you have a clear business case for why you want to use social media, you need to understand exactly what results you want to accomplish for your business. These could be anything from increased sales to customer retention, but what’s most important is that you can quantify the results. Avoid measuring things like “Share of Voice” that don’t have any direct value for your business or goals that are difficult to quantify, like “increasing brand awareness.” You could argue that a growing community that leads to more sales is increasing your brand awareness, but that’s just icing on the cake, not your primary goal. Anything that’s difficult to track and prove shouldn’t be a key goal that you try to sell internally to support the value your community brings to the organization.