In this blog post I will be talking about the different ways a community manager can promote and scale online community and some ideas of executing these promotional and scaling tactics successfully.
Online communities cannot be promoted according to a rulebook. A community manager will have to keep on identifying new ways to promote the online community. However here are a few ways I have learnt, which are effective in getting more people to know about you.
1.Outposts: Your online community need to have outposts at places where people are already present. Typically these are your Facebook/ Twitter/ YouTube or LinkedIn channels of your online community.
If you are looking for some good Facebook pages see starbucks page for their social application and engaging microcontest, Southwest airlines for everything they do, Zappos.com for the kind of engaging updates they create. For good examples for B2B targeting Facebook pages see Cisco for the way it promotes its events, Bain & Company for showcasing their thought leadership and market impact and this list aggregated by Social Media B2B for some other examples on B2B targeting Facebook pages. If you are looking for some good Facebook pages in India you can think of Fastrack for their applications and engaging updates and MTV India for almost everything they do. Moreover, if you are looking forward to knowing more about best practices and trends for Facebook pages, you should click on the given links.
However the above pages are outposts for brands and not for online communities of brands. To see how some brands use their Facebook outposts to promote the online communities related to their brands see the Facebook page for Dell Go Green online community for their very engaging microcontests (disclosure: Dell is a client of 2020 Social – my ex employer) and Club Mahindra Jiyo life page for their updates and shared links. Jiyo life is a Club Mahindra campaign that promotes getting more out of life. Interestingly, the updates on Jiyo Life Facebook page are very core to their philosophy of living life to fullest and getting more out of life.
2. Offline events: Sure success is online, but success cannot stay just online in the virtual space. It is many a time very effective to hold meetups, offline events and on ground campaigns in integration with your online community engagement to give your members an opportunity to personally meet each other and establish their network/ connections. Communities like USL’s Spiritz & more and Servus Credit Union’s Young Free Alberta understand does this very well and compliment their online efforts with offline events, promotions and parties.
3. Social Advertisements: By now you must be familiar with the Facebook ads. Social adverts like those on facebook many additional advantages over the banner ads. One, you can see how many people in your network have ‘liked’ an ad and second, they can be very targeted. Also you can create different types of Facebook adverts, like ads for your site/ online community, ads for your facebook page, ads for your event etc.
4. Initiating word of mouth: The biggest advantage social media brings to you is the way you can engage and energize your evangelists. Identify the super users and influencers in your community. These can be most active content creators, curators or people you regularly read your content and talk about it in their tweets, fb updates, blogs etc. Once you identify them, give them appropriate tools to promote your online community. You can do this by simple tactics like adding Fb/ Twitter ‘share’ buttons, creating emailer lists and sending them targeted mails to seek feedback / recommendations, invitations for guest blog posts (if your community has a blog) or even inviting them to speak at your offline events (if you plan to have any) or inviting them to form groups / clubs to organize their own offline gatherings. The last part comes handy when your online community is build around a core passion (like cricket / app development) or a cause (global warming etc).
5. Outreach: I am not a fan of pushy outreach strategies. However if there happens to be a hub for your target audience, having a presence there is definitely valuable. You can participate in relevant discussion forums around themes core to your community, network with influencers writing on relevant topics etc to pull the attention of audiences to your community. However a quick tip here – avoid spamming and meaningless promotion of your links. I get them a lot on my blog and I always hate them and I almost never click on them.
In my next post in this series, I will talk about few ways to manage content on your online community.
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