Following your Growth Plan is key to your community's success. Each element is important and requires continuous oversight so as to ensure that you achieve your community building goals. So, here are the 5 Elements that make up your Growth Plan:
Element 1: Know your audience. This will help you know what features your members value the most and what kinds of activities to emphasize when asking for engagement.
Element 2: Engage in a two-tiered membership strategy.
Your Community Stakeholders:
Determine your community stakeholders, the ones who have a stake and vested interest in your community's success. Once determined, recruit these stakeholders to become members of your community before launching to the general public launch. When doing this, copy the Invitation Link from your social network and send your invite directly from your normal email address. Unfortunately, if you begin by sending invites from the "Invite" tab of the social network itself, your invite might get caught up in an invitees spam folder or it might get ignored because they don't recognize the sending address.
Remember, your community stakeholders are the key to your community's success in taking on a life of its own. Your community stakeholders and their ability to catch and carry the vision of your community is how you will win the rest of your members and their ongoing engagement. Think of your stakeholders as your change agents and best friends!
Your Community Members:
The first public launch of your community should be done only after you have at least 5-10% of your community members already signed up. Your public invitation for requesting new members should happen via your organization's regular internal email list and once again using the Invitation Link for your network for reasons already mentioned. After this initial public invitation is made, new member invitations can be made by the community members themselves from the social network "Invite" tab. Ideally, your goal is that members invite new members so that your community grows from the bottom up, not from the top down.
During the first 30 days after your community's public launch, your goal, working in team-ship with your community stakeholders, should be to grow overall community membership by 3x.
Element 3: Your blog is important for generating continuous traffic to your site and staying top of mind with your community members. Click here for some important instructions on how to best guarantee a successful blogging experience.
Element 4: Look for and leverage any "brick-to-click" trigger mechanisms for generating traffic to your social network. E.g. important discussions, key events, entertaining pictures, music and videos, etc.. The long-term growth and frequency of use of your social network will be directly related to how effectively it supports your natural relationship building and communications.
Ask your Community Life coach for a bag of "Just Ask" lapel buttons for bringing attention to your social network at your next community event. These buttons are meant for your stakeholders to wear so as to be visible to people who may have questions about how to do certain things on your social network. It's also a great way to build awareness and recruit new members!
Element 5: Be sure that your social network is listed in your organization's Social Graph. The listing of your social network in your organization's social graph is as an effective way to advertise your community to people who already share your vision and values. In a similar way, you might also want to advertise your social network in your Facebook profile using your social network's badge. It's easy to do. Click here for instructions.
Remember, your community is organic. It's alive! It's always growing or declining, either one of these two...and much of it will depend on you and how closely you follow this Growth Plan.
You can do it!
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