Attracting Community Members – SMPG Community Building Checklist
In our previous post, Manage Your Community, we discussed how to manage your initial content, a part of our community building checklist.
In this post, we continue posting our exclusive checklist that you can use to execute your project for building your community – The Social Media Performance Group Community Building Checklist™. We discuss how to attract community members.
Attracting Community Members
- Organic
- People find you through Google because your site is Search Engine Optimized for relevant search terms
- Referral
- Get lots of other highly-ranked sites to link to yours
- Use the Facebook Like button
- Can use paid links but only as a last resort
- Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
- You probably already have an email subscription list; use it to promote the community
- Create newsletter articles that draw users to your Website for more info, or the rest of the article
- Put newsletter subscription widget on all your Webpages
- Personal referrals
- Run campaigns for current members to invite friends
- Cultivate evangelists to blog, tweet, Facebook about you
- Get your executives and even your board involved
- Promote the community at your live events
- Hold Tweetups[1] — real-world events where everyone tweets
- Give everyone the tools to refer, and connect
- Ask members to put your badge on their sites
- Create lists of suggested tweets and topics
- Encourage members to post pictures to enhance connection
- Encourage members to put a community link in their signatures
- Run games or contests to encourage lurkers to post
Next up: Converting Visitors to Members
Attracting Community Members is the 169th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’ve been doing this since 2011 and we’re just past page 413. At this rate it’ll still be a while before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 6WXG8ABP2
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What Others Are Saying
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—Lori Ruff, The LinkedIn Diva, Speaker/Author and CEO of Integrated Alliances
[1] Tweetups: bit.ly/cido0V