Create Initial Content for Your Community – SMPG Community Building Checklist
In our previous post, Create Your Community Policies, we discussed how to design your community policies, 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 creating the initial content for your community.
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Create Initial Content
- Set the stage by designing various forums around key issues of interest
- Seed each forum with starter questions
- Have a forum for newbies called “Introduce Yourself”
- Have a forum called “What <product> Means to Me”
- Test with a few volunteers, and get the discussions started
- Invite community influencers
- Be careful to not look artificial or staged
- Gradually widen the discussion
- Initial testers invite their friends
Launch
- Get enough volunteers to staff the site for initial phase
- Blitz all your online and offline contacts
- Create a media package to distribute if you get press interest
- Target a soft launch to work out bugs and test engagement. A soft launch is where you go live, but don’t do publicity, and only invite a small group to participate.
- Launch early in the week, early in the morning
- Tuesday or Thursday are high traffic days on the Web
- Ensure the initial page tells your story, and includes pictures of your team / clients
- Include a survey or quiz
- Ensure that your site has Facebook “Like” and other social media badges so your members can spread the word
- Give something away
- Reward people for creating a complete profile
- Perhaps just a white paper or other downloadable content
- Create an offline launch party and invite your board, clients, supporters
- Video the unveiling of the new site and post on YouTube
- Create an online event within the first two weeks
- Plan major new content within the first month
Next up: Manage Your Initial Content
Create Initial Content for Your Communityis the 167th 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 411. 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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