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.
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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
Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV
What Others Are Saying
“Infinite Pipeline offers practical advice for using social media to extend relationship selling online. It’s a great way to get crazy-busy prospects to pay attention.”
—Jill Konrath, author of SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies
“Sales is all about relationships and trust. Infinite Pipeline is the ‘how to’ guide for maximizing social networks to find and build relationships, and generate trust in our digital age.”
—Sam Richter, best-selling author, Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling (2012 Sales book of the year)
“Infinite Pipeline will be the authority on building lasting relationships through online social that result in bottom line business.”
—Lori Ruff, The LinkedIn Diva, Speaker/Author and CEO of Integrated Alliances
[1] Tweetups: bit.ly/cido0V
