Engage Your Community For Once And For All

Congratulations! You’ve managed to get users on to your page, now how do we get them to stick around and come back for more? Community Engagement.

Encourage the newbies and the old-timers to spend more time on your page, share your content with their friends, and become a loyal viewer.

Stress-Free Participation

Engagement should be like dating. Slow at first with no commitments, and once they’re comfortable you can gradually begin to ask more from them.

Make sure it’s obvious at first how the viewer can participate online, and provide an incentive for them to come back.

Incorporate multiple entry points so people can participate via email, newsletters, or offline posters and flyers.

Nobody Got Time for That

Remember, time is money. The Internet has raised an entire new generation feeding on instant gratification.

Credit: niallkennedy / Foter / CC BY-NC

If your content doesn’t instantly catch the eye of the reader, then forget it the information won’t be retained and the reader will be on to the next page with a click of a button. Timing is also everything.

If you’ve researched what is attracting readers to your posts and at what time you can effectively maximize the engagement for each one.

For example, if you’re posting about homemade school lunches to make for your kids the optimal time to post would be right around 9:30 after the kids have gotten on the bus to school and when moms have time to breathe for a moment and browse online.

Take Your Community Offline

It’s easy for us to get sucked into our online profile identities and communicating strictly through iMessage, and Gchat, but the most efficient way to engage your community is to occasionally take your community to the streets.

The most genuine and rich form of communication is still face to face, if you really want to make a lasting impact on your community, arrange a meet up in the city and take the time to meet your community members in real life and build connections.

Enter to Win

Who doesn’t love the chance to win free stuff?

Credit: Sean MacEntee / Foter / CC BY

Not only do contests reward loyal fans for their engagement, but it also creates a buzz and excitement for new users to entice toward your page and constantly check back on the page to see if the winner has been announced.

Using a tool like Strutta will help you organize the whole thing among different channels of your choice and even allows you to target what kind of engagement you’re looking for.

What’s New?

Keep members updated all the time, when you post new content, if they’ve missed a post that’s relevant or interesting to things they’ve liked or read in the past.

If they’re repeatedly shown new and interesting content specific to the particular member’s wants and needs they’re more likely to become engaged.

Don’t let Facebook / Twitter Takeover your Community

Many bloggers will try and convince you to take your content to other social media platforms to share your content and attract more to your community.

This is great when you’re building a user base, but once you’ve acquired the users you want to keep them on your page! Try different innovative tactics to keep the traffic within your page.

Ask inspiring and open-ended questions to intrigue the members and keep them routed on your site.

My Opinion

Engaging your community is the most important part of marketing for your page, even more so than directing initial traffic.

Learn more and try out these tactics to gaining more oomph in your online community.

What About You?
What else have you tried to engage your online community? We love hearing from you what’s worked for you in the past, what new tricks are you trying to incorporate to get more engagement? We want to know!

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About the Author
Ben Shwartz is the VP Marketing for Spot.IM He loves to buy/sell websites and anything to do with online marketing.