When you’re operating a membership website, it’s important to not overlook or UNDER-appreciate the members. You both need each other to be successful, and you have to keep your members engaged. Make sure that you are doing everything in your power to get and keep members engaged, or you will fail! Your job is to make your members happy! If you do that, then all will be okay.
It is increasingly important to build a strong online community. Community building is a crucial way to engage people – after all, engagement displays authenticity, credibility and trust. While building a strong online community is increasingly important, it is only a small part of the engagement equation for your membership site. Here are three ways that you can build engagement with the members of your site.
Through Your Website
Your website is where your members head for the information and insight that they are paying you for. It is where they can participate in your online community and where they can register for events, manage their membership profile, and renew their memberships. You want to find a way to build relationships and encourage your members to take action with every single website visit to ensure that you are providing tangible value to your members.
Enable Two-Way Communication Through Online Communities
To keep your members engaged, you must first provide fresh content. Once they are engaged, you must provide a means of communication. This will enable them to alert you to fresh content and enable you to communicate with them though two-way communications. You can keep your members informed of new material by including information in other channels, like posting updates in your newsletter, or any other publications that you create and send out to your members.
You need to have a two-way communication system in place so that your members can talk to you, and you can listen to them and respond. You should provide members with multiple ways to communicate with you. You can do this through online forums, online surveys, or through various social media platforms.
Engage Members Through Social Media
The engagement of your members often links back to how they are engaging with your content. Engagement links back to the relevance and quality of your material. Everybody can be on social media. In fact, you’re nothing but a number if you don’t make a personal connection to your audience. Having great quality content is important, but even that won’t guarantee any success if you don’t work toward building trust and developing relationships. It is important to be active on social media in order to build your brand.
Think about what makes your material so valuable to them as well as what makes it unique and interesting. Ask them to rate and review it on different websites that are relevant to the topic. While social media participation is only part of the engagement equation, it has become increasingly crucial to enabling and promoting two-way social media engagement with members. Your social media strategy needs to be determined based on your particular goals. Photos and videos have become key social currencies online and are instrumental in drawing more members to your website where you can engage and demonstrate the value of your site.
Once you’ve built the initial setup and create a set-up procedure to find and integrate new content into your website, you can improve it over time by adding new features and extending your content. Eventually you’ll have a strong foundation that’s easy to add to continually in order to retain your current members and interest prospective members to your site.
