The best online community managers all have common practices and keys to their success. These are the habits and activities that are key to a successful and healthy community. While there are a number of practices behind highly successful community managers, there are three that have the greatest impact to an online community. These are the 20% that will account for 80% of the positive results. Incorporate these three habits into your daily practice and your community will thrive.
Cultivate Engagement
The best online community managers are keen on ensuring high levels of engagement. They live and breathe engagement when working with their community. At the core, they are creating surveys for the members to take on regular basis. This is one of the most fundamental ways to engage members. Highly successful community managers also use other many tools. For instance polls, discussions, and a topics module. All these are great for qualitative research. Furthermore, activities like an Ideaboard allow for organic ideas from members. Community managers can get a sense of popularity of ideas that get posted by members voting on the ideas. The bottom line is good community managers will have an engagement strategy which leads to deeper insights.
Plan of Attack
The most successful online community managers have a specific plan for the community. The plan can be broken into two parts. 1) The basic setup and fundamentals of the community. For instance, ensuring there are enough members and segments to get all the research done. Creating content for the community. Communicating with stakeholders. All the background work with setting up and getting buy in from the organization. 2) A specific project plan for the community. This includes the number of surveys, activities, points, rewards, etc. for the community. They have a schedule by the year, month, and even down to the week. This helps to ensure that the community remains active and stays top of mind with the members. This will help with getting insights from members. This in turn helps with having the data to make better business decisions.
Constantly Replenish
Online community managers know that they must be constantly recruiting new members. Overtime, a portion of community members will become stagnant. They will stop participating in activities. While running campaigns to get these stagnant members engaged is a good idea, there will still be a portion that don’t want to participate . Thus, it’s best to be constantly recruiting new members to replace those that have become dormant. New members will help bring new ideas and insights into the community. This will help with response rates and the overall health of the community.
It’s easy to become a highly successful online community manager. Rally around these three important points. Make use of them to increase engagement, participation, and insights that you’re getting from a community. This will in turn lead to better and more informed business decisions.
QuestionPro Communities is a purpose-built community insights solution. Our feature rich tool set is at your disposal to help you create engaged communities, collect real-time customer insights, and positively impact your business. Contact us today – [email protected] or www.questionpro.com/communities.
