It’s no secret that companies across the globe have gone all-in on social media. We have seen extensive ad campaigns on social platforms, active and engaged social media departments, and the use of social media influencers. How do membership-oriented organizations use social platforms like Twitter and Facebook to bring in new members, and engage and retain existing members.
While your organization may in fact have a social presence, a Facebook page, maybe even a Twitter account, are you using it to its full potential?
Social media is a great tool to grow visibility and awareness, but let’s look beyond just having a presence on those platforms, and look at 4 specific tips to help grow your membership relationships using social media.
Promote your organization
Your social media accounts should represent your organization as you would like it to be seen. It is a representation of your organization on a large scale so be sure to use the tone, language and voice that you want to portray.
The first step to promoting your organization is to set up your social pages with the branding look and feel of your website and other marketing assets. Include important “About Us” information like mission statement, guiding principles and contact information.
Once your profiles are consistent and provide adequate information, it’s time to start actively promoting your organization. Generate interest with new members by sharing the details of past and future events. Share photos from fun events, summaries of past events, and promotions for future events.
Make your posts interesting, informative, fun and try to show prospective members the value your organization can bring.
Engage your membership
The basis for growing membership relationships is consistently engaging with your members. There are several ways in which you can engage with your members, which ones you use will largely depend on the size and goals of your organization.
For smaller organizations where each member is familiar to you, engagement can be as simple as tagging them in photos of past events, thanking them for attending and inviting to future events. For larger organizations where you may not know each and every member, it can be difficult to engage on such a personal level. Use your social pages to follow members and share and comment on their content. By recognizing, validating and sharing or retweeting their content, the member feels noticed and recognized. It also demonstrates an active and engaged community for potential members who see your social activity.
Share good content
The true key to social media is content — both creating original content and sharing quality content from others. Everyone probably knows the jokes about cat videos other silly memes, but there is so much more that can be done with content.
To use social media to grow membership relationships, create and share content that leads people to interact with it. Examples of such content are industry-related news and observations, quotes or information that ends with a question like “What do you think?” or just a simple word like “Thoughts?” By asking a question at the end of your post, you’re encouraging people to respond. Another option is to share surveys. This will serve to both engage your members into responding and provide you with potential valuable information about your members while showing your interest in their input.
Original content is also key to a good social media strategy. Creating video content, blogs and articles to share gives your members something to share with their followers and builds your reputation as the experts. A video doesn’t need to be highly-produced, expensive, professional content, it just needs to be informative and interesting. A simple selfie-style video blog is a great, quick, inexpensive way to create original content.
Anyone can create content. It takes effort and planning to create great, engaging content.
Read more to learn more about how Yapp can help your association to keep your membership engaged and grow membership relationships.
