Make your Community Sparkle: Lessons in Community Management

This is the first part of a series of posts where I will share lessons learned about Community Management. If you’re stopping by for the first time, I am co-founder of The Social Woman, a community for Canadian women to make friends and meet offline at local events. I took on the role of community manager and want to share with you tips that I have learned along the way-from building and growing community from the ground up, keeping members engaged, and learning when to let go.

So you’ve created an awesome membership-based site, started a Facebook page, a LinkedIn group or a blog…now what? Starting the site or setting up a Facebook page is the easy part-it’s what happens next that involves effort.

In the site example, you have members who have started joining…but nothing is happening.  Same goes for your Facebook page: people are ‘liking it’ but …nothing’s happening!

Lesson 1: Lead by Example

• And yes that may mean talking to yourself (for awhile)

• You want Engagement..you have to engage

When we first started The Social Woman, we told everyone we knew about it and women started to join. We were ecstatic!
We had come up with what we thought was a cool concept, designed a neat-looking site and people were joining and showing interest. But then what? We wanted people to connect!  We wanted discussions to start and events to be organized.

And then it hit us.

If we wanted people to engage, WE had to initiate. We had to start the conversation, which meant everything from welcoming new members and even having conversations by ourselves.

We had to lead by example. We started by welcoming new members who joined the site and telling them how to get started. This got them coming back and getting a better idea of what the site was about. And it had a snowball effect as over time, veteran members started welcoming newer members.

The same thing happened when we wanted members to introduce themselves and participate in discussions..once we started, it got the ball rolling and others joined in.

You have to set the expectation, lead and guide your fans/followers/likers/groupies/community members, not to mention have a strategy of how you will engage (which we will discuss in another post) with them. Slowly but surely you will have a community that will be participating and sparkling.

In an upcoming post, we will look at Lesson 2: “Not everyone wants to be a part of your community..and that’s ok!”

If you are curious and want to learn more about The Social Woman you can read more here.