This is the best time to assess your current practices and take your online community to the next level. Harness the power of membership and take full advantage of all the benefits and features to reach your members, coworkers, friends and even future members.

Following our last post where we listed best practices for online communication, here are some ideas that you and your team can use to create content:

  • Start with a welcome message, encouragement post or some other greeting. It is fine to occasionally keep it light and friendly, and especially now when most of us need a break from all the unfortunate news.

  • Ask people to introduce themselves, tell you where they went to school, what’s their favorite sport/team, hobbies, how long have they been in your particular industry, what their goals are, invite them to make posts or inquiries about a particular subject.

  • Keep your members updated on industry news, changes and laws. Give them information about safely returning to work, reopening businesses, and keeping themselves and others protected.

  • Ask your audience what kind of content or offerings they want to see.

  • Write a great headline. The majority of people will read the title and keep scrolling, so make sure you come up with something catchy or exciting to get them to open up your email or post and read till the end.

  • Don’t expect a lot of engagement if there are no clear instructions for members to follow. The right call to action will tell your members exactly the next step to take.

  • Use lists, bullet points, summaries. People can quickly glance through lists and it also gives a sense of order and instructions to accomplish something.

  • Share statistics and facts. People prefer visuals and graphics.

  • Share your blog. You can allow for members to share their personal blogs as well as any RSS feed from sites like twitter. The feeds will be displayed in the recent activity and discussion group News for others to see.

  • Make a guide or how-to posts. Share what you know. Gain more exposure with how to post, and when you have enough you can list them out.

  • Share your opinion. Find a great article and give your opinion on the matter. Then ask your members if they agree or disagree.

  • Get personal. Tell your members about your journey, experiences and failures. But save the drama and political discussions for Facebook.

  • Share job listings, upcoming events, courses, things your members should be aware about. Be an industry leader.

  • Use the right keywords or tags for search engine indexing. Adjusting community settings to allow visitors to view the landing page is a great way to entice people to become a member.  This way they can only see the front page and titles, if they try to click on a link it will ask for login credentials.

  • If you find something that works for you and your audience, stick with it.

Take the time to learn about Sengii’s features and create a strategy with content that is relevant and beneficial. Don’t worry if you are not getting traction at first, be consistent, try different things and it will pay off in the long run.