When starting out with a community, it is important to understand the purpose of your Community and have a clear strategy in place that is agreed by the key stakeholders, Community Manager and/or Community team. This can be very basic to start with just a few goals in place to achieve over the first 3-6 months, such as: number of users, registrations, active users, number of posts. This is enough to understand what is working and what should change if necessary. You can build and change your strategy as time goes on, always look at the needs of the business as a whole to get the best ROI from the Community, use your reporting tools to health check your community, explore what is working what is not, if you have started a new group or campaign you can monitor engagement of content and so on. Even if you have had a Community for a while it’s ok to go back to the drawing board and create a new strategy, this can happen when a new Community Manager comes on board or if the existing setup is not working. It is critical to keep your stakeholders happy and make sure they are seeing the value of the Community and its importance to the business.
I am writing a little about Strategy to highlight it’s value and to let you know that as a part of our Telligent Community you have a huge amount of support from other Community experts at your fingertips. That is why the Strategy Group is here just for you! This group has already been discussing some valuable topics, just a few below
- How do you prove ROI of a Community to the board? Is it getting easier?
- What are the top 3 metrics you and your stakeholders look at the most?
- What are your top tips for companies that are starting up an internal community?
- Sharing best practices on tracking user engagement.
- Top tips on keeping users engaged.
Please use YOUR community here, lean on your peers for advice and answers. We would absolutely love this group to be a huge resource to help you create and maintain a successful Community.
