BBP 083: How to Get Your Community to Engage with Ryan Rappeport
Shownotes:
You dream of your community being the place that people go to to find answers, ask questions, and connect with others just like them.
Sadly, most communities don’t start out that way, you have to build them from the ground up. In this episode, learn how some simple actions can help you build an engaged community online!
Guest Info
Ryan is a growth marketer at Podia with experience in paid and organic marketing, email marketing, and affiliate marketing. He’s a lover of all things data, analytics, technology, coffee, and travel (in no particular order). Learn more.
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Transcript
[00:00:08].230] – Liz
Okay, so you have your blog started and you want to keep the momentum going by building a community on social media so that you can reach even more people. You dream of your community being the place that people go to to find answers, ask questions, and connect with others just like them.
[00:00:22].950] – Liz
Sadly, most communities don’t start out that way. You have to build them from the ground up. Hey, I’m Liz Stapleton, host of the Blogger Breakthrough Summit. And welcome to the Blogger Breakthrough Summit podcast, where I share some incredible tips and tricks shared during our most recent summit. In today’s episode, you will be learning from Podia’s growth marketing expert Ryan let’s go ahead and dive in.
[00:00:43].590] – Ryan
Everyone knows the most important part of any community is activity. If you join a community and there’s no post for a month, you’re going to forget about it. You’re going to leave, you’re not going to care. You need that activity regularly going to keep people excited and engaged and looking forward to going and engaging in your community.
[00:01:03].970]
So as you’re growing your community, in the very beginning, it’s going to be on you to spark this engagement, to get those conversations going. So what I would recommend, I would make a weekly plan of things that you’re going to do in your community to spark that conversation. You don’t want this to be just like your blog, where you’re the one posting. People are consuming. You want to get people engaged, you want to get them talking.
[00:01:26].790]
So some ideas. And again, this depends on your niche and what works best for you. But some things that I’ve seen work really well in our creative communities are sharing relevant industry news. That’s something you can go. Just find two or three blog posts around the Internet or on your own site and post them. And maybe something that’s a little controversial, maybe something that people haven’t thought about.
[00:01:48].370] – Ryan
Just anything that can kind of get that conversation going is great. You can also also post a question of the week, so you can just come up with a relevant question, maybe something you came across or something. You got emails from someone in your audience. Again, just get that conversation going. Provide your feedback, but also give a place for your audience to share their thoughts and their feedback as well. You can also allow member promotion days. So a tricky balance with communities is you don’t want people joining and just like spamming links to their own websites and promoting their opt-in freebies, then it becomes a mess. But your members really do like to do that. And in the smaller engaged communities, they really do like to support each other. So to find a happy middle ground, I recommend having member promotion days. So you might say, hey, there’s no self promotion allowed except on Fridays. And then on Fridays you can post your latest blog posts. You can see what other people in the community have been working on. That can be a really good way to have people engaged because they know, oh, every Friday I can go in, I can share my post, maybe get some comments, maybe I can highlight that new Instagram post I just did.
[00:02:56].800] – Ryan
Whatever it is you want to give your audience a place where they feel like it’s okay for them to promote themselves, but they shouldn’t be doing it all the time. So that’s a really good balance that I found is identifying one member promotion day and also just keep adding exclusive content to your community. Whether that is running just a once a month webinar, you’ll get in and you’ll teach something for 30 minutes. It doesn’t need to be long or a new digital download template or early access to your new course. Whatever it is, just try to think of ways to make your community members feel like they’re your VIPs. They’re there, they’re engaged. So treat them right and give them some exclusive access which will lead to higher activity and engagement.
[00:03:40].490] – Liz
Okay. Hopefully this episode has helped give you some ideas about how you can build an engaged community of followers on your social media channels. Be sure to join me next time when we learn more about how to co conquer Instagram stories. I’ll catch you then.
