Best Practices, Community Spotlights, Community Management Talks, Ning News, Social Media, Quick Tips, Tools & Tech
On Thursday, Richard Millington joined us for an hour devoted to answering your community questions. We got through a dozen questions during the hour, which you can watch or re-watch below:
Some of the topics we covered:
How do I attract visitors and retain them as dedicated members?
One thing Richard highly recommends is that you know your target audience and have established connections within this audience before your start your community. This pre-existing relationship helps with word of mouth tactics that provide the best referrals to your community. On the retention side, Richard's previous webinar on Converting Newcomers into Active Community Members is a great listen on this topic.
How do you start to pick a community platform?
Rich gave us some insight into the Feverbee process of selecting a platform for a client. Their process looks first at the budget, skills, and resources available, then looking at the potential longevity of the platform. Next, they look at other successful examples of the platform and then features and negotiation.
We also recently released an exclusive white paper from F. Randall Farmer titled "Five Questions for Selecting an Online Community Platform" for those who want to delve deeper into this topic.
How often should Admins send out email blasts?
Richard's noticed that regularly scheduled messages often get overlooked. At Feverbee, they've been experimenting with sending irregularly timed messages and wrote about their findings recently.
One topic we got a lot of questions about was migration from Ning 2.0 to Ning 3.0. We'll be putting out more articles on breaking change in the coming weeks, and keep an eye on the Creators community for us to schedule a dedicated webinar on this topic soon!
