One of the biggest hurdles to the success of your owned social network is filling it with the right people who are excited to engage in a more meaningful level with your brand. Here are a few tips and tricks that make it a bit easier to bring your audience on a different platform to your dedicated, focused, and owned social network community.
1. Create Exciting Content
If content is king, then distribution is queen, right? That’s right. It’s not a revolutionary strategy to create exciting content, but coming up with an innovative distribution strategy that fits your brand is.
So what does that look like?
There are a lot of “it depends on your _____” here, but a general rule of thumb is to give your content the best chance of reaching the most amount of people, while not giving away everything for free. One of the leaders in the sports space is OTRO (Our Other Club) a subscription football community that enables fans to get content from some of the best players in the world.
EXAMPLE: OTRO, Our Other Club
This content effectively converts fans down the engagement and acquisition funnel for a few reasons:
- Audiences want the full story. If you have something juicy or exclusive, audiences crave the details. Teasing the story on macro platforms enables you to convert audiences effectively by hosting the full story in a space that you own.
- Bite Size Consumption. You’re on the hook for the full story in less than 60 seconds. With loads of content in the world, especially on macro platforms, you need to captivate your audience in the shortest amount of time.
- High Content Discoverability. Leverage the subjects that people are searching for, interested in or even just talking about. Ride the wave of popular subjects and take advantage of their relevance.
2. Emphasize Community
The power of community goes a long way; we’ve seen that with one of our own communities, Lady Gaga’s Little Monsters. The uniting power and love that people share for Lady Gaga is the single component that draws her audience into the community, but the Little Monsters are so much more than just fans who love Gaga.
Little Monsters has become a place where fans share their love for each other, art, culture, music and tangentially their love for Lady Gaga. The community has taken a life of its own! For a deep dive, check out our other post focused on the Little Monsters:
3. Give Them Focus
What macro social networks often times don’t provide is a level of focus that verticalized social networks aim to accomplish. Instead of a home feed that’s mixed with politics, family, sports and the occasional meme (or lots of memes, if you’re into that) users can have the ultimate, focused experience around a thing they love inside your community.
The main reason they joined your community in the first place is because of the focus in subject matter that you’re providing; now you have to deliver on that value proposition.
4. A Clear Path To “Get The Goods”
Having a clear path to your acquisition funnel may sound simple, but it’s something that brands and apps struggle with all the time. If you make it challenging for people to get to the finish line (your social network) you’re going to have a high drop-off rate in your acquisition funnel. It’s critical that you make the onboarding process simple, effortless and as short as possible. How do you do this? Open up the channels of acquisition to the best of your ability for your audience; don’t make them search for it.
Example: ROVE: A Community For VanLifers
You might be asking, “That’s just a link in bio, so what?” Links have gotten a whole lot smarter in recent years. Since there are multiple destinations for people to land on, using a smart.url or hyper.url gives you the ability to point to the correct destination or app store based on the device of the user.
5. Host Experiences
Creating unique experiences is a home run conversion tactic. Audiences, fans, and communities alike crave more (specifically, unique) experiences that they can’t get anywhere else. If you’re able to provide them with an unforgettable experience inside your social network, then you’re on track to bringing your audience to your network.
EXAMPLE: One United USA
If you’re a soccer fan (or football in Europe) then you understand the importance of the Champions League. One United USA, a Honeycommb powered social network for Manchester United fans in the USA has leveraged Match Day chats as a vehicle to drive audiences from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to one central local for an unforgettable match-day experience. By creating micro-events, the supporter’s group is able to consistently engage fans on a regular basis and provide a platform for fans to connect with one another in a focused environment.
Bonus: Provide Immediate Value
After you’ve brought your audience to this destination, your next challenge is to figure out how to keep them. The answer? Give them something, ASAP! Providing something immediately for them to bite into gives your community members a reason to poke around the community. This drastically leads to increased retention and gives your audience a reason to stay engaged in the long-term.
Creating immediate value means running consistent programs, activations, and experiences inside your network; at least while you’re moderating the day-to-day experience. As the network grows, you’re able to curate exceptional user-generated content and events that take the weight of creation off the shoulders of community admins.
Enjoyed reading this? Check out our article on why you should move your audience off of Facebook
Reach out to Honeycommb today to get started or Book a Demo to see what we can build together for your audience.
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