In the famous book, How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, there’s a story about a small-town newspaper that does really well despite most of the other small-town newspapers failing. After Dale interviewed the editor, he said his secret was to make it a point to print the names of the townspeople in his paper as much as possible. He wanted to celebrate the successes of his readers because he knew if he helped them win, he would win.
The same is true for your community members. When you help them win, you win. While we’re assuming you don’t run a small-town newspaper, there are still plenty of ways you can celebrate your members.
Here are three ways we celebrate within the communities we manage:
OPTION 1 – CELEBRATE THEIR WINS
Step 1 – Set up a google alert for every member (and/or company). By doing this, you’ll get a notification every time someone in your community does something that is noteworthy.
Step 2 – Share that news on all your social media platforms and make sure to tag as many of the people involved as possible. By tagging each person, they will get notified which will help increase the engagement of the post.
Step 3 – The more personal you get with your members, the closer you get. Feel free to send them a direct message after sharing their accomplishments. It is nice from time to time to feel directly noticed by your community.
OPTION 2 – RE-SHARE THEIR CONTENT
Step 1 – Set up some sort of social media monitoring system for all your members’ accounts. A tool like Hootsuite is good for creating multiple search lists for various social media platforms.
Step 2 – Monitor the lists regularly and look for interesting content that your members are sharing.
Step 3 – Re-share your communities interesting content on your social media accounts.
OPTION 3 – ENGAGE IN THEIR CONTENT
Step 1 – As mentioned above, a system like Hootsuite is an amazing platform to create lists of your community and makes it easy to engage in what they are saying (especially for Twitter users).
Step 2 – As mentioned in Option 2, monitoring your lists regularly will also help you stay engaged in what your community members are doing/saying. If you use Facebook, there is a “lists” option. Create a list with your top clients and scroll through once or twice a week to see what they are posting. It makes it a lot easier to engage with likes and comments.
Step 3 – When your members post something eliciting, engage in the content if you can.
The more you celebrate your members, the more they feel celebrated.
