Follr Rewards Feature: Monetize Your Community Management Efforts

You can generate revenue through your Follr online community in many ways. Sell event tickets, offer paid subscriptions to access exclusive content, and even earn money by inviting others to do the same. With Follr Rewards, monetizing your online community efforts is easy as A-B-C. You can also easily track your rewards right from your Rewards Program Dashboard:

Follr Rewards Program

Follr Guide to Rewards:

1. Share Your Link

Grow your network, save your friends money and earn Follr Dollars you can use for upgrades and add-ons.

2. Friends Join Follr

Earn Follr Score points for every signup from your link. Your friends receive amazing savings thanks to you! Earn 1 point for each registration, 2 points if you are a Pro member.

3. Friend Upgrades

If anyone you invited upgrades, you earn Follr Dollars you can use to upgrade to Pro or to buy an add-on domain name. Earn $2 Follr Dollars for each registration, $5 Follr Dollars if you are a Pro member. It’s that simple. Create your own Follr Community today and get earning!

Follr Community Feature: Activity Digest

Follr Behind the ScenesFor this week’s Follr Community Feature we’re highlighting ‘Activity Digest Emails’.

With your custom Follr Community, you’re able to send a weekly engagement email to all members summarizing that week’s activity. The email will highlight the most popular content, discussions, interactions, etc. Should there be a slow week with no activity, no email will be sent to avoid annoying, empty emails. This is a great way for members to be reminded of what they’re missing each week and to increase engagement!

Follr Activity Digest

Follr Community Feature #2: Social Feed

Follr Behind the ScenesFor our second installment of #BehindTheScenes (for part one see Follr Community Feature #1: Advanced Messaging), we’re taking a look at Follr’s “Social Feed”.

Follr’s Social Feed allows you to combine all of your social network, blog and community content – up to 40 social media platforms! – into one, easy-to-digest social feed. Easily browse your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest news feeds, right alongside each other, or toggle amongst them with one click! And better yet, seamlessly syndicate any piece of content to ALL of them with one click! Not only does information come in via Follr Social Feed, but it can blasted out as well. If that’s not a good reason to create your Follr Profile today, we don’t know what is!

Follr Social Feed

Follr Community Feature #1: Advanced Messaging

Follr Behind the ScenesHere is a behind the scenes look at one of our latest Follr Community Features: Advanced Messaging. We may be biased, but we’re pretty sure we lay claim to the most diverse and useful messaging capability of any online community platform out there today.

As a Follr Online Community Manager, you’re able to direct message one, several or all of your community members with just a few clicks. You can manage which email addresses the message is sent to and from, and which email address you’d like responses to be delivered to. And all of this can be done without even logging in to the community.

Follr Community Advanced Messaging

Advanced messaging, as described by our product developer, Mark Wayman, is “A powerful… and unique tool to encourage a growing membership…This [tool] can be used for general updates, to make introductions between members – a general communication tool.”

Create a custom Follr Community now and utilize this innovative new tool to connect with your network today!

Fool-Proof Guidelines for Online Community Building

Online Community Guidelines FollrBuilding an online community – whether it’s for your business, special interest, religious group, or even your child’s little league team – can seem like a constant uphill battle. If you’re struggling with your online community, or if you just want a few tips on how to enhance yours, we’ve got your all-you-need-to-know, comprehensive-yet-concise guide to online community building here. You’ll find tips on how to get started, what and when to post, and how to retain members/followers.

 

Getting Started

–               Once you’ve chosen your platform get to know the site by clicking around to other members’ profiles and communities. Take note of what you like and what you don’t like, a.k.a. learn from others’ mistakes.

–               Decide who your target audience is and don’t divert from it. Focus directly on this group of people and start following key prospective members on twitter and other social media outlets.

–               Search relevant hashtags and see what others are talking about around your topic or interest. This will tell you the kind of content you should start posting and discussing once you have your community up and running.

–               Keep in mind that building a following of members is not a one-time job. Keep searching and following, keep joining conversations and continue to invite key prospective people to your community. Shoot for one new active member per day.

–               Once you have a small community of members, start connecting them! Search their profiles for skills or interests they might have in common and encourage them to communicate with one another. If your followers see you as a connector who wants to help build their reputation and career, they’ll be more inclined to do the same.

–               When you get stuck, take a peek at this great list of Online Community Building Resources.

Posting & Engagement

–               Post content between 3-5 times per day and always once at the very least (yes, even if you’re on vacation!). Members want to see consistency and commitment.

–               Post original content – a link to your most recent blog post or, a conversation starter, etc. – at least once every other day, and post other relevant content often. Just make sure the source is credible and you’ve read the article in its entirety first.

–               ALWAYS respond to a member’s contribution with a thoughtful and gracious response.

–               Keep in touch with members who may become less active over time. Reach out and ask about a project their working on or a life event.

–               Frequent and meaningful Engagement is the key to scoring and retaining members. Keep at it no matter what and always be positive.

Member Retention

–               Offer thought-provoking content related to your topic of interest or business. Your goal is to make your community a staple of their online experience.

–               Try one of these 4 Online Community Engagement Ideas and see which one(s) your members respond to best.

–               Be candid. Put yourself out there. Tell the truth. Give members something they can relate to. They’ll feel more connected and feel drawn to keep checking in every once in a while to see what’s new.

Good Luck with your new online community!

A Lesson Everyone Could Learn: How to Listen Better

The problem with social media is sometimes we can be so focused on what we want to say that we are not focusing on what others are saying.

Listening is a difficult skill. Online or offline, listening requires us to focus on what we are hearing or reading, not in how we want to respond. Most people are not actively listening, they are passively listening and deciding how to reply. It’s similar to taking notes during a class, if you are writing down what is being said you are not actually listening, considering and learning.

The hardest part of listening is often relearning how to listen. We all think we are doing it, but most likely you are not. In 2014 many people have the attention span of a gnat. How do you relearn the skill of being a good listener?

Focus on the person who is speaking and what they are saying, what their words are, the meaning behind them. If you focus in this way and truly consider those words, their meaning, and actively try to hear each word and intonation, you will find you understand faster and save a lot of time in many areas of life. This can even remove the word “What?” from your vocabulary.

Online, listening is a little different, it means that you are actually watching. tracking in preparation for interacting with your community. Use tools like Google Alerts, Twitter Searches and Hootsuite to monitor for topics of interest. This helps you keep up on what is going on and also to discover new people to connect to.

Online listening also means making lists to keep track of your community. Online listening can get overwhelming when you are trying to watch too many individuals, so breaking your community into smaller groups by interest, category or even time zones, helps to not miss something important they have to say that you might want to respond to.

What other measures do you take to be a better listener and community member? Tell us in the comments below.

Social Media Community Building 101: Get the Essentials Right

Everyone can use a great new idea for building engagement and growing online community, right?

How you build and grow your community will depend on the topic, niche or interest of your community. It’s no different here at Follr Communities, we are always interested in tips & techniques that will benefit our community, and our Communities.

In today’s video, SplashU gives you some of the basics to beginning an online community, building engagement and seeing growth. Be sure to be familiar and comfortable with the “etiquette” of social media, but we’ll have more on that in a future post.

As my friend Jeff Pulver often says “You live or die by your Database” which he has proven time and again. To have a successful online community start with your database. Send email to notify your network about your new Follr Community.

If you are a business get the by-in of your employees, who better to know and love your brand than the people who work with you?
Are you a hobbyist group, a non-profit, it’s just as simple, you already have the passionate members just encourage them to join in and interact in your new Community.

Be sure to get involved yourself, sometimes we get so caught up in building a community we forget that we are still a part of it. Lead by example as an essential part of community building.

3 Quick Steps to Find and Connect with Your Community on Twitter

You built a community, now what? Sitting there by yourself isn’t a lot of fun. How do you find others to join you and share your community?

Since most communities are based on interests, hobbies or brands, they will usually appeal to a fairly widespread audience. The question is how do you find that audience? Twitter is the perfect place.

Use Twitter Search to find people talking about topics your community is built aroundThere are tons of searchable conversations happening on Twitter every moment of every day. There is no better way to find people who want to talk about a topic than on Twitter.

To keep it simple and quick, since we would rather have you building your community and enjoying it, we present…

3 Quick Steps to Find and Connect with your Community on Twitter.

  1. Identify Your Community Keywords
    Think of these as the 5-7 best words to describe your community focus. Write down the key words you would or those that someone interested in your community might search for.

    If you aren’t sure what words are best, refer to the tags that you included when you initially built your community. Those would be the search words or terms that someone would use to find your community.

    If you need help just stop by the Follr Support Community and post a message, we will be happy to help you identify your perfect search terms and keywords.

  2. “The Twitter”
    Twitter is the holy-grail of search. If it is out there being discussed, you will find it on Twitter. Twitter has great search features, whether it is the standard search on any Twitter page, or the advanced search, you will get some amazing results.

    Some people like to search for hashtag specific topics. It’s an option but results are limited to the words only with the # in front of them. An open search without the hashtag will return many more choices. Try to search without the hashtag first, then use the hashtag if the results are overwhelming. To refine the search, add additional words to the search to focus more on the target conversations and people.

  3. Follow and Share
    Now that you found people, follow them. When you follow them you might also want to reply to the message that led you to them, you could retweet it, or reply to it, and mention the common interest. But don’t ask them to join you just yet!! Wait until the individual replies to your message, then keep the conversation going. When it feels right mention your community and share the link, ask them to stop by and tell you what they think.

Be a conversationalist. Include your community in your conversations, the topic, and even share posts that are there, invite people to the conversation.

Add your Community link to your bio, and become an authority on your Community focus. In no time instead of looking for your community, your community will be finding you on Twitter.

Happy Community Building!
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