12 Tips For a Successful Membership Community

This post was originally shared in June 2019, but we’ve made some additions and updates to this 2020 edition. Enjoy! 

When it comes to starting up a new online membership community, you’ll often discover that people will visit for the content, but they’ll stay for the community. An active community is a bridge that holds a successful membership together. It’s the place where your members will form bonds, where they’ll receive and give support, where they’ll develop connections and even possibly make friends. 

It’s reasons like that which make people consider subscribing to your membership for months and years on end. Although, starting a community from scratch can be quite a daunting task. You’ll be asking questions such as “ How do I get my members to participate?” or “How do I avoid my community from becoming a ghost town?”

Having your community gain the much-needed momentum is key to being successful long-term, so here are some top tips for getting started with your new online membership community. 

Use an On-Site Forum

When dealing with the community side of membership sites, the most common question is about which platform to use. Specifically, should you use a Facebook group or an online forum? 

While a Facebook group may be the easiest and more enticing option, there are several reasons why having an online forum is a much preferable option. 

Members having immediate access to the community, as well as the capability to more seamlessly integrate forum solutions such as bbPress or IPBoard into the member's personal experience, are vital to actually encouraging your members to take part. 

Beta Test It 

When creating your membership site, you’ll reach a stage shortly before launching where you should be conducting a “beta test.” Enroll a small group of members at either a minimal price or for free, with the intent of having them extensively test everything available on your site. These tests could essentially become your test group for the community as well. Giving them tasks involving the start and participation of discussions, so that when the gates to your site open there's already enough momentum within the community. 

Even if you’re not running a beta test you should still consider getting a test group from within your network, existing clients or people on your waitlist. 

Start Small

The temptation will linger in the back of your mind when setting up your membership forum to go wild with the number of forum sections you implement. Our advice is to begin small and scale up as needed, instead of creating a separate section for every kind of topic your community may decide to discuss. Don’t make your community all about the business either, come up with a section for off-topic conversations as well; as those can be more relaxing, the casual conversation will often become an easier acceptance for new members to jump into and begin posting.

It’s best to start with no more than 6 to 8 sections unless you’ve decided to place all of your membership content inside the community.

Stay Realistic

At times, people will view their efforts as being unsuccessful due to placing unrealistic expectations, and the same can be said for developing your membership community. There’s a general rule when dealing with community engagement: 

It’s known as “the 1% Rule”:

• 1% of your membership shall be returning users: continually visiting your site several times a day, beginning their own discussions, and propelling the community.
• 9% will be regular users: visiting two or three times a week, replying to topics more so than posting ones themselves.
• 90% of your users base will be known as lurkers: they regularly visit and consume posts, but rarely participate on any topic. 

Make sure to remember this when taking the time to assess how well your community is looking.

Lead By Example

As the founder and creator of your community, it reasonably sounds that you should be the biggest user of your forum. If you can’t even bother to take the time to post on your own forum every day, then why should other people waste their time doing so?

Making an appearance is one of the most impactful things a membership site owner can do, and this double applies to your community. This doesn’t mean you're required to be on your forum 24/7, but making it a part of your daily schedule to visit at least twice a day, begin new topics, reply to some posts and answer any questions will help ensure your membership community is a complete success. 

Make It Part of A Membership

A fantastic way to encourage community participation is to discover ways to have your forum bridge over with your core membership. This could involve implementing specific topics or forum sections for discussion or placing some or all of your information into the forum itself. It can be a regular forum thread where people post their questions for your live training or encourage members to begin introduction threads as part of the initial onboarding strategy. 

Allow Community-Building Features

Some of the more sophisticated forum platforms such as IPBoard or Xenforo have some incredibly useful features for enhancing the user experience within your community. 

Here are some of those features:

• Private messaging: Allows your members to have private, one-on-one conversations between themselves. 

• Member tagging: Allows members to “tag” another member in a discussion, which will then not only automatically connect to that member’s profile but will also notify them that they’ve been mentioned.
• Member Profiles: Members can fill out some information about themselves and learn more about their fellow members in the community.
• Status updates: Members can post short notes on their profiles about what they’re currently doing, what’s on their mind, share links, and more.

Plenty of these features were implemented due to popular social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. As such, they will further help your community seem modern and interactive, which shall lead towards more participation. 

Get Your Team Involved

If you have a team working under you, or even if it’s just subcontractors such as virtual assistants, have all team members become a part of the forum!

Not only will this stir up more discussion and ramp-up activity within your community, but having everyone on board represent your business and brand goes a long way towards expanding your presence and visibility. It also increases the chances that members will have their own set of questions answered quickly and efficiently. 

If you don’t have any available team members, consider hiring a virtual assistant for the single purpose of being a community manager whose role will involve participating daily in the community. 

Keep Discussion Topics Ready

As the creator of your membership, you’re expected to set the pace and during the early months, you’re going to have to be the one coming up with most of the discussions. After a while, this will begin to change, and your members will increasingly post new topics themselves. Until this happens, you’re going to come up with ideas for topics to stop the discussion from entirely halting. 

Tools such as Evernote or Trello can be incredibly helpful for placing all of your ideas in one sport for future discussion. 

Whenever someone asks a specific question, regardless if it's on a social media platform, your blog comments, people emailing you for support, or in other communities, note them down for future use. You’ll quickly stack up a list of relevant topics that can be used to encourage discussion in your community when you find yourself blanking out of ideas.

Share Blog Posts Regularly

If you are publishing blogs, podcasts, videos, and any other content as part of your marketing campaign for your membership site, it’s a great idea to share it within your membership community.

This gives you an excuse to post new topics, and it also provides convenience for your paying members, which is extremely valuable and often overlooked. Remember, during the early days of your forum where the pressure is on you to continuously create discussion, this can ease the burden and give you a simple way to get people to participate. 

Email The Highlights

As long as you’re reliant on your members to proactively visit your forum daily without prompting them in some way, you’re going to have a difficult time maintaining any sort of momentum. Remind your community that you still exist and give them a reason to continue taking part in discussions. Send out a weekly digest of some hand-picked discussion is a fantastic way to get people further invested who may otherwise have forgotten about the community and not bothered to return. If they see any topics that catch their interest, then they’re more likely to jump into the conversation and give their input. 

Consider an App

Thanks to smartphones, keeping up to date with information from social media, news sites, and forums has become much easier. Making your forum available for app users can take your community a long way by allowing not only members to remain in touch with the community, but also by allowing you to manage it on the go. Applications allow you to post relevant dates and information, plus your mobile app content is updated whenever you update your website content.

We have gathered and compared the top community apps in the industry. Take a look at our blog posts to discover the most popular apps.

Conclusion

If you haven’t decided if you should include a community forum onto your membership website, we recommend doing so. Not only is it incredibly beneficial for increasing the value proposition of your membership, but it will also be why many of your members will decide to say longer. By implementing these tips discussed in this article, you can ensure that your community gets off on a great start and becomes an invaluable piece of your membership site.

If you’re looking for a robust membership management system that does all the above, and you’re ready to build your new community, sign up for a free trial at Joinit.org.