Boost Your Engagement: Proven Strategies For Building Stronger Communities.

As a course builder or coach, you may have experienced the frustration of trying to build a thriving community online. You may have considered moving your community off Facebook or other social media platforms, but the fear of low engagement or overwhelming management may have held you back. You may have also struggled with getting your content seen by your target audience or keeping up with the constantly evolving algorithms of social media.

Despite these challenges, creating an engaged community is crucial for growing your business and positively impacting your audience. A supportive community can provide a steady stream of leads, clients, and customers while providing the emotional support and motivation needed to keep pushing forward.

In this article, we will explore practical strategies and tactics that can help you maximize community engagement and create a thriving online community for your course or coaching business. By implementing these strategies, you can build a community that supports and motivates you and generates a steady stream of revenue for your business.

Let's dive in and discover how you can create an engaged and supportive online community that will help you grow your business and achieve your goals.

Simplify Your Life To Be More Present For Your Clients:

Consolidating your community, content, coaching, and conversations all in one place is the fastest way to set yourself up for success. That's where SocialGlow comes in - it's a platform does it all in one easy-to-use interface.

SocialGlow can streamline your community management and be present in your community without constantly switching between different platforms. In addition, with the ability to manage your community and courses from the dashboard, you can check in with your members and engage with them effectively through personalized messages and notifications.

For instance, one of SocialGlow's newest features is Voice Notes for Group Chats and Direct Messages, enabling you to communicate with your members on a personal and human level. Voice memos are incredibly effective in getting your message across because they allow your members to hear your personality and passion for working with them.

By using Voice Notes, you'll keep your clients motivated, show them you're on their team, and create a space of empathy and understanding. At SocialGlow, we know that it's the personal touch that gets members to stay engaged; that's why we're constantly adding new features to make providing that element of thoughtfulness to your clients as straightforward as possible.  

To learn how to use this feature, check out our blog post, Introducing Voice Notes - A New Way to Boost Engagement on SocialGlow.

Community Space That Feels Like Social Media, But Better…

One of the main draws of SocialGlow is how our Groups are designed to feel familiar. When your clients come into the space, they will know right away how to like, comment, post, and communicate through direct and group messaging. You won’t have to worry about a learning curve or your content being inaccessible due to a technological gap. Once members join the community space you’ve built, they’ll get straight into the action.

SocialGlow’s Groups are for optimal engagement and a great building block for setting up the building blocks for a thriving community! For instance, you can add your community guidelines and rules in the description section for members to easily find. You can also create buttons underneath the Calendar and Description to put exclusive content and additional resources. They are customizable and can be used for whatever you need.

Courses

Consolidating your community and courses in one place can be a game-changer for your business. SocialGlow's Course feature lets you access everything in one convenient app.

Creating courses is a breeze with the step-by-step SocialGlow system. It's easy to understand, and everything is set up chronologically. Plus, you can edit the settings anytime you need to.

You can easily track your member's progress, add a gamification element to make taking your courses more fun, and use whatever file types you need to teach your clients.

Additionally, you can use drip campaigns to send out content at specific intervals, keeping your members engaged and motivated throughout their journey.

You'll no longer need to juggle multiple platforms because you can streamline your course creation experience with SocialGlow. Your courses and community will work together to enhance your client's experience when they invest in your products and coaching, rather than your community space being a distraction from their goals because you've made it into an add-on used only for customer support.

Automate And Host Your Content Easily:  

With SocialGlow, you can streamline your content creation and hosting. No more juggling multiple platforms and struggling to keep up with your schedule.

Create Templates, SocialGlow's secret weapon for scheduling events, groups, and content. Templates allow you to plan and prepare your content weeks or even months in advance. You can create an entire content outline and apply it to all your groups or use different Templates for different groups. And with Replacement Tokens, you can easily customize your content to fit each group's needs.

Recurring events, pop-up groups, and challenges become a breeze with Templates. If you're creating content for multiple groups, you can automate replacing the name, invite link, and text within seconds. Check out our guides on how to use Templates for more details.

But that's not all. SocialGlow also makes it easy to store, manage, and share videos. You can embed videos from popular platforms like YouTube and Wistia or host your content directly on SocialGlow. Our tools for content sharing are so effective that you can minimize your use of other social media platforms and still reach your audience. Imagine all the time you'll save by not having to create and repurpose content for different platforms!

Reach Your Members

At SocialGlow, we provide various ways to reach your members and keep them engaged. For example, you can use push notifications, SMS, and email broadcasts to send your messages to all your members at once without worrying about segmentation, lists, or tags.

But we don't stop there. We understand the importance of reaching your clients wherever they are, so we offer the option to send text messages directly to their mobile devices. With SMS notifications enabled, you can contact your members even when they're not actively on the site and keep them updated on important events or new content.

To enable SMS notifications and start reaching your members through text, follow the instructions here: https://help.socialglow.com/en/article/sms-notifications-1g5f9ak/

You should be able to lead your community on your terms without any interference from algorithms or overlords. Our team is committed to providing the tools and support you need to connect with your members and build a thriving community.

Zapier Integration

SocialGlow's Zapier integration allows you to connect your account with over 5000 other apps. One of the most important integrations is automating your payment system using Stripe to ensure you get paid for all the hard work you've put into your community and courses.

Following this step-by-step guide, you can easily set up an automation that sends a SocialGlow Group invitation to a new subscriber when they make a payment using Stripe. This saves you time and hassle and ensures that your members have seamless access to all the content and resources they've paid for.

Fanatical Support

SocialGlow provides fanatical support to our users. Our team of community experts is always ready to assist you with any questions you may have, and we pride ourselves on our quick response time - on average, we get back to our users in under five minutes.

We're constantly looking for ways to improve our support, and one of the ways we've done that is by implementing a post URL feature. Whenever you or your members have an issue, you can click on the date/time of the post and open it on the web. Additionally, we've added a new 'Copy link' button in post settings, which refers to a post URL, so you can easily send any issues to our support team for quick and effective solutions.

With SocialGlow, you don't have to worry about tech frustrations. We've got your back, and our fanatical support ensures that you get the help you need when you need it.

Gamification:

Gamify your communities and courses! Engage your members like never before by awarding points for their every action, from liking posts to commenting and posting. Make interacting in your group fun and build a community through friendly competition.

Members can accumulate points based on their interaction. So, not only have you created a safe space, but you've also made it a place that motivates your members to return consistently.

Each group you create has a leaderboard showcasing the top point earners. This is a great way to create additional motivation for engagement and reward members who invest in your program. It speaks to competitive people in your community, and it shows your members that they're getting more out of their participation.

Check out our ultimate gamification guide to learn how to use SocialGlow's gamification features to 10x your community engagement.

Setting Your Community Up For Success:

Once you've consolidated your coaching and course business onto one platform like SocialGlow, you'll need to set up the home of your community to be ready for engagement. You can't just drop members into the space hoping and crossing your fingers that you'll be able to reap the rewards of a thriving community by just adding people to it.

So how do you prepare your Group to be the thriving and engaged community you know it could be?

First, it's essential to understand the difference between a social media community and a branded community. A social media community is a group of people who come together on a social media platform to connect around a shared interest or topic. However, a branded community is a group of people who share a common interest or passion for a particular brand or product.

While a social media community can be great for gaining exposure, building a branded community will allow for more intentional efforts to build a loyal following around you and your brand. This will promote better client perception of your brand and improve member support.

Essentially - you want a brand community, not a social media one because a brand community is how you will feel supported and fueled by your online community! So invest in the community over the quantity of content, like you would have in social media communities, to get the leads, clients, and customers you've always dreamed of having. With SocialGlow, you'll have that dedicated online space to develop such a community.

To showcase to your members that your Group is a branded community and not just a social media group, there are several key steps you can take:

Firstly, offer exclusive content and resources only available to your community members. This can be done through SocialGlow's Group feature, where you can store content and resources on the right-hand side of the Group, or through the Course feature that allows you to choose who has access to the content.

Secondly, create clear rules and guidelines that establish a safe, respected, and valued space for each member. Again, SocialGlow makes this easy by allowing you to pin community rules at the top of the Group for easy reference. These rules can include guidelines for member behavior, how they should address each other, and the consequences for members who do not follow them.

Following through with consequences for members who don't follow the rules is crucial for creating and maintaining a safe and thriving online space. It shows that you are serious about protecting the community and are present in doing so. SocialGlow has a feature that allows you to block members from the space easily.

Thirdly, actively facilitate discussions among community members by incentivizing engagement. You can reward points automatically on the leaderboard for members who comment, and create competitions where the best answer to a question is chosen manually for extra points. Curating a set of thought-provoking, open-ended questions can also encourage engagement and create a space where like-minded individuals can explore and express themselves.

Finally, providing exclusive webinars, coaching calls, or course content can further establish your group as a branded community that provides value beyond what can be found on social media. By following these steps, you can create a thriving and engaged community that fosters loyalty and boosts engagement.

Add Invested Members

The number one way to maximize engagement in your online community after you've consolidated and prepared the space is to invite members into the group who are already invested in you and your products!!!!

Instead of adding lukewarm leads into the space, hoping to convince them to buy into you and your products one day, find clients already invested in you. Because if they are already about what you're passionate about, showing them, then the interaction, authentic connection, and growth will come naturally - primarily if you've implemented all the pieces above. It's a powerful combination.

Create A Bootcamp!

To find these clients, create a boot camp program! Then, instead of spending money to create a community and sell your coaching, courses, or events, when you pique the interest of your ideal client by selling a boot camp workshop, you'll get paid to create your community and prime your business with higher quality leads.

To create a boot camp program that will work for you, you will want to solve a specific problem and give your future community member a small win as quickly as possible. When you do this, you'll provide people with the ability to check off one of the problems on their to-do list and give them the momentum and progress they crave. Once they can see the progress, they'll happily invest in your community and your additional courses.

Plus, when members go through a boot camp together, it develops a rapport among those participating in it. It creates community before they are a permanent fixture in your brand community, making them a more vital member that will increase the value of your online space!

By creating a simple boot camp, consolidating your content and coaching into one place, using gamification to create a highly engaged community, and incentivizing to get higher-paying clients, you can build trust and authority while changing the world and helping others.

If you want to learn more about accomplishing this dream, sign up for a free webinar on May 4th. It's packed full of awesome tips to help you achieve your goals. Register HERE NOW!