Building a social community doesn’t happen overnight. It requires understanding your members, and that takes time, testing and data.
For three years, Gastropost has engaged food lovers to share in their passion. Each week, we send a food mission to tens of thousands of Canadians, a catalyst for them to demonstrate their love for food. And each week, our members share with us via Instagram how they’ve completed the mission – a dish created at home or enjoyed at a favourite local restaurant. We showcase some of the best contributions online and in the pages of our news brands. And their contributions travel widely across social media – Gastroposters boast an average 700 Instagram Followers compared with 100 for the majority of those who make up the digital generation.
We’ve learned a few lessons by connecting with our members over the course of more than 200 missions that help fine-tune the work of our community management experts.
Data Diving: Give Them What They Want
First and foremost, we aim for high engagement from members. That means we enjoy seeing lots of “mission complete” submissions—members sharing a photo of their food creation via Instagram. We’ve created a set of guidelines to follow that we believe will activate the most members, based on our review of engagement with previous missions. We extract behavioural insights from all that member data and use it to help guide our decisions. For instance, we know that more members enjoy missions themed around a specific holiday than ones whose topic might be ambiguous or require over-explanation. We know seasonality also impacts turnout, and so we take those data points to craft new ways of driving engagement during an otherwise slow period by matching the mission to members’ behaviour at the time of year. When we stray from those guidelines, we might see some high-quality submissions, but fewer people participate.
Takeaway: Facts vs. Wisdom. Measurement and data are great, but it’s what you do with the numbers that matters. Develop meaningful metrics to your business that will lead you to extract powerful insights to guide your decisions and processes.
Connecting with People: Tailor Your Message
We also work at achieving a high open rate on our newsletter as another data point indicating interest in the Gastropost program. We average 23% on our weekly mission launch emails. We’re proud of
that result, but we don’t rest on that success. We aspire to lead the industry for delivery of an engagement service, and newsletter open rate is one of the ways we track performance. One of the techniques to reach more members is by speaking to them in different ways. A member who has completed only one mission in her lifetime requires a different type of encouragement to complete a food mission than someone who has completed 100 and is looking for a challenge to test her skills. In reviewing the various member segments, we also see which topics interest them based on how long they’ve been with the community and their level of engagement. This helps us devise tactics to move Gastroposters along the engagement spectrum, encouraging them to become more active participants.
Takeaway: Dig into your membership data to map the lifetime of a typical member. This will help you develop a playbook for moving them from one level of engagement to the next.
Validate your Cheerleaders
One technique for encouraging Gastroposters to complete missions is our inspiration team. They are our most active and enthusiastic members, completing missions at a rate seven times greater than the average Gastroposter. We offer them a sneak peek at the mission before it’s distributed to the wider membership. Each week, we select one of their creations to showcase as inspiration to the rest of the social community. When we reach out to our inspiration team asking for help, they are quick to assist and produce high-quality results.
Takeaway: Find your ambassadors—community members who are most engaged—and validate them by providing special recognition to let them know you appreciate their participation. Give to them, and they will give back to you.
Derek Chezzi is director, engagement services for Content Works.
