11 tips to successfully launch your community platform (2/2)

In the first part of our blog post series about the ways to successfully launch your community platform, you discovered 6 efficient tricks to achieve it. Now it’s time for the second part, let’s have a look to 5 and one more other tricks that will help you onboarding your whole community in your brand new community platform.

7. Organize an inaugural event

You don’t need to do anything fancy. People love free drinks and peanuts. If you can throw a small party to celebrate the inauguration of your new platform, your members will be happy to join, have a drink, and get more info about your new platform.

If you don’t want to go through a party just for your platform, you can also take advantage of any upcoming event of yours to “Oh By The Way” announce your social networking platform. Check out how Naganand Doraswamy, President of TiE Bangalore announced their community app in collaboration with Microsoft Ventures during their Think Next event.

The video is available here.

8. Mention it in your talks

If you regularly give a talk, teach a class, or speak in any other kind of events, always mention your platform in your slide deck. If possible, say a few words about it to trigger the interest of your audience.

9. Gamify your brand through the app

When you organize or take part in an event, exposition, talk, conference, you can organize small contests with goodies to win in order to motivate the audience to use your community platform. If it’s mobile, when a speaker gives a talk, ask a few questions on your app. The first person to give the correct answer wins a small token (can be any kind of goodies with your brand on it). If your platform is online, no problem: just ask the questions live and give people a deadline to answer on the web and win your prizes.

10. Use promotional materials

If you regularly host events, take part in shows or festivals, using a poster, a standee, or a few flyers can also help raise awareness.

swissnex India created a special standee just to promote their app:

11. Documentation for new members

When you officially announce the launch of your private social network to your community, or afterwards, whenever someone becomes a new member, having a short PDF summarizing the advantages of the platform can be very informative. Have a look at the PDF that EPFL Inno Park sent to all its members at the time of their launch.

12. Start the engine

No matter how successful you are at promoting your private social network at the start, the engagement in it will only be as good as its community manager. And that’s you :-)

For the first month, every day, post something relevant to your community: share the link to an interesting article, post pictures of the event from the previous day, feature a new member, raise interesting questions relevant to the community.

After a month or so, maybe even faster than that, you will see community members starting to post content on their own, engage with each other, and push the late comers to join them without any help from you.

Check out a few examples from various communities we’re featuring.

In conclusion, moving a community out of any social media into your private platform seems like hard work, but if you’re well organized and set up a few (ideally all) of these tips, you’ll have a smooth and easy transition.

Let us know, add a comment about any tip you used to successfully help the launch of your community.