Silverbear Membership Blog

What should you tweet about? Planning your tweets can be a daunting task. It’s vital that you come across as useful, engaging and interesting. Twitter accounts that constantly promote their own agenda do not do well on Twitter. The goal is to share information, provide advice and help to others, and to become a trusted platform for those in your industry.

So what kind of things should you tweet about?  Association announcements: Such as new events, new members, new features/benefits etc. Updates: Any changes to your association that members should be aware of Answer Questions: People might ask questions about your association – the membership types available, the benefits members can expect, cost etc. Ask Questions: Ask your network of followers questions that can help improve your membership offering – what do they want to achieve from their membership, what events are they looking forward to, what do they think can be improved? Retweet: This is where you retweet (RT) another...

Engaging with your members is a vital part of managing a successful association. Communicating effectively with your members is not easy, it can be complicated, time consuming and prone to errors. As a membership organisation, whether you are a charity or other membership group requires membership managers to communicate constantly: To prospect members – promoting the association, highlighting offers & benefits, engaging with prospect members in general To current members  -  Showing the member value of their membership and ensuring they are aware of everything the association is doing and offering When holding events - Promoting events, selling sponsorship, providing the costs, timings, and location and agenda items. Answering member questions and directing them to the right places, promoting member engagement and interaction during the event. Then getting feedback from members and exhibitors, promoting the event to those who didn’t attend, thanking speakers and guests for their input etc....

We have seen from the last post that social media is becoming one of the most popular areas of the Internet. People are using Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to communicate with each other and promote ideas and information. So how can membership organisations use social networking sites to communicate with their members? There’s more to sites like Facebook than just creating a business page and updating your status.

Facebook is one of the largest social networking sites on the Internet. It has more than 400 million active users, more than 5 billion pieces of content (such as web links, news stories, blog posts, photo albums etc) and Facebook pages (pages that are commonly created by businesses) have created more than 5.3 billion fans.

So the power of Facebook is immense. People are used to using it as a platform for communication, and membership organisations are starting to understand the value that lies within in.

The key to Facebook is its ability to communicate different messages and information...