Remember that cool new feature you launched in your online community six months ago? What about the one you launched 18 months ago?
How much do you want to bet that the members who joined the community in the last month or so may have no idea that those features exist?
It’s true.
As the community manager who is always looking for ways to enhance your offerings, attract new members and keep your community interesting it’s easy to lose sight of the revolving door. New members need some of that nurturing you provided to the very first members when you launched.
Sure, they could have been a lurker for 6 months who finally decided to join and already knows the ins and outs of the community, but what if they weren’t?
I had a newer member ask me just today if there was a way to upload multiple photos to her image gallery because uploading them one-by-one was a bit tedious. I was so glad she asked and I steered her to a blog post I’d written when we started accepting zipped files, back from September of 2007. That was just two months after our launch and I thought most people knew how to do that.
I’ve been thinking about this for about a month now and just got around to blogging it. Another thing I did recently was remind members that we offer RSS feeds on the blogs. With many of them spending time on other social networks I figured that they may not have known they could feed their GOLO blogs there, and many commented that they did not.
Actually it’s an easy way to get our brand onto the other social networks so if they use the RSS feature it’s a win-win for us.
What features have you launched that some of your community members may not be aware of? Give it some thought, and remind them. What’s old to you could be new to them.
Breathe new life into those old features. And come back and let me know how it goes.
2 comments
Comments feed for this article
October 6, 2009 at 6:47 am
Patricia
Another great tip, Angela. Agree! We know our community inside out but we forgot that there are new members joining our community everyday and many of then don’t go through our announcement achieves. Sometimes, even regulars don’t know about certain features. Definitely helpful to give some reminder.
Recently, I wrote about 7 Ways to Get More Out of Your Introduction Section. I reckon we can include some of these helpful tips in new member introduction so people who are new can read about them. What do you think?
October 10, 2009 at 12:22 pm
Recent Links at Fast Wonder: Online Community Consulting
[...] Breathe new life into old features [...]