You’ve finally found the perfect way to communicate with your group: A group message. Group messages are great for leaders of a neighborhood committee, sports team, or book club. They’re a wonderful way to keep members connected, updated, and reachable.
But, what are you doing to keep them engaged?
Group messages are only beneficial for organizations as long as members are involved on the platform. Posting announcements, meeting times, and documents is a good start to a group messaging strategy. You’ll need more than that, though, to maintain an engaged group.
Start with a content strategy that utilizes created and curated content from reliable sources. Include a wide variety of content, like industry updates, local news, and thought-provoking articles. This connects with group members, keeps them engaged, and starts a conversation.
Creating Content
Start by making a plan. Decide how often you’d like to post content, and always remember that the quality of posts is more valuable than the quantity. Consider how often your group checks messages. What frequency could cause them to find the group to be a nuisance?
Consider the content you’d like to create. It depends on your group members, your relationship with them, and your organization. Ask yourself about the variety of content your group members engage with regularly. What would they be interested in learning about? Would they benefit from how-tos, book recommendations, inspirational quotes, or personal reflections?
Decide on a selection of different types of content and spread them out to keep your feed interesting.
Narrow down themes. Think about the overarching themes that apply to your group. How can you create content that applies to these themes? Commit to a theme for all content to fall under and stick to it for a length of time. One to three months is a good example.
Start creating. One Rule Of Thumb when creating content for a group is to provide value. If a piece of content isn’t valuable to you or your group, it’s not worth creating or posting.
Once you’ve exhausted basic themes and content ideas for your group, you may find that coming up with new content ideas can be difficult.
Use an exercise, like word association, to come up with more ideas. Write down all the words that relate to your organization’s focus or your members’ concerns. You may find that some topics are untouched and could be helpful to cover.
Curating Content
Find reliable sources. Share content from only reputable sources to ensure that it’s factual and reflects well on you as a leader.
Also, keep an ear to the ground for relevant topics and news about your organization or industry. Monitoring news outlets, industry publications, and social media helps you stay on top of relevant articles that your group will enjoy. This may start a conversation.
Choose on-theme content. Publishing on-theme curated content gives your group new and interesting perspectives on a topic that you’ve been focusing on. Search for information, articles, and videos about aspects of your theme and include them on your feed.
If you find evergreen content that doesn’t necessarily fall under a current theme but could be useful to your group, save it for later.
Tie it back to the group or theme. When you’re ready to post curated content to your group message, include a description that relates the content back to your group or current theme. This gives your members context and start a conversation about the post.
We hope these tips strengthen your group messaging content strategy. If you’re still searching for the right social network for your group, get started with Go2s today! We think keeping track of your group should be easy and natural. That’s why we built Go2s.