How to Use Social Media to Listen to Your Association’s Members

Want to know more about what your members want out of your association? It’s time to think about how social media can help. Reaching out to your members on social media can do much more to help you connect and engage with them than you may think. In fact, consumers are looking to interact with the brands, companies, and organizations they love on the social media sites they use.

‍In fact, Sprout Social reports that 60% of consumers  actively seek out to consume new products or work with new organizations through social media- so you’re association better be apart of the conversation. With social media being such a breeding ground for amazing moments, interactions, and engagements, you want to make sure you’re tuning into what your members have to say in order to keep them better satisfied. So, we’d like to show you how you can use social media as more than a platform to share in order to boost awareness and engagement. So, if you’ve been looking for a better way to interact and actively listen to your members, now is your chance.

1. Using social media to learn

Whether you know it or not, your members’ social media accounts are a wonderful source of intelligence and better understanding. No matter the social media platform they use most, chances are they’re sharing a lot about their everyday lives, their desires, their struggles, and much more. Social media should always be looked at as a learning tool. Yes, it is a tool that allows you to share content, updates, and anything you’d like with members. But if you’re using social media with purpose and intention, you’ll find that you have better results of truly engaging with members. So, what does this mean? It means not only viewing your members’ social media activity, but calling awareness to it- which can then directly result in productive action. If you can first learn how to harness the power of social media as a tool for learning, you can then use it more mindfully and produce more member satisfaction success.

2. Create personas from social media

Once you learn that social media is a learning tool, how do you apply it to what you’d like to accomplish? Start by creating detailed personas of your members based off of what you observe on their social media platforms. A social media persona for your members allows your association to look at multiple types of members. This way, the approach you take to pleasing them is not a stagnant and close-minded one, but one with flexibility, multiple paths and more of a chance to succeed. To do this, you should split your members up based on specific demographics and/or social media behavior. You should also pay attention to what their social media platform of choice is in order to better reach them (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.). Be mindful of when they’re posting, what they post, when they’re online posting, and what other brands and organizations they interact with. All of this information comes together to direct you into a better social media marketing plan, so don’t skimp on the details!

3. Use social media to please

Along with listening to your members to create new marketing paths, you should also be using this tool to listen to member concerns and help give them what they need. Using social media not just as a tool for learning, but as a tool for serving members can help your association really lock down its member satisfaction service. If you notice members are reaching out to your association on social media looking to talk about a problem or concern, you should always respond and be open to listening to what they have to say, looking to provide a productive solution that will help them in the long run. Did you know that about half of all consumers use social media as a sounding board when dealing with a problem or complaint about a product or service? That’s right, so you better pay attention to what that type of attention can do for your association if it goes unnoticed. Respond to members that reach out to connect with you. Listen to all they have to say, provide them with the knowledge that they are heard, and work towards providing solutions and/or explanations to their problems. While some problems may be unfixable, the knowledge of being heard and understood is still a comfort to members.

‍Using social media as a tool rather than just a source of content can help you get to the bottom of better understanding your membership as a whole.