Getting Consumers to Join Your Community

In blog posts over the past month, Jason Smith has explored the concept of the engagement trajectory, the path that consumers take as they engage more with a brand. Starting out with low-level interactions, such as following on Twitter, interested consumers move along the trajectory until a percentage initiate a two-way conversation with a brand by registering on a social channel. This is the gold standard for marketers: starting the conversation with a customer, rather than simply broadcasting to them.
The key to starting that conversation is understanding the three top barriers that make customers hesitate before joining your community:

Time:

The Barrier: Consumers have limited time to engage with brands, and let’s face it, busy people don’t want to hang out online chatting about shirts.
How to Overcome It: Offer content on your website that is a good use of your customers’ time. Save them time by offering practical advice, important news, and valuable discounts. Structure your site so that information is easy to access—good information architecture is important.

Privacy: 

The Barrier: Increasing media scrutiny of targeted marketing practices and web analytics have made customers wary of providing companies with any information, based on the perception that companies know everything about the consumer and that targeting will be intrusive.
How to Overcome It: Educate the public on the real nature of the data most marketers collect, the uses we put it to, and the non-intrusive nature of most targeting. Create a clear, no-jargon privacy policy. Actively “push” that policy out through email, as well as having it as a link on your site.

Over-Commitment:

The Barrier: People are already registered for more social media services than they use. The abandonment rate for Twitter accounts is 80%; people have enough to do to keep up with the mainstream channels, let alone joining a niche channel devoted to a commercial enterprise.
How to Overcome It: Make interactions with your site simple: limit the number of questions in signup forms and use progressive profiling to gather more information from more engaged consumers over time. Use some push marketing, with members’ permission, to keep momentum going once people join. Groups within the community are a great way to segment audience interests; use group membership data to deliver targeted messages like email newsletters, special offers, and live events. Always have something new going on to give members reasons to visit your community. In the early stages, it will be up to community managers to provide that fresh content.

There's nothing more rewarding or productive than the two-way conversations that so many brands are now having with their customers. Getting customers to interact with your brand is not hard; they want to share with you. Making it obvious that your community is a place where that sharing becomes easier is the challenge. Overcoming the barriers that keep them from joining your branded community can pave the way for better, more effective marketing and customer relationships.