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I've been posting a blog every Monday morning for the last 12 weeks. The main benefit was to try and make our community, more like a community!!





I use the blog to share news articles, topical stuff that going on in the world, try and link that back to our community content where I can.





I also use it to share updates about myself and the team so the users can feel like they know us a little better and feel more confident in talking to us.





Another benefit, is in one place, I can link in all the other activity thats going on around the forum, tag usesr and get them to check out what others have been commenting on, highlight topics that will help others that might have the same questions. It also gives me the opportunity to tag users that may not have been around recently as a way of drawing them back to the community to check out whats been going on more recently.





We also tweet this out to OVO's twitter feed each week to help drive awareness of the community.





So far we've seen pretty good engagement and traffic, so feel its something we will continue with, as it helps bring the community to life in one place.





Hope you like it.





https://forum.ovoenergy.com/news-and-updates-47/ovo-community-blog-issue-12-7150
Thanks for sharing this @OVOdarran!





As it happens, I was just wondering whether we should start something similar! I'll start subscribing your forum in order to see what you guys are up to!





Our main competitor (communitywise) is sending out "montly recaps" via email (with several links to the community of course) and some other communities here in Finland are posting their montly recaps in their community.





What made you decide to post it in the community and not send this via email?





Are you guys promoting this in other channels (than twitter)? Am thinking of maybe promoting monthly recaps in Facebook....
Hey @Suvi Lehtovaara





Our customers already get so many emails from us as a business, we didn't want to bombard them with another one!





Also, the purpose of the blog is to ensure we have a chance to promote the forum in a different way, talk more about ourselves and what we've been up to, highlight other users interactions/questions/engagement and ultimately draw people to read it, but then keep them in the forum. That's why I always include "Have you seen XXX post on climate change here", or "big shout out to XXX for their great question, read it here and get involved" etc etc.





Due to the nature of our Twitter followers, they tend to be more tech savvy, so given the work we are doing on EV's and tech to support zero carbon living, Twitter is the obvious choice for us.





We may expand this to Facebook too, who knows!!





Keep me posted on how you get on!!





Darran
Hi @OVOdarran,





okay, we do have similar "challenges" with the emails - I don't see email as an option for us either, but I wanted to hear your thoughts :)





Keeping the blogs/recaps within the community is, as you said, a good chance to increase activity etc.





We also use twitter a lot, but for competitions etc. we do use Facebook in order to reach out to a larger audience.





I've already registered to you community (nice welcome emails, btw 😍) and will be reading all your blogs 🙂
Yes that was the idea, we get a lot of traffic, but we are trying to make more of it "sticky" as in hook them in and then give them a reason to stay and have a look around.





The hope is they will find more interesting things as they navigate and then be more tempted to come back when they need help or have a question.





If you have good audiences on all social channels, why not share it across all, improves your reach and you can test what works. I;e all your traffic to the blog coming from FB, they don't bother with Twitter etc. Hopefully you'll see good results from both!!





Thanks re the welcome emails! We revamped them recently to update them all. Glad to hear you like them!!





Look out for todays blog!





Darran
This weeks blog, in case anyone is interested 🙂
Hey Darran,





thanks a lot for sharing this, truly inSpiring! :)





As to email vs. community: I agree that too many newsletter/marketing-like mails will probably annoy your users. In a B2B-environment I see more reason to do it (as professionals in average have a bigger interest in learning more about products they use for their work) however in B2C it can feel "spammy" really quick.





In the meantime we have some things in the pipeline which could help you with this project. 🙂 My colleagues might already share a little bit of info on this during the event, who knows? 😃 😛
Sounds intriguing, looking forward to the event and seeing what's coming in future developments!!
Latest blog for those that are interested. This week's focus was on promoting new product launch and also encouraging others (both old and new) to get involved in the community.





https://forum.ovoenergy.com/news-and-updates-47/ovo-community-blog-issue-16-7277

For anyone interested in my blog, here’s the latest edition!! 

 

https://forum.ovoenergy.com/news-and-updates-47/ovo-community-blog-issue-22-7517#post24734

 

Thanks to @Florian and @Ditte for the feedback!! :) 

Hi Darran,

what would you recommend as KPIs for such a “Community Blog”? And did you set yourself a target that you want to achieve?

 

Thanks, really great engagement example! 

Florian

@Florian Number of views, but more importantly, who engages and if they look at all the other elements linked to from the blog, i.e number of pages viewed per visit etc.  

 

Back to our conversations, quite tricky to accurately measure this without getting lost in GA or CSV’s……..

 

We are also going to start a news round up on a Friday ahead of the weekend, linked to our OVO Newswire site that pulls together topical, energy or EV related news that’s been around across the week.  The plan is to do a round up of things we think are interesting and link to the site, and pitch as getting ready for a bit a weekend reading over coffee…..we will see how it goes down. 

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