Members always appreciate a personal touch, and a direct message to welcome them to your Community can definitely hit the spot.
Engaging a member and making them feel welcome from the very beginning, can really help to foster that sense of connection and community that they are looking for when they join.
A simple way to do this, is to set up a direct message form an official account with a welcome message that can give new members a personal guide to your Community.
It is important to know that members cannot respond back to this message, so you'll need to make sure that:
- Your message explains this.
- It is sent from a standard account that is not designed to be active.
Let's take a look at setting this up together.
Picking your Default Member Account:
We recommend creating a bespoke member account specifically for this feature. Generally, we find that an official Community account works best. The reason for this is to avoid member confusion when they receive this message.
As we mentioned above, the main reason is because the member cannot respond to this Welcome Message and it may cause confusion.
We also recommend amending the accounts permissions, and toggling off the option for the account to be able to receive connection requests and be followed. This also avoids any confusion for members.
With all that being said, you can pick any member account you wish to be the default account from which the Welcome Message is sent.
Setting up your Welcome Message:
Once you have selected your default account, it's time to head to the Console.
Select Grow and then Onboarding from the left hand menu, and scroll down to the bottom until you reach the section to set up your Welcome Message.
By default, the feature is set to off and before you can begin to edit it you must enable to the toggle to on.
Picking your Member:
The first drop down field you see is the From field and it is here that you set the member account you want your message to come from.
The drop down menu will only show a few member usernames, however, you can type into the search box and locate the specific member account you want to select.
Crafting your Message:
When crafting your message, make sure to remember that every member will receive this, so it will need to be generic rather than specific to an individual.
We recommend highlighting in the message that this Welcome Message cannot be replied to – this way members will not be confused or frustrated if they attempt and fail to type a response.
Once you are done, simply press Publish and everything will be saved and ready to go.
Top Tips:
- Think about how much information you share in your message. Too much and it may overwhelm the member.
- Don't use a member account that you use yourself, otherwise you may find that members find it tricky to connect with your account in the future.
- Consider the message you want to send, is it informative or comforting – what benefit will your members get from receiving it.
- Once enabled, this message will only be sent to new members and existing members will not receive it.
- You can always disable this feature by toggling the feature to off.