Your chamber, or association, should be using social media for membership retention.
I have a question for you.
Does your chamber President/CEO take the lead in developing business relationships with members?
In many chambers and membership organizations that is the case.
After all, the President is out in the public more than most other staff people. Additionally, people want to be associated with top leaders like Presidents/CEOs, so they will search them out and befriend them.
The greater the quality and quantity of member relationships, everything else being equal, the greater your membership retention.
Great relationships contribute to better membership retention rates.
Social media, of course, plays a role here. A person can leverage social media to maintain more relationships.
They can use social media to quickly touch base. They can stay more in-the-know with the life events of the members.
HOWEVER, not every chamber President is the most connected person on staff.
Sometimes it is the salesperson. Other times it might be your marketing person.
Even your accountant, IT person, and volunteers have strong connections to the membership.
The point here is that each and every person on the staff, including board members, should be encouraged to build solid business relationships with ALL the members, through social media and otherwise, to maximize membership retention.
Lesson: It really doesn’t matter who the member “loves” on staff, as long as they love someone. None of your members has a relationship with the chamber, per se. Relationships are between people.
Social media is an indispensable tool for creating and growing these bonds today.
Free up your staff to build their own relationships through social media. In the final analysis, you can’t stop them without violating their worker’s rights to a life outside of the office. You might as well encourage it because it leads to higher membership retention.
