5. Identify Champions

 Now that you're moving towards launch, and you're busy getting your content ready, it's a good idea to start looking at actions you can take to grow your userbase, and get your users engaging and interacting with your content.

The great thing about having an app for your communications, is that it allows two-way communication. However, you'll often find that your staff will be hesitant to comment on your articles, and post their own content if you have user generated content enabled. This is especially true if it's the first time in your organisation that staff have had a chance to engage.

Quite simply, no one wants to be the first one to comment or post. When you post a page using the CMS, and no one has commented on it yet, it looks like this:

Be the first to comment? No thanks! Terrifying.

But if you, as a comms leader in your organisation can get some dedicated champions, who will consistently leave comments and make posts, you'll find that others will be happy to join in. As long as someone else has done it first.

Have a look at the video below that explains it well:

Now, in this example, the 'first-follower' could have been a stranger, but equally he could have said to his friend: "I'm going to get up and dance here, so wait for a few minutes and then come up here too."

For your purposes, your first-followers are going to need to be people you have spoken to, and asked for them to regularly leave comments and make posts in the app.

When your users are exploring the app in the weeks after launch, and they see comments from other people on the articles - they'll be much much more likely to join in, and from that point on, your growth will start to become more organic.

You really just need to plant the seeds yourself before it will grow!

Of course, you might be asking yourself, "why do I even want all these comments and posts?" - It's all about using your app to create a sense of community. 

Thankfully, the process of identifying these champions and getting them on board before launch is really easy if you've already done Step 1: Talk to your staff, and Step 3: Involve Stakeholders. You've already talked to a range of people across the business. Go back to some of them now and make sure that at least some of them will be your 'first-followers' by making posts and leaving comments!