Hub Maintenance: Best practices – Alida Help Center

Add ALT text to images

Use alternative text (ALT) in post images and documents for members who use a screen reader. Screen readers cannot read text embedded in an image, such as text in a logo. If your image contains text, you can repeat the text in the alternative text field.

For more information, see Format text and images.

Keep your content fresh

The volume of new posts should align with the amount of activity in your community. If there is a lot of activity in your community, you should post often to encourage member engagement with the activities in the field. When there are fewer activities in the field, you can post less; however, members will be less inclined to visit the hub on their own if they see the same content over and over again.

When developing your content strategy, keep the following guidelines in mind:

When community activity is high, we recommend creating one new post for each activity in the field.
When community activity is low, the optimal number of new posts is one original post (either a shareback or blog post) per week, and up to three curated pieces per month.

On a monthly and quarterly basis:

Review your metrics: What topics, formats, and frequency work best for your audience?
Remove old and irrelevant content.
Have content strategy meetings with your team.

Allow 3-4 months of posting to determine which content and themes resonate with members. The more authentic and interactive the post, the better the content tends to perform. For more information, see, View the post performance metrics and Newsletter analytics.

Tip: Videos and listicles tend to be the most viewed content in a hub.

Engage with members

Regularly interact with members to strengthen their ties to your community and brand. You can drive and shape conversations in ways that give you additional free-form insight.

Respond to comments: Join the conversation, answer questions, and interact with your members to let them know someone is listening and their thoughts are valued.
Acknowledge super users: Use the @ symbol to mention people by name, or @everyone to include the entire community. The members you’ve mentioned will receive an email notification when you do this.
Send regular newsletters: You can highlight 3-5 pieces of content the community has been engaging with to draw other members back to the Member Hub. For more information, see Newsletters.
Leverage Calls to Action: With a Call to Action, you can embed your company’s Twitter feed to ensure there’s always new content on the Hub. You can also link to active campaigns or events. Calls to action can also be used to integrate with third-party platforms (if you are interested in an integration, get in touch with your Customer Success Manager). For more information, see Widgets in member hubs.

Use newsletters

Regular newsletters are a great way to highlight popular content as a way to bring less active members back to the Member Hub. They are also a good tool for summarizing the most important content over a period of time.

Keep the following considerations in mind:

Less is more: A clean and simple newsletter is best. Limit the amount of text and include no more than 5 tiles of content. Too much content an be overwhelming; you want to whet members' appetites and encourage them click through to the Member Hub for more.
Too much content in a newsletter may also trigger some common email systems’ spam filters. Using less content ensures that your newsletter does not end up in a commercial or junk mail folder.
Test your newsletter on different devices: Send a test to view your newsletter on a few different screens. While newsletter format is mobile-optimized, a text box that looks great on a desktop may be too long on a mobile device.
Tip: If you notice issues with newsletter delivery, contact Technical Support to investigate. Common issues include allowlisting, enterprise rate-limiting, and spam filtering.
A/B test your newsletters: Experiment with the content, the subject line, and the time your newsletters are sent, so that you can optimize them.

Measure your success

Set realistic goals and benchmarks, and monitor them on a regular basis. Some examples of metrics include:

Engagement	Traffic	Email Engagement
Post likes Social shares Post contributions Time on page Pages viewed per session Interaction with Calls to Action	Page views Sessions Unique visitors Repeat visitors	Total & unique: Open rates Click through Unsubscribes

Many of these metrics can be tracked within the Member Hub, but a few require use of online analytics solutions like Google Analytics or Omniture. For more information see, Member hub analytics.

An example of some of the adjustments you can make: Say that you find the time spent on the member hub is low. You can respond by building multimedia posts with videos and uploaded files to increase time on page.

Tip: Healthy communities should fall into the standard 90:9:1 ratio: 1% of the group is superusers who comment and share, 9% are mildly engaged and like your content, and 90% are passive consumers.

Summary

Maintaining your Member Hub over time is a key component of building customer relationships and gathering quick, honest insights. Keep your content fresh and relevant, and members will want to come back. When you engage your members in conversation through @ mentions and contributions, you keep the discussion going and bring them back. Newsletters are another great way to engage even more passive community members. And by measuring the performance of your Member Hub, you can find ways to optimize and continually improve engagement.