Are you building a community? Or are you building an audience online?
Building a community online is not the same as building your Instagram audience. The most important difference is that in a community the members share a concern with each other.
So why are social media communities important? Only in 2018, 45% of buyers spent a lot of time doing research before actually purchasing something, and a single negative review can stop people from purchasing. A social media community is a good place for a possible customer to land on whenever they are considering buying something from you.
You need to understand something
You're not only building a business on social media, you're also building a social media community where you try to understand people's problems and create meaningful interactions with them. It's all about talking to the right audience and connecting with your clients to increase retention, get referrals and customer value.
Here we are breaking down the best tips to build a strong social media community:
1. Get to know which is the best platform for your community
This is probably the most important tip ever. If you are not talking to the right audience, it really doesn't matter what content you are posting, how often you are on social media, or how good your product/service is, because they are simply not going to buy it.
The reality is that there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to marketing, the market is just too broad and diverse, but that's not a difficulty, that's an opportunity. Do some market segmentation and understand your community persona, try answering these simple questions:
Are they female? Male? Both? Where do they live?
What's their age? Are they young adults? Teenagers? Children?
What do they do? Are they students? Parents? Workers?
What are their goals? What are their interests?
What's their socioeconomic status? Can they afford expensive products?
What's the problem you are solving? What motivates them to get it?
Based on that, you get to know which social media platform they use, and which is the best way to build a social media community.
2. Create meaningful content
Let’s create a hypothetical scenario in this:
“We are a non-profit organization whose focus is on improving the education of young children in South America. We are small, but we are trying to grow our social media, increase our reach, create a community, and help with fundraising.
They have a social media content calendar specifying they must post on social media 3-4 times a week. Usually, they talk about their projects, updates on how the kids are doing, and some festive holidays, however, they don’t focus on educational holidays, they also post for environmental days, friendship days, and some holidays that are not from South America, such as thanksgiving.”
This is a quality over quantity case scenario, yes, we understand that consistency is important, but in most cases quality overthrows quantity. Be flexible and adapt, if your strategy says you should be posting 3 times a week on your community but have no relevant content it will be a doomed effort.
If you are having a hard time creating meaningful content for your audience, check out these two rules for better content creation.
3. Pay attention to your social media community engagement
Let’s keep it real, no one likes to feel like they are not being heard, that situation can be worsened by online interactions, where you can’t tell if someone saw your comment. But can you keep customers engaged with your content?
Reply to comments on that post, answer direct messages, make your stories interactive by launching small surveys, asking for feedback, promote a dialogue. These are just a few examples of how you can increase social media community engagement, so your customers also feel like they are being part of the conversation, otherwise, it will just be you talking about how good your product is.
Final thoughts
Usually, audience and community are terms that are swiped, however, that's far from being the same thing. When one wants to build an online community, it is important to focus on getting to know which is the right platform for your community, keep the content relevant, and keep your community engaged.
Make community members feel like they have a choice to stay or leave the community, create a meaningful connection, and help them progress or get something out of being part of the community.