If you’re struggling to attract and maintain a passionate community on social media for your brand, don’t worry – you’re not alone. Many brands face challenges when it comes to building and maintaining their social media community. However, there are some steps you can take to make it easier.
Here are 7 ingredients to building a healthy social media community to support your brand.
1. Be passionate about a topic
In order to attract a group of people who are passionate about a topic, you must be passionate about it as well, if not even more. It’s important to stay authentic and choose something you truly care about, you can’t fake this part. People are more likely to be interested in something if you show a genuine interest in it yourself. It’s one thing to be passionate about a topic, but you’ll have to express that passion in a way that will resonate with your audience. Learn what gets you going and run with it, you will find a community that is passionate about it, whatever it may be.
2. Tell your story
We are in the age of higher purpose and there has been a lot of importance placed on a brand’s ‘why.’ If you don’t already know, a brand’s ‘why’ is essentially the reason they do what they do, usually more than just to make money. It’s often to fight some kind of social issue, environmental issue, to give back to a certain group of people, or make a positive impact in some way.
These days, consumers are obsessed with doing business with brands that have a higher purpose because people love to be a part of something that is bigger than themselves. By communicating your mission and telling your unique story, your customers will feel more connected to your brand and more invested in its success.
3. Define your audience
It’s always important to know your audience, but its crucial for building a community. In order to build a healthy community, you have to be able to communicate and connect with your audience. Learning what interests them and gets their attention can give your brand a huge advantage when it comes to creating engaging content and building brand loyalty. One of the best methods of doing this is to conduct a target audience analysis and creating a few customer personas.
4. Focus on providing value to your community
When you prioritize providing value to your audience and expect nothing in return, you may feel like your time and efforts are being wasted, but that is not the case. By providing value, you will begin to see followers who are more committed and loyal to your brand. Consumers often find brands that only promote products and sales to be annoying and pushy. Instead, try to provide value through your content and engage with your audience whether its by posting tips, insights, entertainment, or simply replying to comments.
5. Make customer experience a top priority
People are increasingly using social media to research brands and products, and a poor customer experience can be a major turn-off. On social media platforms, consumers can see authentic interactions between the brand and its customers that they normally wouldn’t see. Many consumers want to do business with a brand that sees them as more than a sale, but as a valued member of its’ community. By providing a pleasant experience for your existing customers, you’ll be more likely to attract new ones who want to join in on the fun.
6. Engage with your audience
One thing that is clearly common among successful social media brands is that they make an effort to engage with their audience. A common misconception is that all that it takes is to post engaging content, but that is only a part of it. Engaging with your audience means encouraging them to engage with your content, but also taking the time to reply to comments and messages. When you think about it as a simple conversation, you wouldn’t want to engage if it were one-sided. Social media users are more than willing to engage with content they enjoy, but sometimes they may just need to be encouraged or pushed to do so – and if there’s a possibility that their favorite brand might reply to their comment they will be more likely to engage.
7. Find a way to stand out
Consumers are seeing hundreds of different brands on social media a day, and are exposed to even more content. Whether it be advertisements, content from pages they already follow, or on the explore page. So it’s crucial to find a way to make your brand stand out from the rest – whether it’s through unique content, a strong brand identity, or a clear mission and purpose.
A great way to gather this information is to revisit your social media strategy. There you should be able to identify your story and your audience, as well as what makes you stand out from the competition. Once you’ve established that, the rest will fall into place. Oyster Shell Strategy can help you build your community on social media by participating in our Social Media Strategy Workshop, where we walk you through our process for building an effective social media strategy. You can sign up for the Social Media Workshop here (link).
Meta description: Learn how to attract and maintain a passionate community on social media for your brand with these 7 tips. Be passionate about your topic, share your brand’s story and purpose, understand your audience, provide value, prioritize customer experience, engage with your audience, and find a way to stand out from the competition.