Let’s face it: it feels nice to have an engaged social media community to keep your brand top-of-mind among your audience. An engaged social media community is an essential ingredient for your brand’s success.
Businesses worldwide have maximized the potential of social media nowadays. With its huge popularity, businesses bank on it to optimize their brand and increase profit.
How can you build a social media community for your brand? There are plenty of industry tricks you need to keep in mind. Let’s take a look at a few tips and best practices.
How Important Is Engagement in Social Media?
If you’re aiming to know and dissect how well your brand is resonating with customers, maximizing engagement is essential. Through engagement, you will have a solid grasp on what the customers like, dislike, aspire and despise.
Banking on improving your social media engagement also translates to how reachable your brand is. In other words, developing an effective digital marketing plan in the manner in which you are easily reached for feedback and suggestion will do you a lot of wonders. Plus, when your community members are engaged, your business will be at the forefront of their minds when they need your services or want to recommend a product like yours to a friend or colleague.
Hence, doing it — and being good at it — should be among your top priorities if you want to scale up your brand.
Tips for Building an Engaged Social Media Community
If you are building a social media community, make sure you are contributing to the attainment of social good. By crafting your social media policy, you will not only be able to protect your brand’s identity but also commit to a hate-free community.
The driving force for this endeavor should be community-building while urging people to rally behind your product. If effectively done, this should easily translate to profit.
The tips below top the industry recommendations, and following them will truly help you grow a highly engaged community.
1. Be Responsive
A brand that actually listens, and responds, is what consumers want. When they feel that they are being listened to, it’s an affirmation that their voice matters.
Following this thought, build a dedicated team that readily answers all your customers’ and followers’ concerns. Responding to their comments and suggestions can energize your social media community in ways you could never imagine.
Don’t be afraid of the discussion that will be generated through this effort. Here you will see and discover the so-called “wisdom of the crowd.”
2. Be Accessible
Whenever concerns arise, you’ll want your team to be readily accessible. Being able to respond quickly will create an impression that you are more than an ordinary brand.
For brands and products, it’s crucial that you pacify concerns before they grow into big problems. In other words, this is one effective way of controlling things before they even get controversial.
Doing this will also empower your community and inspire them, even more, to reach out. A high degree of engagement will be good for your business.
3. Tickle the Imagination of Your Followers
Give your followers something to talk about every now and then. Shun the formula of your marketing strategies, and go creative all the time.
You can do this by posting intriguing and interactive posts that will keep your community hooked on what you want them to discuss. Of course, it helps if you have a dedicated social media team to manage these efforts effectively.
Social media platforms love experimentation, so incorporate a little dose of creativity and imagination and dare to be different.
4. Content is King
Never forget the power of content in keeping your social media community engaged. When you have tons of content, you’ll have higher odds of posts gaining traction—or even going viral.
The virality of your posts is one good sign of a highly-engaged social media community. But here, you will also get a peek at what content your audience really wants.
One good practice in the industry is the usage of social media share buttons. By installing these buttons on your website, you’ll get access to precious data about what content your visitors are sharing most often. This data set can serve as your guide in producing more content.
Among the benefits you can get from using these social media share buttons is gauging how effective your campaigns are and where you need to focus more effort to keep your community active.
5. Prioritize the Frequency of Your Posts
Use data analysis as a tool to decide the optimal frequency of your posting. One good data set that you can use is the time when your followers are most active.
The majority, if not all, of social media networks, provide access to this data set for groups, pages, and business profiles. Since you are posting frequently based on the time most followers are active during the day, chances are engagement will follow.
6. Build Trust
Trust is the most effective way to build your brand. So one of the primary goals on social media should be building a foundation of trust.
Thus, in everything you do online with your social media community, make sure that it contributes to the task of trust-building. Anything other than that will not contribute to the growth of your community.
There are plenty of ways to cultivate trust. Content, engagement, and reciprocity are just some of the important things to keep in mind.
Are You Ready To Build a Highly-engaged Social Media Community for Your Brand?
Many brands mistake being present on social media as sufficient for their marketing efforts. However, the main driver of growth and results is people engagement.
Since your customers are the very people that drive your company to success, now is the right time to start building your social media community.
Exciting things await reputable brands that capitalize on social media engagement and build a community. Treat it as an essential part of fortifying your company to reach its full potential.