by As social media marketing has developed and continues to develop, community building has become influential to its growth. The audience now wants to connect rather than see marketing promotions all the time. There are billions of users that spend several hours per day on social media accounts. Brands are competing for their potential customers’ attention via relationships, rather than just trying to reach out as far as possible to get their customers’ attention.
Strong communities differentiate brands from their competitors because they provide a place where individuals feel valued, acknowledged and have a voice; this creates the foundation for brand loyalty and creates advocates for your brand’s products/services.
The New Evolution of Social Media Marketing
Now that businesses must focus on building relationships and connections instead of just branding and visibility, Community Building is critical to every Social Media Marketing strategy in order to turn Followers into Participants; when people can relate to being part of something, they are more likely to leave comments, share and return on an ongoing basis, helping to ensure that businesses continue to achieve the visibility they need despite the ongoing changes to Social Media algorithms.
Increasingly, as more and more businesses recognize that Community Building on Social Media is becoming a necessity, the businesses that adapt to the current evolution have the strongest competitive edge. Through Community Building, businesses will more easily develop a foundation for setting long-term goals for their business growth, as well as knowing the target audience for their products and services.
Setting Clear and Measurable Community Goals
Setting concrete goals for creating a community is critical when building a community through social media marketing. It also ensures that brands know what engagement looks like, and it allows them to measure it, whereas if a brand doesn’t have defined goals, their engagement can be perceived as random and hard to measure if they pursue gameplay or “vanity metrics” rather than developing a community-based on true growth.
Some brands establish goals with the idea of driving more conversation, while other brands create objectives around customer feedback and/or peer-to-peer support. Having established goals early in the process allows all content and interaction to be in line with what a target audience is expecting from a brand. Goals also assist all team members working on a community in maintaining consistency across multiple platforms.
Measuring Community Success Effectively
Having measurable goals allows brands to monitor and continuously improve their progress. The ways in which brands can measure their community’s success include:
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the quality of comments received
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the number of returning engagement (repeat)
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total active followers
As a result, a higher rate of success comes from using fewer platforms (you’ll get higher quality engagement), and therefore a better return on investment.
Develop Content that Invites Participation
This trust incentivizes the audience to remain engaged through changes or difficult circumstances(s). The loyal community members are highly likely to defend and recommend brands they are loyal to; this type of support provides for growth without relying heavily on paid support.
By creating an emotional bond with the audience, it provides a higher level of audience retention. When trust is built into the culture of a community, loyalty is a natural progression towards building these willing participants for deeper involvement within the community, which will be discussed further in the next section.
Use Natural Engagement Methods
When creating social media marketing campaigns, effective methods of engagement are those that do not feel artificial or contrived, as most people can easily discern artificial interaction, which results in low engagement.
Creating this type of opportunity for participation encourages community development because these casual participants will eventually transition into active participants.
Creating a sense of natural engagement within the community allows for the development of momentum. As members of the community participate more frequently, they will begin to interact with other community members as well as with the brand.
Allowing for this growth in interaction between community members prepares for the future development of the community and of the audience’s connections with the community and brand.
Additionally, providing content and responding to requests from consumers regularly, in addition to “checking-in” regularly as a community member, will develop a habit in the community of returning often to visit the company online. Consequently, this ongoing visibility reinforces the brand’s name within the community’s mind.
When retention increases, communities develop stability and provide support for their member. This creates an opportunity for brands to reward these loyal community members, as detailed in the following section.
Rewarding and Recognising Your Community Members
Recognition is an incredibly strong way to build a community through social Media marketing.
The rewards that come with being recognised do not have to be solely physical materials. The ability to receive exclusive offers, receive updates first, and be mentioned in special ways can also motivate someone to continue participating.
Monitor Community Input and Feedback
The collection and tracking of feedback are important to the development of a brand’s social media marketing and the continual enhancement of its community building efforts. Brand feedback provides the brand with valuable insight into what the audience wants or values, as well as what the audience does not receive from the brand.
The ability to track and compile all these types of feedback allows a brand to fine-tune its target audience without having to rely on guessing or assumptions.
Listening tools and analytics offered by a variety of platforms have made the aggregation of feedback from a variety of channels easier than previously. The ability to see patterns of feedback and to identify frequently asked questions, persistent complaints, and accolades about a brand is a way that brands can find areas of opportunity for improvement and/or growth.
This understanding enables brands to create and implement meaningful engagement strategies based on actual behaviors of the brand’s community members.
The act of listening and responding to feedback will create an increased sense of respect for the community among its members. A brand’s ability to make changes based on community members’ input, will ultimately create an increase in trust among the community, creating a greater likelihood of engaging this audience.
This increased level of responsiveness creates a stronger bond between a brand and its community members and generates more opportunities for open communication between the brand and its community members.
Feedback that results in an improvement to a brand and creates a climate where the members of the community feel that they are working together towards a common goal, will create a stronger sense of loyalty among the community members towards the brand.
Keep the Community Engaged by Evolving
Knowing the latest platform updates also helps protect your reach and visibility on these platforms. Because many brands don’t adapt to the changes as quickly as others, those that are quick to implement the changes, typically receive increased levels of engagement before the features become oversaturated.
Being proactive about adapting to changes in the way that your audience interacts with your brand supports retention rates with your audience over time.
Evolving also keeps your community active and engaged. As you and your community evolve together, the bond between you becomes stronger and continues to be important over time.
Summary
The Community as a Foundation for Digital Presence
By utilising community-building strategies and listening to the feedback of their audience, brands will be able to create meaningful and relevant interactions that will inherently help them to build greater customer loyalty and establish greater retention ratio over time.
A consistent, flexible, and humanised community model will allow brands to harness the power of their communities as a key driver of their growth.
