Community Building Starter Kit For Newbies

Social media revolves around people and community, that much has been emphasized time and time again. If you’re lost track of this truth, then I don’t know what the heck you’re doing in social media at all.

When I was still starting to learn the ropes of social media marketing, I’ve been told that it’s important to build a strong relationship with online communities and their individual members if I wanted my efforts to work. And to this day, I can attest to the truth behind this crucial tip.

There’s no way that you can build a strong marketing strategy if you can’t engage the community to which you want to appeal to. This is why I try to keep with certain principles when dealing with the community. It worked well enough for me so I’m sharing these tips in hopes that these will help tide you through your community-based marketing efforts:

The community is not merely an audience. When you say audience, that means they only watch on the sidelines as you deliver your speech. You don’t do monologues in social media marketing. You want things to be two-way. Acknowledge community members as participants rather than mere audiences.

Don’t be the conversation driver. Referring back to the previous pointer, you’re not talking to an audience who won’t talk back. You want them to share what they have in mind. Don’t try to control the conversation. Stifling it to conform to what you want to talk about will only stop people from sharing their ideas, and thus kill the conversation altogether.

Engage your community. Show them that you’re listening to what they are saying. Take the time to learn what they’re interested in and use those information to give them something that would be useful and of value to them. It’s not just about people engaging your brand. You have to learn to reciprocate the love to build a stronger bond between your brand and your community.

Give your community something more. If you think press releases are enough to keep your community’s interest, you might want to think again. Think of your community’s concerns and find a way to give them content that can be useful in addressing those concerns. Encourage community loyalty by showing that you care enough to produce content that can help them.

Be honest with your community. I doubt that any relationship based on lies will flourish at all. Don’t you agree? You want your community members to trust your brand. Lying to them won’t help you earn that trust.

Keep in mind that participation already counts as marketing. Simply producing interesting content, even if you had the community in mind, is still one-way communication. Opening the floor for comments and input from the community will take your content and your brand further. It wouldn’t hurt to visit community members’ sites and sharing your thoughts on their respective blogs too.

What’s your take on this? Do feel free to share your thoughts over at the comments section so we can talk about it some more.