Chapter 30: How to Build a Social Media Community

Social media is either the best thing or the worst thing to happen to small businesses in the last 100 years.

• It’s the best thing because it has fully democratized publicity. Even a home-based microbusiness can potentially reach billions with the right viral content, and can foster a dedicated community of fans and advocates.

• It’s the worst thing because doing it wrong, or not doing it at all, gives all the competition who does it right a significant advantage over you.

There’s a lot of art and science to doing it right, enough that entire books and e-courses have been written on the topic. For now, let’s look at the top-level, strategic do’s and don’ts of building a social media community.

Do Name Your Community

The difference between “I’m a person who enjoys Monty Python” and “I am a member of The International Ministry of Silly Walks (Parrot Division)” is immense. A named community gives a sense of belonging and begins the journey toward advocacy and rabid fandom. It’s also easier to label on a business card or web post.

Don’t Skimp on Organization and Goals

There’s a persistent myth about social media that you can’t or shouldn’t subject it to standard business goal setting, organization, benchmarks, and measurements. This is a myth. Your social media community strategy should be as formal and powerful as your strategy for any other branding effort.

Do Ask (Lots of) Questions

Questions foster discussion. Discussion creates engagement. Engagement builds community. When you post, end as many posts as possible with a question for your social media community members to answer. When you respond to posts within the community, respond in a way that invites answers. This is a lot like the old cocktail party rule of asking two questions for each statement you make, and it works for exactly the same reasons.

Don’t Fire-and-Forget

Never post anything you’re not prepared to follow up on. Posting something, then ignoring community responses, is worse than never posting anything at all. The point of all this is to foster connection and build a community. That won’t happen if there’s no difference between your social media and a television ad.

Do Act as a Matchmaker

Not romantically — unless that’s your business model. At the top level, the existence of your community acts as an interest-based matchmaker by connecting people who are passionate about you and/or what you do. Within that broad scope, also find ways to help connect people over other commonalities. The easiest one is shared location, so community members can meet up in real life. Other commonalities will appear as you watch the posts and communications, and think about what makes your brand valuable and unique.

Don’t Be Too Professional

You can never be too professional if you define “professional” as “maintaining appropriate communications” and “not blowing your top when challenged.” On social media, though, you can easily be professional by lacking transparency, responsiveness, and a personal voice. One easy example is using “I” instead of “we” in social media communication. It recognizes that the exchange is between two human beings.

Do Focus on Relationships

This seems obvious, but based on many social media feeds I’ve seen it isn’t obvious enough. Your social community is about your relationship with your fans, their relationship with the brand, and their relationship with each other. Every strategy and tactic should serve as many of those relationships as possible. There are no exceptions to this rule.

Don’t Automate

Well, almost never automate. It’s okay to batch-complete your social media shares and schedule them according to your content calendar. But always create an alert to have somebody watch those shares when they go out, and never, ever, EVER automate your responses to engagement around what you post.

Do Optimize Your Accounts

Apply the most recent content optimization strategies to your accounts, profiles, and shared content. What you do for your other online content, you should also do for your social media.

Don’t Be Afraid to Pay

Watch your spending carefully — many social media pay-to-play programs are scams — but the right ones can boost viewership and membership by thousands of members over the course of a year. “Social media should be 100% free” is another myth you need to disbelieve for successful social media strategy.

Do Prospect Influencers and Thought Leaders

I’m not saying you should stalk the people who are most influential in your industry and community…but you should definitely stalk the people who are most influential in your industry and community. Watch their feeds. Share their blogs. Comment insightfully within their communities. At worst this leads to interesting conversations with people you respect. At best it can create a mutually profitable partnership…and bring some of their fans over into your community.

Don’t Miss Trending Topics

This strategy is so common it has a slang term: “Newsjacking.” Whether you’re an online content company (ahem) posting about how many tweets the Super Bowl or Presidential Election got, or a legal firm posting on a recent scandal, it pays to write about what other people are reading. This isn’t cheating. It’s solid strategy.

Do Track and Measure

Social media is absolutely measurable and trackable if you know what the various metrics mean. Don’t fall for the myth that it isn’t. Set goals, create metrics to track your progress toward those goals, review both regularly and re-calibrate to match.

Like I said earlier, the detailed how-to and resources for each of these are beyond the scope of your book, and the job of the expert minions with whom you have surrounded yourself. Just keep these navigation points in mind while building your social media community strategy, and hold your people accountable to these guiding lights.

How to build a community:

The great thing is if you already have an existing business with customers then you are halfway there. Quite frequently we find the largest ROI on a marketing campaign is targeting existing customers and letting them know of additional services your company provides.

Here are some ways to help build your community:

Include all leads in your community emails:

• Not everyone is market qualified but everyone can be a member of your community

Leverage content you are creating:

• We are building thought leadership (articles, value added content, webinars, etc) to bring people into the sales funnel. Distribute that content to your already existing lead, MQLs, and customers. Remember add value don’t sell.

Segment your community:

• Not everyone is interested in the same things to make sure you are offering the proper content to the proper community segments

Reward participation:

• Offer special recognition or rewards to the members who are the most active with your content. If they open and click on everything you send out they are the ones you want to encourage.

Survey:

• Ask your community what you can do better they will appreciate it and feel like they are more part of the brand

Upsell:

• Does your community know all the services or products you offer? This is a great time to educate them on some of the benefits to them. Don’t sell to aggressively.

Community nurturing:

• Remember if you create great content your whole community hasn’t seen it as they have all joined at different times. Remember to leverage old content for new community members.