Marketing - Growing Your Online Community And Measuring Your Results

A strong community of engaged customers, interested prospects and excited brand advocates can go a long way in growing the success of your business and your career. But how do you build an online community?  The ever-changing business landscape has really hit it home that it is essential to have an online community to network with and a lay a foundation of trust and goodwill with your audience online.

So, what is an online community? It is a group of people rally around a shared common interest, value or goal. A major focus is to bring like-minded people together by building and nurturing a community that supports a close bond between the business and its community members.

So how do you build your community? First you need to define your guiding philosophy and align it with your social strategy objectives and business goals. A suggestion is to build relationships in other communities, such as a LinkedIn group before starting your own. I did that myself networking for a few years before starting Mass Professional Networking in 2013.

How do you grow your social media audience and community?

• Find creative ways to engage your offline community online.
• Host events to attract an audience that aligns with your company's values.
• Monitor social feeds to find potential brand advocates and opportunities.

How do you engage with your social media community and w/ influencers and advocates?

• Keep your brand voice in mind.
• Take time to build a relationship before inviting an influencer to your community.
• Build relationships with influences and advocates that can expand your reach.
• Provide value and engage consistently to nurture your community.

How about some best practices for growing your online community across some of the major social media channels? Let's focus on a couple of tips using Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram and YouTube.

X (Twitter):

• Use advanced search tactics to find people who can benefit from the knowledge your community offers.
• Host and participate in Twitter Chats. You can simply do a search using a Hashtag with the topic.

Facebook:

• Use Facebook Groups to build secret, closed or public communities.
• Promote community events with Facebook Events.

Linkedin:

• Build communities with the goal of furthering the professional development of its members and included seasoned professionals.
• Getting access to certain groups can help keep your community high quality and on topic. The Announcements feature can highlight important discussions and tag community members.

Instagram:

• Recognize the community members who engage frequently with your content and make them feel good for doing it by recognizing them, re-gram their content, follow them back.

YouTube:

• Take the time to connect with your viewers by encouraging and responding to comments and taking their suggestions into consideration when developing new content.

Finally, it is always to measure, monitor and adjust when it comes to your online engagement.  When you build your social media strategy you should also include your goals, strategies and KPIs and measure social engagement.  If you do see sharp growth or decline in engagement or follower counts, trace it back to whatever activities you engaged in that spurred on the quick change.