In this post we are assuming that the person reading it (you) is a business owner, looking to be a business owner, or are a person who’s been put in charge of establishing or growing a social community for your company. It is also assumed that you have heard a lot of people telling you that you need to sign up and focus on every social media platform out there—LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube… Pinterest. And lastly, it is assumed that you are looking for some quick tips from people who have done this before, to perhaps give you a “primer”, such as motivation or direction, for doing this task that has been graciously (or not) put in front of you.
MYTHS
Before we begin though, let’s debunk a couple common myths about social media, that many individuals and companies have:
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It’s required that I do all social media platforms
This is just not true. Social media is another form of marketing, and when we look at our marketing, we have to look at who our target audience is and figure out the best product to give to them. Does your audience love data and stats? Twitter and LinkedIn will probably be a good platform for you to research and check out. Does your audience respond well to media? Think about Facebook, Pinterest or YouTube.
Remember, marketing doesn’t mean you make a product and you try and get customers to it. It means you know your customers and you bring the product that they want, to them. This is successful marketing, and social media is no different.
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It’s required that I be on social media every day, all day, seven days a week
Also not true. While it is true that you need to stay up-to-date and consistent with your communication, it is not a requirement to tweet, post, and pin stuff every 2 seconds. In fact, that could lead you into a situation where you actually lose your audience because you’re overdoing it.
Instead, analyze your potential audience and find out how they use the social media platforms. Are they tweeting once a day? 100 times a day? Do the reply to images or videos more so general text posts? Are there certain topics that you find them posting about, or replying to more frequently than not?
These are the areas we look at to find out where their interests lie, and it’s important to know this so we don’t spend our time and money on targeting a medium, platform, or entire audience that actually doesn’t benefit our goals.
TIPS
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Research, Research, and… Yep, You Guessed It, Research
As aforementioned, it’s not a guarantee that your highest ROI-type customer is going to be located in every social platform. Actually, it’s almost guaranteed that they’re not. So, why waste time trying to learn each platform and build a community in them, only to find out, 12 months later, that your audience was never there to begin with?
Research is key to the overall marketing and social marketing process, and while some get lucky without doing it, most don’t. So, we recommend reviewing each platform and the people on it, but not necessarily jumping in and trying to build a community on them all. Find out who your audience is, find out where they are located, and find out what they love. This is your first step to social community building success.
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Create Consistency in Message and Delivery
I’m pretty sure you hate it when things aren’t delivered on time. The mail. Your dinner at a restaurant. Mail order wife. Yeah… that sucks.
The same is true for how your users feel when you over-promise your communication with them. Did you start a newsletter and send it out for the first 3 months, but haven’t “had the time” over the last 12 months to do it anymore? Did you start your Facebook account by posting great content at least once a day, but now do it every couple weeks? The truth is, your audience will come to have expectations about your delivery and quality of product.
If you set high standards only to drop them a couple months down the road, you’re going to lose all your traction. And much like your credit score, it’s more difficult to build up over time after it drops, than it is to build it right the first time and maintain it. Consistency in delivery and quality of product is key.
I’ll cover more on this topic in a different post in the future (how to effectively create and maintain consistency over time. Warning though, it may involve you spending some money).
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Find a Personality
This is what we refer to as a business’ “voice”. It’s extremely important that you establish a voice and personality that resonates well with your target audience. This will largely be based on our first tip of “Research, Research, and… Yep, You Guessed It, Research”, and will allow you to “connect” with your followers.
If you find that your followers speak eloquently, and are very scientific, it would impede you to not try and step up to their level of eloquence. If they are easy going in tone, or are sarcastic in nature, you probably wouldn’t stand a chance if you were overly strung out, or couldn’t infer their meaning the first 3 times.
So, find your personality and make it connect with your users. They will thank you in the end.
Okay, so in summary here, building a community can be a hard task, depending on your goals and audience. You don’t need to spend all day, every day working on it, but the key points to success reside in research, consistency, and voice. As a side note to the third tip of “Find a Personality”, I’m going to leave you with a…
Bonus Tip!
Our bonus tip for today is that while sometimes it may be an okay idea to sub this type of stuff out, you will only want to sub out the consultation and setup portion of it (typically). It’s very, very difficult for outside agencies to work closely enough with you, for “you” to respond socially if they’re the ones that are technically responding.
Some good questions to validate this point or not:
- Do they know your internal policies well enough? (perhaps, if they’ve helped you develop them)
- Are they able to dedicate the time necessary to respond to complaints, issues, accolades, trends, and more, within your business and industry?
- Do you want to spend time talking to them on the phone, or sending / responding to emails, with them everyday?
If you’ve answered no to all or most of those, then you know you shouldn’t sub this effort out beyond the consultation and setup. If you know an agency or firm well enough that you have faith in this… Well, that’s your call, I guess. But you’ve been warned (and a huge congrats if it’s worked out for you!).
