How To Make Your Social Media Community Part Of Your Team With Leadership
People At Your Fingertips
With a social media presence and a strong brand, a community is the natural result of continual output and positive interaction. When we scroll our feeds, we rarely look for the pages we want to see and typically allow the system to provide what it thinks we want. This means that building a team from the community isn’t as simple as it sounds. They’re part of your page and they interact with your content, and they also behave the same way with many other brands. Inspiring people to take fondness for your presence and grow to have a preference for it, you need to make sure to provide a real focus and a genuine resource. The more people who interact with your presence on social media, the more reach you will get. The platform is more likely to share content with more previous interactions. Each new post is only shown to a small fraction of the possible visitors and it’s user interaction that informs the platform whether to show it to more people or not. How can we make sure that the people who see our posts know what we stand for and why interacting with us benefits what they care about?
Recommended read: How to Build and Mobilize a Social Media Community for Your Nonprofit in 90 Days
Make Your Resource Count
What do people get from you? They have tastes and needs. Often when we visit social media it’s because we want to pass the time. For people who use social media as a tool for communication, it’s much more than this. Building a brand presence and acting as your own ambassador is an essential part of the service. People who visit you want to find the content they recognise and discover more. There are all kinds of avenues we can take, most have a website that promotes the brand further and offers products and services. People want to have the option to enrich their understanding of your field and to find out more about you. If we can provide this, it gives a professional and actionable presence.
Recommended read: The Language of Social Media: Identity and Community on the Internet
Listen To Comments And Create Parallels
As a service, it’s vital to listen to what people want and what they are saying. The direction of your progress has to take into account the needs of the consumer. This means there must be a balance between what you aim for and what the customer actually wants. Because of the qualitative subject matter within social media, it’s very possible for people to take many perspectives on your content and message. We need to be aware of this and cater to everyone who feels affiliated with our common cause.
Recommended read: The Complete Social Media Community Manager′s Guide: Essential Tools and Tactics for Business Success
Strengthen Networks Across Platforms
It’s important to build strong bridges and bonds between your own brand, those you serve, and those you serve alongside. The slash and burn then set up shop technique is simply not going to work with the democratisation of content offered by social media. The colonial mindset that business in the past has operated by is being challenged with every new enterprise. Social responsibility means that we have to nurture those around us in order to find the space to thrive.
Recommended read: Public Relations and Participatory Culture: Fandom, social media and community engagement (Routledge New Directions in PR & Communication Research)
Empower Your Community With Genuine Gratitude
No one is being forced to interact with you and use your services. This is always done by personal choice and therefore means we need to respond with gratitude. Sometimes we can give the wrong message and imply we are not happy with something when in reality we actually want interaction and feedback. We sometimes need to put our personal feelings to one side, and if your jug is full this is heavy work. It can take a few minutes to make sure our feelings are not directing our responses. Remember to make space for this action before acting as your brand ambassador. When we give thanks, we have the opportunity to communicate what we actually need and want. The things we specify in the gratitude message give a clear communication to the audience and readers about what we want from them in return. This must be balanced between the things that benefit your cause and the things that benefit your business. If it’s all about one or the other, we can give the wrong impression.
Recommended read: Disinformation, Misinformation, and Fake News in Social Media: Emerging Research Challenges and Opportunities (Lecture Notes in Social Networks)
