Social Media Savvy: Building Your Brand and Community Online

If you want to strengthen your brand and lead better conversations with customers, building your brand and community online with the help of social media is the best strategy you can rely on. Brand communities rally loyal customers in a place and attract new leads through the good old word-of-mouth experience.

A through-through social media community helps your brand grow, improves communication with customers, helps you get more positive customer reviews, and builds customer loyalty. But let’s see the steps you could follow to make these things happen.

Identify Your Target Audience

Creating a profitable and successful brand community starts with identifying and defining your target audience. If you gain an understanding of what they need, their desires, and interests, you can create curating content and talk about experiences that truly resonate with them.

Our advice is to also emphasize market research by gathering data on demographics, preferences, and behaviors of your existing customers. This research helps you identify their pain points and find out what influencers or thought leaders you can engage with.

If you shape your strategies around the insights you gather, you can engage with your customers to establish more relevant and longer-term campaigns. This way, you can also focus on campaign results to gain more business prospects.

Create a Group Around Your Brand Community

If you want to strengthen your relationships with your audience, start with creating a group for your brand – starting with Facebook or any other platform your target audience uses. This will also help increase engagement and help to market your products and services to wider audiences.

Start group discussions to find out what your audience wants. Identify their pain points and offer them your advice. People in your group will feel like they have exclusive access to important information when reading your suggestions – at least, that is the goal.

If people with the same interests and goals get together, their engagement is higher. Many of them will participate in conversations, sharing topics and opinions that attract more followers every day.

Define Community Values and Purposes

After identifying your target audience and creating a group that addresses their pain points, keep strengthening your brand’s community by defining its values and purposes. Think about what you want to achieve with your community to determine the core values that increase development and growth.

If you do these things, you give your community a clear direction and help it align with your brand’s mission and values. Community members who have shared goals will gain a better identity sense this way. Don’t forget it’s also very important to transform your community from a loose network of contacts into a trust circle.

When defining the purpose and values of your community, you should ask yourself what your community’s ultimate goals are. It’s also very important to envision how your community supports your brand’s values and mission.

 

Create Interesting Content & Discuss Experiences

If you want a successful brand community, you should create the most engaging content and discuss experiences relevant to your platform. The forms of content can vary, i.e., you can publish blog posts, create social media videos, and schedule events.

When you curate content, you should consider your community’s values and purpose. Upload content that stands for your brand, is emotional, entertaining, and educates your audience. This way, you motivate your community to participate in conversations and share their own stories.

 

Pay Attention to Feedback and Adapt

Make sure you respond to customer feedback, as this is how you can build a successful social media brand community. You can do this by monitoring online forums and social media channels, conducting focus groups and surveys, and posting feedback or individual member comments.

Listening to what your customers say shouldn’t be only about considering their knowledge and ideas, but also about considering changes and implementing them to meet your customers’ needs. Sooner rather than later, you will recognize leading community trends and create an extended relationship with them.

If you do all these things, you can boost interest in your brand and products. You will also get a unique opportunity to gain deeper insights into loyalty level, engagement, and brand reputation online.

 

Evaluate and Measure Your Success

If you want your social media brand community to be efficient, you should also evaluate your success and measure it efficiently. You can do this in many ways, by analyzing engagement rates and customer retention, as well as gathering community feedback from your focus groups and surveys.

Measuring your success will show you where you can improve and make the most informed decisions that can lead your brand in the right direction. Consider results and build brand interaction within your community.

Keep in mind that you need to evaluate and measure your success constantly – this is not a one-time activity.

 

Pick Suitable Content Themes

Publish content topics and themes that your audience wants to read about. Let’s say you run a fitness equipment business. If this is the case, pick nutrition and health as your primary content themes. Don’t forget that content formats should be equal.

Short-form content like Instagram Reels or YouTube shorts often perform much better than longer posts or videos. But the most important thing is to select formats that resonate with your audience. If you monitor discussions and hashtags, your content can become viral faster. Plan it if you want to seize the best opportunities, remain trendy, and connect with a wider audience. Stay true to your brand and be consistent with your messages.

 

Network Face-to-Face

Your brand’s social media community can also grow through face-to-face networking. Connect with people face-to-face by attending meetups, conferences, and workshops. If you network, you raise your company’s profile, build confidence, and form real-life friendships.

Meeting people face-to-face helps us know them better. If you allow other people to know you, you can work on building a trustworthy personal brand and form a community of people who think like you. One way to achieve this is to always search for people and locate contacts on LinkedIn after meeting them in real life, especially when branding in the B2B sphere. But the same approach works in the B2C segment, too – it’s all about constantly updating and growing your contact database.

 

Encourage UGC

User-generated content (UGC) could be anything, from reviews, testimonials, videos, and photos that your customers contribute. UGC is one of the best marketing strategies because it proves that customers are using your products and shows other social media users your brand is trustworthy and relatable. It makes people feel like they’re a part of a community that values their contributions.

One of the best case studies here is Sephora, with its Squad program, back in 2019. The idea is simple and functional – Squad is an online community of beauty connoisseurs and other creatives sharing experiences and beauty tips on using the brand’s products.

 

Consider a VIP Loyalty Program

Customers like to receive rewards when they purchase, so make sure to have a VIP element loyalty in place too. For instance, you could gamify shopping and encourage your customers to buy more so they can receive rewards for their shopping. Loyalty programs also help customers feel appreciated and included in your community. Offer them exclusive deals and early access to your new products. Invite them to special events because they should feel “spoiled”.

In conclusion, be professional when conducting your brand community social media campaign by implementing the advice above. Don’t appear “spammy” because you don’t want your audience to get tired of your content. Approach your audience naturally and stay focused on your marketing goals.