Building and engaging a community
Perhaps the greatest value of social media marketing is your ability to foster and engage with a community of other people. That engagement is at the heart of social media, and without it, you’re left with a megaphone and no one to hear you. You have the opportunity to interact with customers from all over the world—including those who are right down the street—on a huge scale. If a current or prospective customer has something to say to you or about you, you now have the ability to respond immediately.
In addition to responsive communication, brands and businesses can begin to build relationships with their customers beyond those that happen during normal transactions. These relationships are what keep customers coming back, increasing both loyalty and retention. If those customers become advocates and increase your word-of-mouth presence, you’ll start seeing amazing returns.
By providing a great place of engagement for your community and helping build valuable, authentic resources for your brand’s niche, you’re also building up authority for your brand within your industry. You’ll find your customers increasingly trusting what you say and coming to you for resources that can help them solve their own challenges. Heck, you may even find yourself lending a hand to a competitor in the space. All brands start in a similar unknown place, and the more you give, the more authority you’ll get back. A great example is REI, which not only sells outdoor gear, but is also a known resource for tips on hiking, snowshoeing, zombie survival, and a whole host of other activities centered around the outdoors.
The feelings of any community member toward your brand can range from resentment to adoration and beyond. We’ll address the negative feelings later on; the people we want to concentrate on now are those we hope to move along a spectrum from simply “liking” you all the way to being willing to defend you and your brand.
The first step is getting people to simply like you, whether on Facebook, by word of mouth, or however. The people who like you are consistently having their expectations met. This typically feels transactional with a low level of engagement, though there’s certainly nothing wrong with that.
Like any relationship, forming bonds that take you to the next level highly depends on the needs of both your brand and the individuals with whom you’re interacting. You want to form these bonds on positive experiences you have together that benefit both of you. (This is not to say that bonds can’t be formed through adversity, but having say a positive Twitter exchange around helping someone is better than one around how your product is malfunctioning.) Even better if these experiences bring delight and build your unique brand voice. For example, when Kotex started their Pinterest account, they selected 50 female users and sent them unique packages based on their Pinterest boards. Not only were these women surprised and happy, but all shared about what Kotex did on their social networks, creating a cascade of warm feelings.
Moving from like to love
There is another level where this relationship grows even deeper. When a customer becomes willing to defend your brand, you know you’ve really outdone yourself. This final “willingness to defend” stage is brand and social nirvana, as community members are not only engaging frequently and providing recommendations, but also standing up to advocate your work and defend you from brand detractors.
You can never expect your community to handle 100% of the customer service issues or questions that arise. They aren’t fully equipped, and it’s not their job. But you can expect, after your initial investment and cultivation, that some community members will begin to step up and help out when they can and where appropriate. (This is a good time to think about about how to recognize and even reward your most active participants.) When that happens, you begin to see how your efforts will start to scale as you continue to boost your community engagement efforts. It frees you up to work on other engagements, and as you might imagine, an advocate standing up for a brand is far more powerful than a brand standing up for itself. There’s a level of authenticity built into that sort of peer-to-peer interaction that can’t be found in brand-to-customer interactions.
It’s not just about marketing
The community engagement that social media affords is beneficial to nearly every part of your organization, from the product team to HR and more. As an added bonus, getting more colleagues involved will lighten your load. To get you started, here are a few areas that see the most obvious value.
Content creation
By using your search traffic data, on-site engagements, and social listening efforts, your social media presence can help you determine what people are looking for and create content that fulfills their needs. (Not to mention giving you a wonderful way to share that content once it’s available.) Topics for content will likely fall in one of three buckets:
Learn and improve
This type of content is designed to optimize your customers’ tasks or workflow. You are attempting to make their lives better by more fully utilizing your product (feature education, etc.), or even by offering assistance. The main goals of this content type are to build authority, drive connections, and increase engagement.
Explore and discover
Customers wanting to get creative and find new ways to use your product are looking for this type of content. For this group, building relationships is going to be tantamount; these relationships will breed ideation and community.
Social feedback
Information can be shared through social media at an amazingly fast pace, and users are increasingly turning to social channels to share information in real-time. This information often takes the form of opinions, so if you’re listening for the right cues from your audience, social media can become an invaluable source of insights and feedback. Incorporating social listening into product development work can act as an early warning system, save on customer service costs, provide valuable development feedback, and even help identify ideal beta testers without much expense.
Influencer connection
After you get your branding t’s crossed and your content i’s dotted, it’s time to start looking for people with whom you can engage. Start by seeking out those individuals you’ve identified as influencers from other platforms. You have likely already established a relationship with them, and relationships are portable across platforms. Leverage that. As you interact with them, seek out more individuals who are relevant to your space in their followers. Before long, you should have the basis for a nice little network.