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Everyone talks about content, content marketing, content distribution, but the topic of building a community on social media of engaged followers is not discussed enough.
If you are pumping out content and no one is engaging with it then something is not working. This is what a lot of entrepreneurs are facing and the common mistake is just to say: "oh well, I'm waiting on one of my posts to go viral".
The real solution is to go on the offense and start building community on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, and/or any other social platform.
If you are looking for low-hanging fruit here on re-energizing your communities, make sure the right people are running your social media channels. You want social media marketing experts to run your pages! Start an analysis to figure out what really is broken. Talk to your audience and figure out who they are, what they care about, and what they would like to see from you as the community builder.
Keep reading.
A few months ago someone reached out to the Eclincher team with a question. They had over 3 million followers on Twitter but hardly any engagement. They had something like 0.00000001% engaged followers. They asked us what we could do to help them get more engagement, more leads, and more sales.
This post is for you lonely entrepreneurs out there with "crickets" on your social media pages!
I'm going to show you a 3-step simple strategy on brand community building on social media. Also, be sure to check out our social media bio example to get an understanding of how to set your account up the right way!
Work with Influencers
Influencers are people with medium to large online communities that are centered around a topic, cause, or theme. The traditional way to work with influencers is by hiring them to promote your product or service. This is not what I'm talking about.
You can use an influencer's community without having to hire them.
Here's how:
- Tag an influencer on a social media post (but not blindly - give them the chance to be involved before-hand)
- Write about an influencer and link back to them
- Interview an influencer about their successes and failures
- Ask the influencer to share your post and where to share your post
We activate this type of strategy on every post where an influencer is involved, especially in the how-to guides.
For example, we wrote a step-by-step strategy about Instagram influencers a while back and tagged, at the time, the wonderful Ellie McInerney who now writes professionally for Canstar, a prominent Australian site specializing in helping Aussies make better-informed purchasing decisions online.
She was an awesome fitness micro-influencer out of Australia. What started as a random link to her page actually led to some fantastic conversations, and we learned a ton about Instagram Influencers from talking with her.
Here is how we mentioned her in our article:
Pro Tip: LinkedIn is becoming more and more effective for marketers and brand community building. Like and comment on posts of like-minded people with many followers, particularly those with whom you share your target audience.
Every time you do, thousands of their followers will see you and click on your profile. Ask people to like and comment on your profile. The LinkedIn algorithm will automatically display your content to more people and get more traction. Engaging with high-traffic profiles gets your more traffic.
Create and Join Groups
Just like we saw in our post on accountants social media, social groups can be very effective! If you don't already have a community on social media, you need to start a group. Facebook groups are super effective for building communities as well as LinkedIn groups (depending if you are B2C or B2B, either one may work better for you).
We started our thriving community on Facebook called the Inspire Community, where we already have almost 550 community members and growing.
You can post your content or choose more creative ways by asking wacky questions like this one:
A lot of entrepreneurs and marketers build businesses around Facebook groups. For example, the incredible blog NicheHacks start building a Facebook group early on, a few years ago, and now they have over 40,000 people in it. Josh Fechter is famous for his BAMF group of over 17,000 marketers and founders.
If you want a step-by-step guide on creating and growing a Facebook group, here is an in-depth guide by Neil Patel.
The greatest advantage of groups is the value that the community members can take out of it. The community manager and moderators can bring so much value to the conversation by sharing best practices, how-to guides, case studies.
The group can also be used for networking. People can ask everyone for feedback, post job offers or projects they are working on, and find partners.
Pro Tip: If you create a LinkedIn group you can use a tool like LinkedHelper to automatically invite all of your LinkedIn contacts to it and extract all the community members' emails. This is a super powerful method of getting qualified leads to your business and getting more traction.
Leave your Two Cents
I'm not going to lie; I listen to almost everything that Gary Vaynerchuk puts out. And his video on the $1.80 Instagram strategy was exactly on point.
The idea is to leave your two cents on the top 9 Instagram posts for ten popular hashtags. That's a total of $1.80 of your thoughts, which is just a funny way of thinking about it.
If you leave quality feedback, words of encouragement, and positivity, you will naturally attract like-minded people. This way, you will surely get a bunch of followers every month and will be able to build an engaged online community.
Here is the video in full.
Check it out and let me know what you think!
If you are serious about building a strong community of engaged followers on social media, you need to spend 2-3 hours every day reaching out and commenting on posts.
This is how Gary Vaynerchuk got his first contract with a large corporation for $80/year to grow their Twitter. This is the hustle that he always talks about and that so many businesses are built on.
Recap
Online communities are super important, and it's so easy to make an emotional connection on social media.
- Connect with micro-influencers in your niche to share ideas, blog posts, content, or partner on projects together.
- Create and engage with groups on Facebook and LinkedIn.
- Leave your two cents by interacting with top posts on Instagram.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you create a social media community?
First, you need to find a topic that people are passionate about and that lends itself to the conversation. From there, you need to create content that is both informative and engaging. And most importantly, you need to be genuine and interactive with your followers.
Is Facebook a social media community?
Yes, Facebook is a social media networking site. It's a great place to connect with friends and family, share photos and thoughts, and stay up-to-date on what's going on in people's lives.
What is an online social media community?
An online social media community is a web-based platform where people can interact and communicate with each other. Communities can be open (anyone can join) or closed (members must be approved by the administrator). The purpose of a social media community is to bring like-minded people together to share common interests, exchange ideas, and collaborate on projects.
