4 Ways to Build Community on Social
Social media isn’t just about catching up with friends and family these days. What started off as a person-to-person connecting platform has become a business-to-customer connecting platform.
In order to take your business’s brand to the next level, you’ll need to invest some energy into social media accounts and creating a community around them.
Here’s our take on how to build a community around your business on social media.
1. Responding
This is an easy one to get right and you already know how to do it. No one likes to feel like they are being ignored. If someone leaves a comment on your post or sends you a message, respond!
Depending on how many comments and messages you’re currently receiving, the difficulty of keeping up can fluctuate. But hopefully, you read our other post (click here) about using Facebook Creator Studio or Buffer to schedule your post.
If you create a schedule in advance, it will make it easier for you to feel like you have the time to respond. On the other hand, if you are posting manually and aren’t able to respond right away it’s important to set aside time each day to get to those DMs.
For DMs, we recommend:
Go into your page’s Settings > Messaging and turn on ‘Show a greeting.’
Here you get to welcome someone to your page with a warm greeting that is customizable to fit the time of year or notify them about something going on at your store.
Also, a little lower in that section you want to click ‘Set up automated responses’.
There’s a lot you can do here, but to get started go ahead and turn ‘Away Message’ on. If you don’t like feeling as if you have to respond to someone’s question in the middle of the night, then this option is your best friend. Simply set the hours you want to be available and when someone sends a message outside of those hours, they will receive a reply letting them know you’ll be back during your next available chat hours. This feature saves you from feeling the pressure to respond immediately. It also makes your customer feel like you’re organized and that they can trust you’ll get back to them later. The key here is to actually get back to them later.
Do you get the same question over and over and over? Then this tool is a game-changer for you. Turn on ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ and cry happy tears as you type in your FAQs and their answers. From that point forward, Facebook Messenger automatically responds to your customers for you and they will thank you for how quickly you got back to them.
Bonus Tip: Once you see those questions being answered automatically, follow-up with the customers the next day or week and ask them if they need anything else or how their experience was at your business. They may respond with a simple answer but you could gain some key insight.
2. ‘Add Value’ Post
It’s important to take a look at your posts from the last couple of months and analyze the category your content falls into. Here are a few categories to consider: Sales, Informative, Tips/Lessons, Engagement, and Giveaway.
Sales: The majority of businesses post this type of content. They are persuading potential customers to come in person to buy something or to shop online. Sales posts are very important but they shouldn’t be what all of your content is based around. The business is basically asking the customer over and over again to give their money or time. Of course, it is important to ask, but it’s also important to build rapport with the people following your page. They want to feel like they know you and that they have some special insight into what goes on at your business.
Informative: Sometimes these posts can be overlooked but they are necessary. You need to let customers know what’s happening at your store. Are you going to close early or open late? Make sure you give your customers enough notice. You might wonder how does this content add value? It builds trust. Do you ever remember being frustrated after you headed to your favorite store only to discover that their hours had recently changed or that they closed for renovations? Taking the time to post pertinent information as soon as you can lets your customers know you care enough about their time to save them a trip that otherwise might end in frustration.
Tips/Lessons: teaching your customers how to better use your product or giving ‘inside information’ for your industry will prove invaluable to you
Engagement: these types of posts are those that include asking your customers questions or maybe even posting something funny and inviting comments/engagement.
Giveaway: this one is simple and of course it’s one that customers and potential customers love!
Bonus Tip: Besides actually posting content, it’s extremely important to update your Google My Business, Yelp, and Facebook hours if there is a change. More often than not this will be what will save your customers from a fruitless trip and you from a bad review or angry DM.
Check out our post on how to easily make more content.
These next three types of posts are what I would consider the most powerful ‘Add Value’ Post. This would be defined as giving something without asking for something in return (at least not right away).
3. Facebook Groups
Facebook groups are a powerful way to strengthen your community because it encourages your followers to engage with each other. Facebook offers help on how to create groups. Be clear about why you’re making a group and what you hope to accomplish. Are you a restaurant?
Give out a recipe and invite your members to share photos of them making it. Turn into a giveaway/competition. There are a variety of ways to use groups to help members feel like they really have the inside track on something special. Here are a few ideas to make your Facebook Group special:
A sale only available to members of the group
Early access to deals
Get to know you posts and games
Feedback on potential and upcoming product and events
Invite customers to test out new products
There’s so much you could do with groups! It’s important to remember that the content you add to the group shouldn’t just be what you’re already posting to your regular Facebook page.
Of course, informative posts with news of business hours changes is okay to post in both places but be sure that the majority of the content is unique to the group.
4. Texting
Now there are plenty of texting services out there where you can blast messages out to make announcements. The limitation with these is that it typically doesn’t feel personal. There’s a great new tool called Community that helps to make messaging feel more one-to-one.
This is really best if you have already built up a great following on social media and are having success with DMs. This step takes things to the next level as people are more likely to engage with a text. Texting is the new DMs, DMs are email, email is mail, and mail is….whatever mail is now.
Take a look at our digital marketing blog to learn more about social media.
