Nowadays, thanks to the miracles of e-commerce and social media, there is a strong overlap between community and customers. People who buy products, leave reviews and recommend you to others make up a single large community that uses many different channels. And these people are not only intelligent and with excellent taste (of course) but they can also become precious ambassadors of your brand.
With a pinch of planning and creativity, even the smallest business can create an active and involved online community. Here are the 5 steps to follow to grow your online community.
1. Set realistic goals
A lively and dynamic community does not create us overnight. You need to consider your community a long-term project and set goals along the way. Whenever you reply to a comment or post an image, add another brick to your virtual clubhouse. Of course, you cannot devote all your time to this activity, so we advise you to work on it often and for a short time, logging into the community every day and spending 5-10 minutes answering comments or questions.
2. Create spaces for the community
To operate in a sustainable way it is important to create your own online community on a platform that is suitable for your style and your way of doing business. Facebook, for example, is ideal for finding new users and reaching many people thanks to the high number of subscribers and the ease of sharing posts, while Instagram is perfect for artistic or luxury brands. And Twitter is very useful if you intend to involve people using wit, intuition and knowledge.
Make sure to include in all your common spaces a clearly visible link or an “About Us” section that leads to your site, online store or other main social channel. In this way, customers can shop easily, choosing between different channels.
3. Be recognizable
If you use different platforms, for example, Twitter, Behance and Facebook, think about how to keep a coherent image. Will you have a main channel that automatically posts the same content to other interconnected multiple channels or accounts?
Whichever site or app you use, choose an account name that matches your brand or the name of your shop, and also coordinate the visual aspects, personalizing them as much as possible with your distinctive colors and graphic elements. We also recommend that you coordinate the design of your Business Cards and other offline marketing tools such as Postcards or Stickers
