Statistics show that marketers will spend about $350 billion to fuel their social media advertising campaigns in 2023. This massive number doesn’t even account for ad spending across the global economy.
Does all this money evaporate into thin air? Probably not. It’s invested to build communities, thus producing more engagement and driving sales. With users worldwide spending about two hours and 27 minutes per day on social media, the potential is huge. But why does your business need a social media strategy in the first place?
Why a Social Media Community Is Essential for Businesses
The keyword of social media is “social.” By being social, you build a community of people who love to interact with your brand. Once you’ve achieved that, it becomes much easier to increase your brand awareness and sell your products or services.
When we observe carefully, we notice that social media communities can benefit your business in many ways:
They Spread Brand Awareness through Brand Ambassadors
In the age of influencer marketing, brand ambassadors can make your brand popular without having to spend much money on paid advertising. Differently from paid influencers, brand ambassadors who are current customers of your brand are more authentic.
Building a social media community attracts potential brand ambassadors who can spread the word about your brand via multiple media channels. They do it by sharing your content or posting customized content, among other ways.
They Become Repeat Customers
Once you’ve built a community on social media, no matter how small, some of them will eventually decide to purchase from you. But what happens after the first sale? Do they forget about your brand or keep purchasing? By educating and engaging with them through your channels, you’ll turn them into repeat customers who purchase from you again and again.
Social media is one of the best ways to stay in touch with your community of customers, and it can be used to positively influence customer retention. Knowing that acquiring new customers is five times more difficult than retaining current ones, building a social media community that strengthens customer retention is worth your time and money.
They Drive Recommendations
A loyal social media community is powerful because it drives recommendations in the most natural way possible. Social media is used by your customers to share snapshots of their daily lives. If your product or service is an integral part of their routines, they’ll recommend it to their audiences (especially when you incentivize them).
Even when they don’t share anything on their profiles but simply leave positive comments on your pages, potential customers who were on the fence about buying will find it easier to decide. 44% of people surveyed say that their purchasing decisions are influenced by brand conversations on social media more than by paid adverts.
They Bring New Customers
Views eventually turn into purchases. Your goal on social media is to get as much exposure as possible at the lowest cost. A loyal social media community helps you achieve this successfully.
With just the click of a button, they can share your content with their friends and bring more potential customers to your social media channels. From there, you can even encourage sharing by allowing them to build customized referral links.
They Provide UGC
“Content is king,” they say, but not all types perform the same. That’s why you should aim to create top-performing content for your brand. In this case, user-generated content (UGC) has an increased performance of 29% when used in advertising campaigns.
By building an engaging social media community, you’ll automatically start getting UGC. If you run contests to encourage users to produce content, you’ll have an endless amount of unique content to repost on your channels, use as testimonials, or incorporate into adverts.
11 Tips to Supercharge Your Social Media Marketing Community
Building a strong community on social media is challenging because the algorithm is not always on your side to start with. Less than 10% of your audience will see your content, which is not a lot if you have a small audience. But is there hope?
Sure there is. As long as you take the right steps while producing your content, you’ll achieve a lot more than you expected. Here are 11 tips to help you in the process, even if you’ve just started building your social media community.
1. Conduct Thorough Research
When you create a profile on social media, you’re a stranger. Even though you can craft your personalized bio and logo and introduce your business via stories and posts, the vast pool of social media users is global. You need to be specific in the way you present yourself, including whom you reach out to and engage with.
Here’s how to research your target communities on social media:
- Define the targeted demographics and their interests.
- Get market insights via surveys and social media listening.
- Participate in discussions in industry-related forums and Facebook groups.
2. Create Contests to Increase Engagement
By organizing contests, not only do you attract new followers, but you also win user-generated content (UGC) to enrich your social media strategy. User-generated content is proven to increase engagement since it shows strong authenticity.
A fundamental principle for successful contests is to prepare a relevant offer. The prize you’re offering should ignite a burning desire to win it among your audience. At the same time, this prize should align with your brand’s theme.
You may think no one would say “no” to an iPhone, but if your audience is businesses in the retail space, it makes little sense that they would engage with your contest. As a result, you’ll end up attracting the wrong audience. So, center your contests around your industry’s needs.
3. Set a Clear Objective
When we’re talking about objectives, we’re talking about progress. Progress is hard to measure if you don’t have milestones to achieve. That’s why, when you’re outlining your daily, weekly, or monthly social media strategy, your objectives are crucial.
For instance, a clear objective looks like this:
I will post once per day on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for at least six months. After posting, I will spend 40 minutes engaging with the best-performing accounts in my industry. At the end of six months, I expect a growth in engagement of at least 5%.
4. Diversify Your Content Strategy
Your content needs to be diverse to match the best-performing types found on your target platforms. Reposting the same video on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook won’t work. It’s best to publish content customized for each platform once a day, rather than posting the same content across all your channels three times per day.
Diverse content is crucial, especially when your audience is diverse in terms of interests, demographics, and beliefs. Besides content formats, you should also have diverse content that caters to each segment of your audience. Publish with the larger demographics in mind, and then have some pieces that speak to your smaller audiences.
5. Use the Right Tools to Cater to Your Community
Well-researched content is powerful, but posting consistently and analyzing your performance on an ongoing basis is what guarantees the steady growth of your community. To achieve success on this journey, the right social media tools will be your best friends.
The proper tools can track the performance of your content, and they come with scheduling options, so you don’t have to stay pinned to your devices to post at the same time daily. Moreover, by using such tools, you’ll be able to manage multiple accounts at once.
6. Post Video Content for Your Community
If you’re not yet taking advantage of video content, you’re missing a lot of growth opportunities. Over 86% of marketers say video content has helped them collect more leads and grow their social media communities. The effectiveness of video content can be seen in the booming of apps like TikTok.
Video content works best in short-form formats (these excellent TikTok ad examples testify to its success). That’s why most popular social media channels offer special options dedicated to short-form video content, similar to TikTok.
- YouTube offers Shorts.
- Instagram and Facebook offer Reels.
- Snapchat offers Multi Snap, etc.
7. Make Use of Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing helps you promote your products and services without directly paying the platform for ads. Instead of spending money testing Facebook ads until you find out what works, you can pay an influencer to promote your brand to their audience and encourage more users to join your social media community.
Some other characteristics these influencers should have include:
- Their audience matches your ideal audience.
- They’re not currently promoting your competitors.
- Their fees are affordable and reasonable.
- They’re ready to commit to a long-term partnership.
8. Avoid Being Too Pushy on Social Media Platforms
The fastest way to lose the trust and respect of your audience is by being over-promotional with your content. No one likes to be asked to buy all the time. Even if they like your products, they will get bored with your promotional content and probably unfollow you.
Social media content, just like highly converting email copy, deserves proper attention from you as a content creator. If you’re not yet ready to sell, your posts should end with a CTA that encourages comments, likes, and shares.
9. Engage with Your Audience Regularly
When growing a community around your brand on social media, ticking all the boxes that include content creation and posting isn’t everything. Don’t forget that you’re interacting with real humans behind their screens, and these humans all have different opinions to express.
Some of the best ways to engage with your audience are through quizzes, polls, questions, and stories. Facebook reports that 58% of its users claim they’ve been enticed to check out a brand’s website after seeing its stories.
10. Promote the Content You Share
Many talented creators are forgotten in silence — not because they’re not good enough, but because they don’t want to promote themselves. For them, marketing resembles an annoying salesman who knocks door-to-door, and everyone hates him. But speaking about your business doesn’t harm anyone. The truth is different.
There will always be people who feel annoyed and others who appreciate what you do. With or without marketing and promoting yourself, these two categories of people will always exist. So keep in mind to confidently promote your work and reach those who need what you offer. In this way, you’ll start building your own unique community of followers who love your craft.
11. Observe the Latest Trends and Changes
The ones who build large social media communities of loyal followers are those who follow the trends and adapt their strategies fast. With the ever-changing nature of algorithms and the engineers working to refine them day by day, updates are rolled out quicker than we expect.
Check out some of the trends shaping how we approach social media marketing:
- Social search is growing steadily as people use TikTok or Instagram to find answers to their questions instead of Google.
- Social commerce was expected to grow rapidly, but it’s slowing down, leaving time for businesses to catch up.
- Famous brands like Nike and Starbucks are throwing a lot of money into the Metaverse, disregarding the mass skepticism of its fate as the future of social media.
- Short-form videos are triumphing as the most captivating content format.
Even though important updates quickly become noticeable on social media, it’s best to stay informed by following official sites, such as the Meta Newsroom, Instagram Business blog, or Twitter blog, to learn about a recent update as it launches. This allows you to revise your social media strategy instantly and provide your community with recent content.
Top Social Media Tools for 2023
The savviest community management teams would agree that social media tools save time and make their jobs easier. They come with great features that allow you to schedule posts, moderate comments and messages, track performance, and produce seamless reports.
Here are four of these tools you must try in 2023:
1. Buffer
Coming with a free plan that lasts forever, Buffer has an intuitive interface that is easy to navigate and tons of helpful content on its site. Suitable for small to medium-sized businesses, Buffer offers the fundamental options of sharing and drafting posts for Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Twitter. By scheduling posts, you’ll have more time to engage with your users and reply to their comments.
2. Bulkly
Buffer offers so many options that sometimes you may need to combine it with another tool like Bulkly in order to cater to your communities. You’ll be able to revise old social media updates, automate the process of adding social media content, upload CSV files detailing these updates, shuffle posts, and utilize many other convenient features. For instance, Bulkly helps you generate multiple social media updates from your blog posts to keep your community updated.
3. Hootsuite
Over 18 million people rely on the power of this content marketing software. Hootsuite allows you to schedule and tracks the performance of your content starting at $49 per month. The platform helps you measure your social ROI, schedule content, run ads, and manage multiple accounts across 35 different social networks. Moreover, you’re able to respond to all messages from multiple social media accounts from a single unified inbox.
4. Sprout Social
If you’re committed to making your social media channels thrive, you should incorporate Sprout Social into your community management strategy. Even though it costs slightly more than its competitors (around $89/month), it comes with many useful features. It includes all the functionalities of the platforms mentioned above, and it also produces outstanding moderator reports. It allows you to perform social media listening and monitor the conversations about your brand across your channels.
Quick guide on how to build social media community
Building a social media community starts small, but it can grow steadily, depending on the work and content quality you put into it. Once the community starts growing, you should be more careful about the content you post, the contests you launch, and the influencers you work with. These are some of the best strategies used to grow your community.
At the same time, they can backfire if not done right. The wrong content encourages your audience to unfollow you, and unrelated partnerships might cause divisions between your fans. Always do your research properly to avoid mistakes while producing content, and use social media tools to schedule your content and spend less time on automatable tasks.