7 Strategies for Achieving Phenomenal Online Community Growth

Over the past few years, a lot of attention has been paid to companies’ growing followers and marketing on social-media channels.

But the best kind of engagement involves building a real online community. Online communities that a company curates and grows can help it reach influencers, power brand recognition, increase website traffic, receive user feedback and connect with new potential customers.

For best practices in social-media community management, large companies offer inspiration. Examine how Whole Foods uses Facebook to drive issue awareness and field customer concerns and the way Boston Consulting Group enlists LinkedIn to drive thought leadership.

Large companies have realized the importance of social-media outreach and engagement. But you don’t have to have a large organization to develop a successful social-media presence or cultivate an online community. Here are seven strategies based on my experience.

1: Start early.
New social networks (such as Pinterest, Snapchat, Ello and Instagram) pop up all the time. Be an early adopter of new platforms to catch the spike in traffic and interest.

You can still achieve great success with established platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. But don’t miss the chance to build on new, rapidly growing social networks in the future. Invest time with current networks, but be on the lookout for fresh opportunities at the ground floor.

Match the platform.
Match the style and interests of your platform. Tailor your message, discussions and engagement to the expectations that your members have for this particular platform. If you’re forming a LinkedIn Group, for example, your content should be professional in nature and about careers or business.

In the Recruiter.com LinkedIn Group, my staff start discussions about interviewing and hiring best practices that solicit interest and feedback.

CNN is customizing specialized content to reach Snapchat’s audience. It’s a departure for CNN to delve into such ephemeral content, but the company is making a special effort to reach Snapchat’s audience.

3: Promote the group.
Some people might think that online communities on social-media platforms should be used to direct users to the company’s own website. But directing people away from a group is like leaving your windows open in the winter: All the energy escapes.

Instead, channel people into the group, inviting them by email and promoting the community on your owned properties. Drive active participation in this community using any and all resources at your disposal. If you promote the community actively over time, it will begin to grow on its own.

Recruiter.com staffers regularly invite people to connect with the company on major social networks engage users with questions on these platforms and solicits responses from newsletter subscribers and the corporate website's visitors.

There are utility technology who can also help to build intimate customer communities which is....
In today’s cloud-based, mobile-focused, inherently social world, customers demand a higher level of responsiveness than ever before: they expect businesses to provide what they want, when and how they want it.

But achieving this type of agility can be difficult for big businesses that are several levels removed from the customer and often struggle with the red tape of internal communications. In many cases, it can be several weeks before customer feedback filters up to the appropriate levels and change can be effected, frustrating customers and leading to a decline in brand loyalty.
Until very recently, middlemen such as distributors and agencies were the people who exclusively held relationships with customers -- because of limitations imposed by factors such as time, location and technology, businesses simply couldn’t connect with their customers in a personal fashion and were reliant upon the connection these middlemen provided.

But entrepreneurs today are changing all that. We’re finally seeing a move away from the traditional model towards a type of extroversion in dozens of young companies. Next-generation social infrastructure and mobile technology are making it possible. It reflects a radically different kind of customer intimacy that is all about understanding customers at an individual level, through personalization and direct connection utilizing social technology.

This new customer intimacy appreciates connections as much as it recognizes customers as individual buying units. It accepts that the consumption of goods and services almost always has a sometimes latent social component no matter what vertical you serve: education, healthcare, cooking, sports, finance, arts, entertainment, fashion, etc.

Your organization sits in a mostly invisible pool of customers, non-customers and influencers, a pool that is much larger than your organization and upon which your very existence is entirely dependent.

So what do you need to be doing? Not letting any distributors and agencies get between you and your customers, for starters. You need to not only get close to your customers, you need to meet them in the middle of the street. You need to make customers integral parts of your most creative processes -- make them part of your team.

It’s all about creating communities and 24/7 engagement with customers using social technology. These communities should consist of members from both inside (employees) and outside (customers) of your organization, and collaborate to accomplish goals. Like-minded customers can share information, employees can better understand and address customer concerns, and your organization can create and co-create with customers to build lasting relationships.

Below are some key precepts to adhere to when thinking about utilizing social technology to build these communities for your business:

Your community needs a mission.
The mission is what drives community engagement over the long term, and what separates communities of purpose from discussion forums. The community must be fully integrated with your business processes: begin by pinpointing specific customer pain points, and then focus the community on solving those through interaction and open discussion with customers.
Take this discussion a step further by incorporating customer feedback and producing iterations of the product based upon the discussions held in the community.

Remember to aim high -- the mission needs to hit a notch or two above the literal product or service category being delivered. Customers need to feel as if they are co-creating and that their opinions have a hand in shaping an improved product that meets their wants and needs.

Participation is a two-way street.
The mission the community decides upon must appeal to a higher, long-term sense of purpose, but for a community to work the collaboration needs to produce immediate benefits for each set of constituents. To build brand loyalty, customers need to see change happening quickly, and employees need to see that their connection with the customer is producing a return on their time investment.

Rather than traditional product development cycles of months or even years, adjust to shorter cycles that focus on incorporating customer feedback incrementally. Utilize social channels and rich-media content such as video to obtain immediate customer feedback and iterate quickly.

The process and technology can’t get in the way.
Organizational hierarchies shouldn’t get ripped apart, and IT resources shouldn’t get diverted from day-to-day operations. Look for social technologies that allow you to build communities that effectively float over existing hierarchies.

This way, there is minimal IT involvement (which means lowered costs and saved time), and your communities can get up and running in days or weeks, rather than months -- which means addressing customer concerns more quickly and effectively.

Services are a sweet spot.
Communities are about relationships, and relationships are inherent to services. So it’s no surprise that connected communities involve innovative services created by what had been, less than four years before, purely product groups.

To build lasting relationships with customers, it is imperative to constantly keep a customer-service mindset, regardless of what industry you operate in. Only then will buyers turn from one-time shoppers into lifelong customers. In other words, it’s no longer about providing a product -- everything is now a service.

Plan to contribute.
One of the hardest decisions you’ll make is determining how much time to spend on developing content for the online community. Spending valuable resources on a platform that you don’t own can seem like a foolish endeavor.

But either commit energy to building actual value in your group or watch it stagnate and die a slow death. My company has staff dedicated to social-media participation, outreach and moderation. Even without dedicated staff, an entrepreneur can carve out a few minutes each day to participate.

Build partnerships.
The importance of third-party sites and groups for promoting a company's community cannot be overstated. Network with other group owners and active forum moderators on a platform like LinkedIn to cross promote one another’s communities. Reach out to the news media and influential bloggers to get your online community named on “best of” and “top 50” style lists.

Such efforts can boost membership. Invite users to talk about your online community, link to the platform and highlight discussions of interest.

Tap advocates.
Don’t forget about your real-world relationships and connections when trying to grow a company Facebook page, Ning site or LinkedIn group.

What worked for me was encoraging people I knew to participate. This creates a strong center for the new community based on existing relationships. Such advocates might include current customers, users, colleagues, influencers and even relatives. Ask people to not only participate but also advocate on your behalf by inviting their connections.

Go for the long haul.
Online-community engagement via social media does not have a specific end date like a marketing campaign might. Develop a strategy that you can sustain over the long term. Consider using dedicated, focused staff or a professional social-media consulting firm. When you begin to see traction, redouble your efforts to compound your success.

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