Building and engaging a community

Building and engaging a community

Perhaps the greatest value of social media marketing is your ability to foster and engage with a community of other people. That engagement is at the heart of social media, and without it, you're left with a megaphone and no one to hear you. You have the opportunity to interact with customers from all over the world—including those who are right down the street—on a huge scale. If a current or prospective customer has something to say to you or about you, you now have the ability to respond immediately.

In addition to responsive communication, brands and businesses can begin to build relationships with their customers beyond those that happen during normal transactions. These relationships are what keep customers coming back, increasing both loyalty and retention. If those customers become advocates and increase your word-of-mouth presence, you'll start seeing amazing returns.

By providing a great place of engagement for your community and helping build valuable, authentic resources for your brand's niche, you're also building up authority for your brand within your industry. You'll find your customers increasingly trusting what you say and coming to you for resources that can help them solve their own challenges. Heck, you may even find yourself lending a hand to a competitor in the space. All brands start in a similar unknown place, and the more you give, the more authority you'll get back. A great example is REI, which not only sells outdoor gear, but is also a known resource for tips on hiking, snowshoeing, zombie survival, and a whole host of other activities centered around the outdoors.

Moving from "like" to "love" to "defend"

The feelings of any community member toward your brand can range from resentment to adoration and beyond. We'll address the negative feelings later on; the people we want to concentrate on now are those we hope to move along a spectrum from simply "liking" you all the way to being willing to defend you and your brand.

The first step is getting people to simply like you, whether on Facebook, by word of mouth, or however. The people who like you are consistently having their expectations met. This typically feels transactional with a low level of engagement, though there's certainly nothing wrong with that.

Like any relationship, forming bonds that take you to the next level highly depends on the needs of both your brand and the individuals with whom you're interacting. You want to form these bonds on positive experiences you have together that benefit both of you. (This is not to say that bonds can't be formed through adversity, but having say a positive Twitter exchange around helping someone is better than one around how your product is malfunctioning.) Even better if these experiences bring delight and build your unique brand voice. For example, when Kotex started their Pinterest account, they selected 50 female users and sent them unique packages based on their Pinterest boards. Not only were these women surprised and happy, but all shared about what Kotex did on their social networks, creating a cascade of warm feelings.

There is another level where this relationship grows even deeper. When a customer becomes willing to defend your brand, you know you've really outdone yourself. This final "willingness to defend" stage is brand and social nirvana, as community members are not only engaging frequently and providing recommendations, but also standing up to advocate your work and defend you from brand detractors.

You can never expect your community to handle 100% of the customer service issues or questions that arise. They aren't fully equipped, and it's not their job. But you can expect, after your initial investment and cultivation, that some community members will begin to step up and help out when they can and where appropriate. (This is a good time to think about how to recognize and even reward your most active participants.) When that happens, you begin to see how your efforts will start to scale as you continue to boost your community engagement efforts. It frees you up to work on other engagements, and as you might imagine, an advocate standing up for a brand is far more powerful than a brand standing up for itself. There's a level of authenticity built into that sort of peer-to-peer interaction that can't be found in brand-to-customer interactions.

It's not just about marketing

The community engagement that social media affords is beneficial to nearly every part of your organization, from the product team to HR and more. As an added bonus, getting more colleagues involved will lighten your load. To get you started, here are a few areas that see the most obvious value.

Content creation

By using your search traffic data, on-site engagements, and social listening efforts, your social media presence can help you determine what people are looking for and create content that fulfills their needs. (Not to mention giving you a wonderful way to share that content once it's available.) Topics for content will likely fall in one of three buckets:

Learn and improve

This type of content is designed to optimize your customers' tasks or workflow. You are attempting to make their lives better by more fully utilizing your product (feature education, etc.), or even by offering assistance. The main goals of this content type are to build authority, drive connections, and increase engagement.

Explore and discover

Customers wanting to get creative and find new ways to use your product are looking for this type of content. For this group, building relationships is going to be tantamount; these relationships will breed ideation and community.

Question and answer

This type of content serves to meet customer support needs. Something has gone wrong, and customers seek a solution. This can range from a detailed forum thread on resolving a technical issue to a simple question and answer on how to make a product return. Your main goal is to drive answers.

Also, don't overlook the content that can be generated within your own community. User-generated content can be amazing—a gift, even! Your users can help write what your audience finds interesting, relevant, and useful. The possibilities are endless.

Using analytics tools like SimplyMeasured, True Social Metrics, as well as tools from the networks themselves, you can measure the conversations you’re having on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and even YouTube for content creation ideas. The big takeaway: Members of your community are openly talking about what they want. In order to reap the benefits of that conversation, all you need to do is listen. It's remarkably easy to derive meaningful insights when you're looking in the right places.

Customer service

It's a pretty natural human reaction to complain when something doesn't go our way. In the past, we might simply have vented our frustration to a couple of friends. Now, we turn to Twitter and Facebook. A much larger audience is listening there—one that is not limited by geography and has the ability to easily amplify any complaints. As a company, when individuals use their social channels as a means of complaining about you, it can be frightening at first. It can feel like you're being attacked and like you have no control. But these truly are opportunities to jump in and help rectify the situation, even improving the customer's experience with your brand.

Bottom line: We're rising with the tide of our customers' expectations.

Not all customers will address you directly, however, so it helps to be listening. Always make sure it's clear and easy for people to easily contact you. It may help prevent a Twitter rant or an upset Facebook update.

Some customers out there are ready to engage with questions, concerns, and even complaints, and it's your job to be there. But you don't have to do it alone. Remember that as you move your community members into more meaningful relationships with your brand, they'll stand up to defend you. You have to put in the muscle up front, but after a while, you'll start seeing evidence of your community stepping in to help each other on your behalf.

With some training and an emphasis on consistent voice, social participation can be picked up by other customer service-oriented departments inside the company. When social engagement is not the sole responsibility of a social media marketing professional, but rather a distributed effort across functional areas of the company, you'll be able to better serve your customers while running an efficient and informed business.

Product development

At no other time in history have businesses had more access to customers at scale than they do now, and product development stands to benefit from this perhaps more than any other group. Input from social media, though, can be both a blessing and a curse, as people don't always know precisely what they think or want. There's a quote widely attributed to Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company, that goes, "If I had asked the people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

It's easy to make the mistake of treating all customer input as gospel. Feedback is incredibly important, but that being said, you should take that feedback in the context of everything else you know about your product and your brand. A few complaints are not necessarily representative of your entire userbase, so the feedback you're seeing may not be completely representative of the truth. There are several tactics you can employ to make sure you're gleaning all the right benefits of this customer feedback without assigning artificial weight.

Create beta/tester communities: This can be done in a couple of ways. You can curate a list of community members who would be most helpful—power users from across the social web, enthusiast bloggers, and so on—into a group connected by email, a Facebook group, or other social mechanism. You can also create special restricted areas of your forum-based communities where these power users can converse, engage, and network while participating in conversations you generate. This special access can serve as a reward for those community members, and it can lead to incredibly useful insights for you and your brand.

Listen for your competition: As you listen for product feedback, you'll want to analyze sentiment, look out for specific problems, and see what the greater community says about your competitors. Conversations happening around your competition's products/offerings can provide endless amounts of insight for your own efforts.

Measurement: Just as you can glean insights about your products by sifting through your web analytics, you can gain similar clues by watching and measuring the performance of your social channels. Do posts about one product frequently outperform similar posts about another? Your customers might be telling you something about which they like better.

Human resources

Social media can play a wonderful role in HR, as well: encouraging employee engagement, finding and connecting with new recruits, and even helping with retention efforts.

A word about governance: Depending on the culture at your organization, your HR department might need to play a part in any implementation of social media, and regardless of the culture, getting their buy-in is always a good idea. Working with your HR professionals during the development of your social media policies and governance can help ensure your organization is protected from risk while empowering its employees. Definitely get in touch with them before pulling other employees into your efforts; this is one area where you'd rather ask permission than forgiveness.

Beyond those governance considerations, though, social media can be a remarkable tool for HR professionals. Some of the areas you may be able to grow your efforts into HR include:

Recruiting

Social channels are the perfect place to reach new applicants. People search for job openings online, and chances are that some of them have already "liked" you, so why not reach them where they're already spending their time? Given its interest, your community will also be more apt to share these openings with its networks.

Internal social networking

There are some social networks that are designed to be used entirely inside an organization. Some people like Yammer. Some prefer Chatter. Heck, some even use Basecamp or Jive. Whatever flavor you pick, social networking tools used internally can be incredible for knowledge sharing, building a sense of camaraderie, and increasing cross-functional collaboration. Internal social networks can also be valuable for governance and policy awareness efforts.

Career advancement

Being active and fully aware of the "hows and whats" of social media is quickly becoming a mandatory skill in today's workforce. This skill cannot be overlooked, especially for HR professionals. Social media can also be used to network online and learn about trending topics in a specific field, discovering new areas of opportunity for the business that might include niche communities for related professions.

Social media is not something that should be solely utilized by any one team within a company. Ideally, the entire organization is involved in some facet of the company's social media and has a deep understanding of their customers through participation. Cross-functionally distributing the social media effort also helps ensure the right people take the helm at the right time.

At the same time, it's important to maintain consistent voice and branding for every aspect of your company's social efforts, so you'll want to at least create a set of basic guidelines for everyone involved.