For your business or brand, are you trying to create a community? Looking to go beyond only a huge number of Facebook fans or followers on Twitter?
To help create and manage communities, this article reveals three valuable tips you need to know.
- Embed within your group
Group administrators must also incorporate themselves and become integrated with the community within the community they represent.
The consequence is that group members gather useful data and insights and report back to management. Usually, reporting is input on how to strengthen the goods, services or business processes of the organization.
If they are honest and leave egos at the door, community managers will be successful. Group members are wise and can see right through egos and they can call you on it many times. Just to be yourself is the best tip Ben Givon can give to a group manager.
2. Don’t concentrate only on monetizing.
The worst mistake a group manager can make is to start shouting at the rest of the community with “one-way” marketing messages. Either of two things the members will do: they will either leave the party or publicly call you out on it. Both are terrible for companies and should be stopped at all costs.
Sadly, cases like this are still happening today. For the sole purpose of monetization, brands and small businesses create groups, fan pages or Ning communities. As a consequence, there might be some sales, but there is little or no long-term advantage, much less repeat sales.
Ben Givon emphasizes that building the community, winning the confidence of members and delicately asking for their permission to sell their services is the most efficient strategy to drive revenue for a company.
3. Don’t just listen, include the community.
Yes, the hot topic today is “listening” and with new apps launching every month, the resources are just about commoditized. Building strong consumer loyalty is not only listening, but also behaving, integrating yourself and being a trusted voice within the community. The challenge for any social media company is to finally “become credible.” And that means gaining consumer trust.
These are three tips for building confidence in your community and your business by Ben Givon. These tips will help you build a community and business that are based on trust and in this way will lead to more sales and success of your business. Good luck!
