An active, loyal, and nurtured community is what signals a great brand. But how do you build a community like that? The obvious answer is: on social media. And with the right community-building strategy (yes, you need a strategy, just like with just about anything in marketing.) Here are some pointers if you’re looking to build one.
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Why do I need community-building strategies? 🙄
I know, it would be great to just jump in and create a vibrant brand community on the fly, with spontaneous activities and genuine interest. And yes, those are really helpful, so don’t throw them out the window just yet.
But building brand communities is a time-consuming endeavor. And to build a brand community consistently and effectively, you need to plan ahead. And that’s what community-building strategies are for:
- To maintain consistent engagement instead of just random bursts of activity whenever there’s time (which is, let’s face it, almost never. And definitely not when you need it the most.)
- To create communities aligned with larger brand awareness and marketing communication goals and things like product roadmaps.
- To see what’s actually working and what needs to be improved so that the brand community can hit those goals for you.
- To collect valuable information and insights about your customers and use them to improve your products or services and target your marketing comms better.
- To measure your community-building activities against concrete targets and KPIs.
Because, yes, communities are about people, engagement, and authenticity. But if you’re building a community around a brand, best practices for effective marketing also apply.
So, without further ado, let’s take a look at some effective community-building strategies to adopt, with tools that make applying them easier and more efficient.
6 community building strategies to adopt in 2024
1. Be on the right platform(s)
No, I can’t tell you to just “go on TikTok.” And no, you don’t have to limit yourself to one platform – though you can absolutely do it. What’s important to consider is:
- Where your customers hang out
- What resources you have (or can have) to create content and manage engagement
- How the different platforms tie in with your overall business goals.
So, while not everyone needs to be on TikTok, if your audience is there (because they’re Gen Z, or you’re in a niche where lots of people use TikTok, regardless of their generation label), it will be a good idea to get on there and start building an engaged community on the platform.
Some examples of brands who’ve picked single social media platforms to build their brand communities:
- Wendy’s on X (formerly Twitter) talking to their customers and other competitor brands
- Bumble and their rebrand communicated on Instagram (and TikTok)
- Ryanair on TikTok with their own twist on popular trends, getting them hundreds of comments
2. Come up with your own format
Of course, as you can see from the above examples, just being on a platform will not get you the community that you want to build. You have to come up with an idea – ideally (pun intended), something that you can repeat and that people can get used to and recognize. Just like, for example, Ryanair’s takes on popular TikTok trends.
The more original your format, the more engaging it can become, with people literally waiting to get engaged in the comment section.
And how do you know what content to post?
- Ask your audience directly.
- Research what your competitors are doing and what gets people engaged.
- Stay on top of the trends popular among your target audience.
- Look into your own social media statistics and see what content people respond to.
A.k.a., put together a strategy and a plan for how you’re going to execute it, including posting frequency, best times to post, and internal resources to create the content that people will want to respond to in the comments.
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3. Show up in the comments
Speaking of comment sections, posting content (based on a solid content strategy, of course) is just the first step. But what happens in the comment section is where the true community is built and engaged.
Which is why you should never, ever ignore your comments and what happens there. This means:
- Responding – on time and on point
- Removing hateful comments, spam, and blocking trolls
- Being helpful
- Not ignoring or leaving your community members on read.
All of this requires your active participation in the community. And yes, it might be overwhelming – the more so as your community-building strategies work and the engagement keeps growing.
The solution? You might already know you can’t – at least effectively – do it on your own. So get a Social Inbox that can bring the chaos from the comments into a neat community management workflow:
- Keep track of all comments and messages from Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, and even the reviews on Google, in Google Play Store, and Apple App Store – all in one place.
- Reply to comments in different languages – the tool will automatically translate the comment and your response into whatever language you use.
- Assign comment threads as customer service tickets to community moderators (if you’re lucky to have a team) so that all customer conversations and interactions get the love they deserve.
- Tag comments and their authors so your team can easily recognize loyal community members (and the trolls, too). You can even build more complex customer profiles with conversation history, making it even easier to build relationships with community members.
- Tagging will also help you route conversations to the right moderators based on, for example, topic, product, or author.
- Swiftly remove spam and hate from your comments (you can even do it automatically) to keep your comment section a nice place to be for your community.
4. Ask questions
This might seem too simple to call it a community-building strategy, but hear me out. Social media is obviously a two-way street – this is why it’s been such a revolutionary marketing channel. It’s helped brands reach more customers increasing brand visibility. But it’s also given customers direct access to brands. So that both sides can actually have conversations.
Now an important part of any conversation is showing interest in the other party. And how do you do that? You ask questions.
Questions are great conversation starters, so use them:
- In your social media content. Basically every post, TikTok, or reel caption should end with a question. This is how you get people engaged beyond just liking your content.
- Add questions to your Instagram Stories and share answers later.
- Ask people to ask you questions and then answer them in your stories.
- You can also ask people to ask questions to other members of your community – and then show their answers.
- Create content based on your followers’ questions in the comments on TikTok.
- Add polls to your reels and Stories, then discuss the results.
- Create Facebook groups where people can talk to you and to each other. Ask questions and encourage them to ask others questions they need answers to.
- You can even interview people for your video content, e.g., on TikTok. There are so many options.
See? Questions might be a super simple idea, but they can be really powerful engagement builders on social media. And yes, you can build an entire strategy around them.
For example, Salary Transparent Street is a TikTok account based on asking people questions about their jobs and how much they make – and now an entire active community of people.
5. Work with influencers/ambassadors
Your community doesn’t have to be built solely on your social media profiles. If you work with the right people who can become your brand ambassadors, your community can extend to their social media channels. This is how you expand your reach as a brand and gain invaluable help managing and fostering an engaged community.
Things to consider:
- Find people who are right for your brand – including having an audience that’s aligned with who you’re targeting as a brand.
- Don’t just look at the following numbers. How engaged their audience is is much more important when it comes to community building than how many followers they have (if they’re even legit.)
- Go for creators and ambassadors who are easy to work with and open to helping you build an engaged community instead of just serving them your ads. Communities need much more attention than that.
6. Automate the overwhelming parts of community building
You might think that automation and community don’t go together. Let me show you how they actually can.
- Remember how removing spam and hate comments was important, so that your community members feel safe and motivated to engage? That’s one thing you can (and probably should) automate. With Auto-moderation in NapoleonCat you can automatically hide spam comments containing certain words or even links. That’s a lot of time saved for your community managers that they can channel into actually having conversations with your community members.
- You can also set up smart replies to instantly let people know when you’re unavailable (outside of working hours or on vacation) or reply to simple comments or messages related to your products. This way, you’re showing instant attention and can decide where your community managers’ efforts go when it comes to relationship building.
You can’t really fake or automate genuine engagement. Still, when you do automate the more straightforward aspects of community management, you’ll gain a lot more time for those more meaningful conversations and more in-depth community-building activities.
Manage your social media community with one tool
Manage all social media interactions from one view. Reduce response time with an all-in-one social media tool.
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Build organic engagement with the help of automation
True community engagement is and always will be rooted in authentic human interactions. But to have time and energy for those while communicating with customers not just in small groups but at scale, you could use a little bit of help from automation tools like NapoleonCat.
Not to replace the interactions, but to actually make more interactions possible without losing the human element that’s essential in any community.
You may also like:
- How to Build a Social Media Community
- How to Deal with Trolls on Social Media – A Much-Needed Guide
- How to Provide Excellent Social Media Customer Service
- Top 10 Customer Service Tools
- 7 Best Practices of Using Social Media in a Customer Care Strategy
- Why You Should Automate Facebook Ad Comment Moderation
- How to Monitor Social Media for Negative Reviews and Protect Your Brand Reputation
- The Best Social Media Crisis Management Tool
