According to a HubSpot study, 86% of social media managers suggest that an online community is an important part of a good social media strategy. Additionally, 27% of social media users are actively participating in online communities. This is a clear indication that communities have become a key part of growing social media organically without ads.

When well done, communities can help you enhance your marketing strategy rather than just add an engagement tactic. It can help you improve your brand trust, enhance customer retention, build a feedback loop, and increase advocacy participation, thereby improving ROI for an organization where social media influences ROI. In this article, we look at the top strategies for building a community on social media.

What is a Social Media Community?

A social media community is a group of people who interact on social media platforms, sharing goals, values, and interests. The communities can be on different platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, and others. They offer their members an opportunity to participate in content creation, engage in discussions, support one another, and improve relationships. 

Importance of Having a Social Media Community

Having a social media community comes with some benefits, such as:

More Brand Discoverability

When you promote your brand on social media, you can improve discoverability, especially when your brand is seen as actively engaging in conversations already happening within a community. When you have a community on social media, you can enjoy various benefits, such as:

• Appearing in relevant discussions.
• Showing your company to be a helpful resource.
• Enabling brand recall.

When you have the right skills for community building, your brand can strengthen its recall and ensure a more meaningful connection with its target audience. You can read our guide on building an engaged Instagram community.

Get Helpful Feedback

When you build an online community, you can easily build strong relationships with users who are already interested in your brand. Having a community of such engaged users can provide valuable feedback based on their experience with the product. This amount of feedback can ensure continuous improvement across areas such as product development and customer service.

Offer Helpful Value

The reason most modern consumers choose a brand isn't the product they sell, but the experience and value they get. You can use communities to determine how your customers can get deeper value. Community value can help brands to:

• Show the value they offer transparently.
• Share resources and knowledge on a bigger scale.
• Add an experience beyond the product's functionality.

Therefore, community building can foster an emotional connection with your customers, strengthen brand loyalty, and build long-term brand affinity.

Steps in Building a Social Media Community

If you want to build a social media community, you can follow these steps:

Find Community Members

Without members of your community, it can be hard to build a community. This should involve more than defining the target audience. It should also involve understanding your customers, their needs, and where and how they prefer to connect. After identifying a community interested in your brand, you can reach out to them in a creative and authentic way.

Define Your Community

When building a social media community forum, you need to clearly define your community and how you want people to understand it. Make sure the community remains open and inclusive. Unless the community is open and welcoming, it will struggle to attract new people. Your community should also inspire people to join, not push them away.

Be Transparent and Authentic

If you want to turn your audience into loyal customers and fans, you need to be transparent. The idea is to enable your followers to see if there is any real value in being part of the community. To gain your audience's trust, offer essential insights, provide support, and foster genuine interaction.

Avoid creating too many promotional messages. Instead, focus on offering value to your audience. If you focus too much on promotional posts, your audience will feel disconnected and stop engaging with your content, resulting in a lower level of loyalty and trust. On the other hand, when you focus more on your audience's interests and needs, you can gain their trust using honest communication, which can, in turn, result in a more meaningful engagement and enable the long-term growth of the community.

Leverage Storytelling

Storytelling is an effective strategy for connecting with audiences on platforms like TikTok and driving engagement. On platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn, you can use behind-the-scenes content and storytelling to create content that better resonates with the target audience.

There are also certain content formats that can help in community building, such as quote images, TikTok emojis, branded GIFs, and memes. When used correctly, they can increase engagement with your content, making it shareable and relatable, and improving your brand's likability. You can offer your followers special promotions to show that you really care about them and want to reward them for their engagement and loyalty.

Remember that social media users love authentic, relatable stories that offer deeper insights into your brand, its value, and its people. The stories can be in different forms, such as:

• Customer success stories.
• Behind-the-scenes content.
• Brand journey.

These stories can help you increase trust and loyalty, resulting in a stronger brand identity and stronger organic interactions.

Make Your Followers Seen and Heard

Humans like being valued and heard, and this is one of the things you need to keep in mind when creating a community. You want to make your followers feel appreciated and heard by actively listening to their feedback, responding to any concerns, and celebrating their contributions.

When you create a sense of community, it's easy to turn those passive followers into vibrant brand advocates who will contribute to its growth. Fostering a sense of inclusion, community, and validation will also help you build loyalty and trust. This is especially true when you offer personalized messages and genuine interactions with your audience that make them feel seen and valued, reinforcing your brand's image as trustworthy. Create content that genuinely helps your followers solve a specific problem.

Ensure you also follow best practices on social media, such as sharing new features, product improvements, and upcoming releases. You can highlight the updates to address some commission challenges, thereby improving your experience.

Engage Actively

To foster a sense of community, you need to actively engage with your community members. You can do that by actively responding to community members in DMs, on Reddit, in comments, and in other spaces. Remember that each time you respond to a community, you will be speaking one-on-one with the person while also speaking to the whole community.

Make sure your community engagement focuses on building stronger relationships in different ways, such as through upcoming events your target audience may be interested in, solving a specific problem, or escalating a problem to support. Follow your workflows and track the different user behaviors resulting from the interactions.

Best Practices for Social Media Community Management

After creating an outstanding, engaging community, use the following best practices for community management.

• Use a consistent voice. Your brand tone and voice should be consistent across your community. This will ensure your communities recognize your brand when they encounter its materials on social media.
• Be responsive. When you make your social media followers feel like they are being spoken to rather than participants in an ongoing conversation, they will feel that your brand is only interested in itself and doesn't care about their needs. You can, however, humanize it by responding to followers, thereby enhancing affinity.
• Share strategically. A good idea is to provide your community members with helpful content that caters to your audience’s interests. Make sure only 20% of your content is promotional, with the other 80% is helpful content. Use that 80% to support the insights and ideas that your brand believes in. Again, make sure all your content is authentic.
• Use personal identifiers. These can be your first name or initials, to make the interaction feel more human and improve your social customer service.
• Add CTAs. Add a persuasive CTA that inspires audiences to better understand your brand, so it can lead to a conversion in the future.
• Use a personal identifier. Make sure you have a post series and recurring topics that your followers and fans can look forward to participating in. This can result in higher engagement.
• Use recurring topics. You can create post series or recurring topics that your followers and fans will look forward to. This can lead to recurring engagement.
• Track engagement. Check engagement to identify content and posts that resonate with the target audience. You can also conduct competitor analysis to see which content drives the highest engagement. You can then use the data to improve your content.

In Conclusion

One of the best ways of driving engagement on social media is through community building. When followers feel like they are a member of your community, they are likely to trust your brand more. Therefore, use the tips above to build a social media community that drives your long-term growth.