Building and Growing an Online Community
Effective Principles on Online Community Building with Social Media
In order to build an effective online community using social media, it is first very important to form a clear vision for community collaboration. The first step in having a clear vision is to develop a vision statement. In order to develop a clear, effective vision statement, you need to understand when community collaboration is appropriate, know where community collaboration is more likely to deliver value, apply an understanding of your organization’s goals and culture, and craft and distribute an organizational vision for community collaboration.
After successfully developing a vision statement, it is important to consider a few aspects of community collaboration. Companies must be able to understand when community collaboration is appropriate and when it is not. Companies must apply an understanding of their organization’s goals and culture. Lastly, they have to be able to know where community collaboration is more likely to deliver value for their specific goals and objectives.
When a company has a complete understanding of their vision, goals, objectives, culture, and where community collaboration is likely to deliver value, they can then develop their own unique strategic approach to community collaboration. The first step in this approach is developing a well-formed purpose. Having this can motivate an identifiable target audience to participate and engage with content across all platforms.
Growing an Online Community
After watching the tutorial videos and taking the quizzes on the Hootsuite Podium module 4, I have learned some social media principles for growing an online community that I would like to share and discuss.
First, as a company it is most important to develop a strong brand voice and mission. All of your social media content will be centered around this. One of the best ways to establish this is to create a branded hashtag that will be used to help people engage online with your brand. This brings us to content. All companies must produce content on a regular basis in order to grow their community. Without content, even if your community grows large, it will not be engaging with you.
Beyond creating content, companies must use two-way communication to fully engage on social media. Two-way communication involves producing content and then responding and engaging with comments. If comments are positive or constructive criticism it is important to always respond and to do so with enthusiasm and in a positive way. This reflects well on the business. If content is vulgar, offensive, or seems like spam, it is important to hide or delete it from your feed.
Application of Principles for Social Media Client
The principles I have learned this week have helped me to give some great advice to my current social media client for this class. The small logistics company that I work for, Partners Bulk Logistics, hosts an annual golf outing for employees and customers. Our customers include the management of company’s we haul bulk material for. One recommendation was to include social media profile links and our branded hashtag on the banner for the golf outing. In addition, it will be printed on Koozies and golf tees given to participants for free. This is a great way to engage and grow our community. The amount of people that could potentially see our pages and follow and like them on social media increases substantially with this type of marketing campaign.
References for the book I read from and the videos I watched before starting this week’s discussion on building and growing an online community:
Bradley, Anthony J., and Mark P. McDonald. The Social Organization: How to use Social Media to Tap the Collective Genius of your Customers and Employees. Harvard Business Review Press, 2011. Pp. 39-76.
Hootsuite Module CH. 4: Building Your Advocate Community - https://education.hootsuite.com/courses/take/social-marketing-education/texts/2512115-chapter-4-overview
