Do you want to engage with your community? Your answer should be yes. It’s a vital part of building and nurturing a relationship between you or your brand and your customers, users, or fans. With successful community engagement, you’ll build brand loyalty and increase user retention, and it’ll help to drive more leads to your company. This is ultimately more cost-effective than relying on ad campaigns on Facebook; with an engaged community, they drive the leads for you. Though these strategies might not work for everyone, here are a few community engagement strategies you could start using today.
Provide a space for community engagement.
You won’t have a community without any members, and you won’t have any members if they don’t have a place to gather and interact with one another. Though the community might build up with you as the topic, ultimately everything is about your members. They want to talk to one another about you and your brand or other important things, and you should encourage them to do so. If your community feels like it’s being heard and that what they’re saying is being valued, they’ll be more likely to stick with you and your platform.
You can show them that you hear them by sharing user-generated content online (with permission from the users, of course). It will not only let you interact with those you’re there for, but it’ll also help assure you that you’re not posting to the void.
Be responsive to your members.
Very few people like to talk to themselves when they could be talking with other people. Communities aren’t formed just by existing in a similar fanbase; they need to interact with one another. This also goes for you—if you want to build a repertoire with your fans, you need to interact with them once in a while. What are people posting about in your community? What are they sharing? How can you engage with these posts? By showing your face in the group you’ve created, you’ll build a relationship with your followers, and that can eventually lead to trust and retention.
Make things fun!
When done right, community engagement can be a ton of fun! You’ll only bore people if you post nothing but promotional content for them to see—frankly, it’s a surefire way to get confused with a bot posting pre-scheduled messages rather than a real person behind the screen. Balance your posts between promotional ones and creative content (photos, videos, what you’re working on presently, etc.). Doing so will eventually set you up for monetization opportunities, and from there, you’ll be golden.