December 2021
What is a brand community?
To have a successful brand community means that you have built a community of people that not only follow your brand on all of your social platforms, but they also share your brand with others and engage with all of your content. These are people who are loyal to your brand and truly care about what your brand is doing online. A brand community puts all of your most loyal fans in one place and gives them an opportunity to interact with each other and your brand. By building a strong brand community, you are giving yourself an audience that you can reach out to for feedback, and you can count on them to share your brand widely.
How can you build a successful brand community?
#1 – Define who or what your brand is
Before you can build a community around your brand, you need to have a full understanding of your brand and what it is. This means that you’ll need to have your mission and the voice of your brand fully developed. Once you have a defined plan about who your brand is and what it stands for, you’ll have a better idea of who your target audience is that will connect most strongly with your brand.
#2 – Determine your goals
Once you know who your brand is and who you’re targeting, you need to know how you will measure the success of your community. Will you monitor engagement rates or conversions? What metrics will you be tracking? How will you know that your audience is engaged? These are all questions that you will have to answer to ensure you have clearly defined your goals. Once you know the purpose of your community, you can move on to the next step.
#3 – Choose your platform
This is one of the most important questions you will have to answer. You will need to know which platform will help to promote your brand and where your target audience will be most active. Most brands choose to use social media as their main platform, but there are other options, such as a streaming platform or a blog. Social media is typically the easiest to get started and generates that most engagement. Facebook and Instagram are the two most prevalent social media platforms that most brands use to build their communities. You will have to determine which platform will help you meet your goals and reach your audience.
#4 – Engage with your community
Once you have chosen your platform, it’s time to get started engaging with your audience. You can do this by sharing social posts, articles, blogs, and creating polls. You will want to ensure that as your audience is engaging with your posts, you are liking their comments and commenting back. A community is a great way to answer your audience members’ questions and generate user content, as well, so you’ll want to take advantage of that.
#5 – Monitor your progress
You’ll want to routinely monitor the progress of your brand community and make sure that you are on track with your goals. If you notice that engagement is down and you aren’t meeting the goals you’ve set for yourself, then you will want to make adjustments to your strategy. A brand community isn’t just a social platform that you can set up and forget about. The only way you will get the full benefits of building a brand community is by being fully engaged and aware of what is happening on the page.
If you follow these 5 tips, you will be on your way to setting up a successful brand community. If you run into challenges along the way or just need help getting started, contact us and we can help you make your brand community successful.
