Sociatic

Posts Tagged ‘social community’

Posted on September 6, 2010 - by Kwame

18 Tips Every Social Community Leader Should Remember

Are your followers on the social web for real? I ask this because sometimes it seems no one, out of thousands or tens of thousands of followers, is paying attention to anything you say or do. We hear stories of businesses with just a few hundred followers closing sales whiles others with thousands of followers are not able to leverage this and close a single sale.

If your primary aim of using social media is to help and direct people, then you’re qualified to be called a social community leader. That’s the only reason people will pay attention to you; if you lead them.

If you want to direct people to do what you want, take a cue from these 18 tips for social community leaders:

1. Develop synergistic relationships with your community so that they automate your marketing for you. Help them to achieve their goals (solve their problems) and they’ll help you solve yours.

2. Clarify your goals and objectives for each of your social web profiles. If you’re going to sell on one Twitter account and provide support on the other account, say so. Mixing things up is okay but some people find that hard to cope with.

3. Provide feedback to your community. Don’t always take their feedback and testimonials; give them yours. A good way to do this is to share with them the results you’ve got due to their participation in your business. This is a great way to show appreciation to your community and it also shows them that you listen to them.

4. Encourage and participate in discussions by asking questions in your status updates. Discussions often lead to more ideas and better insight of your community.

5. Strive to answer questions thrown @ you in a timely fashion. Huge time lapses reduce the momentum needed for a conversation to start or continue.

6. Don’t be ethnocentric. I don’t know how some people think but I added this one because I saw a terrible example of a status update with ethnic favoritism. Your community might be made up of people from all races so you don’t want to be ethnocentric no matter what you believe.

7. Develop a reward system for people who participate and take action in your social web communities. It doesn’t have to be a scheduled promo. You can give out stuff at random without announcing it. Announce it only after you’ve done it. This will make people start paying attention to you. They may even follow you and put you on a special list if this happened on Twitter so that they can see what you’re up to and take action when you ask them to.

8. Perform a social media audit regularly. This will help you improve your social media campaigns.

9. Brainstorm creative ways you can use to power up your community. Maybe offering freebies, tips and discounts sound interesting but how about adding some creativity to these campaigns?

10. Don’t argue. Drop your ego to a certain level. If you start arguing with one person in your community, everyone else sees it and people will begin to take sides. This will break the community you have worked so hard to build.

11.  Continue learning new ways to improve your community. Learn about online trends and facts so you know how consumers are evolving and also where they are spending more time and money.

12. Marketing Automation doesn’t mean using a bot or other tools to reach your community. Rather, it means you’ve gotten to the point where your community does your job for you.

13. Learn more about content marketing. Content sharing is now a big part of social media and smart marketers are producing more content. It is best to learn about different content marketing techniques so you can reach many people with different content formats.

14.  Strive to be indispensable to your followers. In other words, don’t be the average Joe. That’s too common and people are used to ‘common’. Be a resource.

15.  Explore ways other community leaders are building their communities. There are a lot of creative minds and campaigns out there. Borrow their ideas and mix them up with yours.

16.  Track and measure your effectiveness. That way, you know what you’re getting wrong and what needs to be fixed. Maybe the only person who’s paying attention to you is yourself. You’ll only know when you track and measure.

17.  Don’t share your blog post again and again. Don’t share your promotions again and again in one day. This is called spamming. I hate and so do your followers.

18. Only follow people you deem as qualified for helping you achieve your goals. By qualified, I mean targeted or your target audience. Following just anybody will only make your work difficult.

19. This is a bonus point. After harnessing all 18 steps, rinse and repeat . It’s time to get real with your followers. Just do it (borrowed from Nike )!

Here are some other articles you should consider reading. They are a valuable resource to me and will be to you:

On Managing a Community : ChrisBrogan.com

The Role of Leadership in Social Media: ScottMonty.com

The Power of Community – A Social Media Success Story by Hessie Jones: DannyBrown.me

Sometimes, when I see posts that I love (like the ones I’ve shared), I share them to say thank you. Just an idea for you to use if you know what I mean .

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