Community Building

3 steps to create your community management strategy (1/3)

Building and engaging a community is certainly one of the best ways to grow your business

When you are running a business, there’s a high chance that your target market is using social media. After all, today about 31% of the population is active on a social network or another, and the average duration of a single connection in France is of 80 minutes per day (Source:We Are Social Singapore). No wonder that most web marketers run community management campaigns on social media!

Building and engaging a community is certainly one of the best ways to grow your business today, but what is the secret of successful community building? How can you use social media to grow your business? What is the key to a successful community management strategy?

In this blog post series, i’ll go through 3 important steps you can follow to create your community management strategy.

Define your goals

Step 1: define your goals!

There are many different ways to use social media. If you want to be efficient, you need to run your community management strategy with a specific aim in mind.

So what’s your goal? Is it selling? Raising awareness? Building a community of loyal fans? Or is it monitoring common questions about your company? You have to be very clear about your goals before you start building your community management strategy. It’s the first step, and in my opinion, the most important one. Without a clear goal, you cannot build a strategy.

Why social media?

Keep in mind that it’s much more easy to interact with people on social media than on any other channel. People are much more vocal on social media, and get much more easily involved with your brand. About 61% of social network users confess they would like to give their opinion on brands and products. And 42% have already had a conversation with a brand on a social network. (Source: salesforce.com 2011).

Once you have determined your goals you are ready to read the next article in this series: define your target audience.