11 Proven Strategies to Build Your Social Media Community

Creating a social media community around your brand can be both easy and challenging. With more than 4.59 billion users, social media platforms host millions of online communities at different levels; from book lover clubs to loyal fans of a brand.

By enabling the global exchange of thoughts and ideas, this virtual network has significantly boosted communication across borders. Brands have not stayed behind in using the power of social media to their advantage. Aiming at building an impactful social media community, business owners have now included these social channels in their comprehensive outreach strategies.

Your social media community serves to be a significant aspect in establishing an effective relationship with your target audience. It is also instrumental in promoting engagement with your prospects and increasing your brand visibility. A well-nurtured social media community helps you attract more followers and builds an affinity toward your brand! Interesting, isn’t it?

In this article, we’re going to learn more about building and nurturing a social media community for your brand, using strategies that work.

So, let’s jump right in!

Updated on 20.02.2023

What is a Social Media Community?

A social media community is a group of people who interact through social media and share common interests, goals, or experiences. There are many types of communities based on hobbies, lifestyles, professions, cultures, and locations.

Members of a social media community can share content, exchange ideas, and engage in conversations. Also, they can provide each other with support and guidance. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn enable communities to form and grow with features like groups, pages, and hashtags.

Community on social networks can be a powerful tool for connecting people from different backgrounds. But here’s the interesting part: They can also be used for digital marketing, brand building, and customer engagement purposes by businesses and organizations.

Why Social Media Communities Are Important for Brands?

Social media communities can be extremely valuable for brands in a number of ways. Here are some reasons why social media communities are so vital for brands:

1. Increasing Brand Awareness

Social media communities provide a platform for brands to create and share content that can be easily shared and spread among members. This will help brands to improve brand awareness.

Companies now easily reach out to their target audience directly, in an engaging and personalized way. After all, social media is a two-way communication tool, and it’s more flexible and let’s say casual, compared to the traditional methods.

Red Bull is a good example of a brand that has a highly engaged social media community. It has over 65 million followers on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. The company regularly shares content that its target audience —extreme sports enthusiasts —love!

Not to mention the other community pages that they own such as Red Bull Dance or Red Bull Snow!

2. Boosting Customer Engagement

Using social media communities, brands can engage with their customers and build relationships. They can show their customers that they care by responding to their comments, questions, and concerns.

For example, Lego has a highly engaged social media community on Twitter, where they respond to customer questions and complaints in real-time. This level of engagement helps to build trust and loyalty among customers.

3. Gathering Feedback and Insights

Social media communities can provide valuable feedback and insights about a brand’s products and services. By tapping into these communities, businesses can gain invaluable knowledge to inform their decisions and shape their brand.

In 2021, McDonald’s announced that it would be changing the design of its McFlurry cups in response to customer feedback. Many customers had complained that the cups were difficult to mix and that the spoon would often fall out of the lid while mixing. As a result, McDonald’s redesigned the cups to have a wider base and a more secure lid to make it easier for customers to mix their McFlurries.

McDonald’s made this announcement on its social media pages, where it has a large and engaged community of followers. The company receives much feedback like this almost every day.

4. Building Customer Loyalty

Social media communities can help create a sense of loyalty among customers. By providing value to members of the community and fostering a sense of belonging, brands can build long-term relationships with their customers.

5. Create Brand Ambassadors

Social media communities can be a powerful tool to find your next brand advocate or brand ambassador. By building a passionate community of customers who love your brand, you can create a group of brand advocates who are willing to share their positive experiences with others.

Many influencers, especially those with a more close-knit follower base, are willing to promote their favorite brand for a chance of being featured by the brand.

For example, Glossier has a highly engaged social media community that celebrates the brand’s commitment to diversity and inclusivity. Glossier’s customers share photos and stories about how the brand has helped them feel confident and beautiful, which helps to create a community of brand advocates who are willing to recommend Glossier to their friends and followers.

5 Different Types of Social Media Communities

Based on the purpose, social media communities can be different from each other. Here are some of the most common types of online social communities:

1. Brand Communities

Brand communities are built around a specific brand or product and are designed to engage customers and promote brand loyalty. They can also serve as a customer service tool where members can easily receive support from the brands.

2. Interest-based Communities

Interest-based communities are focused on a specific topic or hobby, such as fitness, beauty, cooking, or travel. Members share information, tips, and resources related to their interests.

3. Support Communities

These communities are designed to provide emotional and practical support to members who are dealing with a particular issue or challenge, such as mental health or chronic illness.

4. Professional Communities

These communities are focused on specific industries or professions, and members share information, job opportunities, and professional development resources. The most well-known example of social media communities for Professional purposes is LinkedIn.

5. Geographic Communities

Although social communities forms in the virtual world, there are groups that are based on the geographic location of the members, such as a city or neighborhood. Members share information and resources related to the location, such as local events and businesses.

11 Strategies to Build a Social Media Community & Grow It

Looking at different successful examples of social media communities, we come up with these 11 proven strategies that guide you to build and develop your own community in the right way.

With these insights, you can also build a solid and loyal social media community fostered with trust. Let’s check them out:

1. Know Your Audience 

Diving deep into your customer personas helps you understand your target niche better. This is essential to improve your offerings and know precisely what your prospective clients are looking for.

Social media platforms are an open stage that provides you with a wide range of opportunities to build an entire audience. Set your goals and take constructive action toward them for creating an engaging social media community.

Search for distinct ways to grab people’s attention over social media platforms and accordingly include activities that drive users to your accounts. Make sure you also set up a reasonable budget following your defined targets and objectives. This would give you a transparent vision of your expenses towards achieving your goals, which eventually increases your followers.

Additionally, ensure that you research well and determine your target audience. Once done, jot down the ways to create content as per their interests. This not just makes them happy but plays an integral role in connecting them with you.

The more you know your audience, the higher your engagement rate will be. So, although this is the very first step to building a community, it’s the most important one as well. And what way better than actually listening to your audience to learn how they feel about you?
Well, you don’t have to listen to them directly one by one (that would be a dream comes true). However, the good news is, you can systematically monitor what people are saying about you or the topics related to your community. This brings us to the second strategy.

2. Use Social Media Monitoring

Social media monitoring tools help you to access valuable information about your community’s performance during a specific time. This primarily includes the amount of reach, mentions, engagement rate, and dynamic count of your followers.

The good thing about these tools is that you can customize your search and check your mentions in each of the channels individually.

By using tools like Mentionlytics, you can get insights into social media and make informed decisions about your marketing. These help you build an active social media community, as well as increase followers and engagement.

3. Use Hashtags to Expand your Social Media Community

Hashtags are more than just a symbol to show your feelings. They can act like road signs that bring your audience to you. They also bring immense engagement and keep your community highly connected.

Using relevant hashtags in your posts can increase the visibility of your content and attract new followers who are interested in your brand or topic.

It’s important to use hashtags that are relevant to your brand and target audience. You can start by tracking hashtags your competitors and similar brands are using. Then, create branded hashtags for your brand and encourage your community members to use them.

You shouldn’t just use relevant hashtags, you should also think about the number and placement of hashtags. Use hashtags to get more visibility on your posts, but too many hashtags will look spammy and make your posts less engaging. As a general rule, don’t use more than two or three hashtags per post. Put your hashtags strategically in your posts, like in the caption or the first comment, so they’re more visible.

4. Engage with Your Audience

Social media platforms provide you with various engaging tools to keep your audience updated at all times. Building your social media community demands regular interaction with the people who follow and admire you. Your social media community stands out to be the most powerful support only if you engage and respond to their queries.

If you choose to ignore your follower’s questions and feedback— especially when you don’t handle negative social comments — they tend to feel left out and not engaged in any conversation.

This way, your followers consider your social media account not so relevant. Interacting and responding to your social media community brings them closer to you and your brand, leading to increased revenues and lead generations.

One way to get your community to engage more with you is to follow social media trends and use them in your content-creating strategies.

5. Choose The Right Social Media Platforms

Now that you learned about your audience, it’s time to choose the right platform. Hopefully, you already are present in most of the famous platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. However, if you have a more specific social media community purpose, it’s good to choose the platforms that your audience is more active on.

For example, if your niche is gaming, you may want to consider starting marketing on Twitch or Discord.

Here are some of the criteria you should consider when choosing the right social media platform for your community:

• Demographics: Take into account your target audience’s age, gender, location, and other demographic factors. For example, if you target a younger demographic, TikTok and Snapchat may be a better fit.
• Industry trends: Keep track of industry trends to find out which platforms are gaining popularity and which ones are losing ground. In recent years, platforms such as Instagram and TikTok have seen significant growth, while platforms like Facebook have seen a decline in usage among younger audiences.
• Platform features: Consider what format works best for your brand and content on each social media platform, such as short-form videos (TikTok), Stories (Instagram and Snapchat), and long-form posts (LinkedIn).
• Your Budget: If you can manage a few platforms rather than many, it’s best to do so. Choose the platforms that you can realistically manage and commit to.

6. Embrace Influencer Marketing

You can build an online community on social media with influencer marketing. In order to increase your brand’s visibility and attract new followers, you can partner with influencers who have a large, engaged following in your target audience.

Finding influencers who are a good fit for your brand and target audience is the first step to effective influencer marketing. You can do this by researching popular influencers in your industry or niche, looking at their engagement and follower demographics, and assessing how well their values align with your brand’s.

You can reach out to potential influencers once you’ve identified them to propose a partnership. You can sponsor their content, give them your products or services to review, or just collaborate on a joint campaign. Make sure it’s mutually beneficial and that the influencer’s content aligns with your brand.

7. Publish High-Quality Content

Producing qualitative content is also one of the necessary critical elements in building your social media community. Along with an increased content publishing frequency, you must also ensure that it resonated well with your target audience.

Whether your brand is well-established or it is just starting, smart and compelling content stands out to be a powerful driving force in attracting your audience. Quality content garners a considerable amount of users and keeps them engaged with your brand performance. Since social media keeps changing, make sure that your content is fresh and reliable always.

Keep track of the current trending content and accordingly plan your social media marketing strategies. Content that performs well on a particular social media platform such as Instagram may not have significant reach on other platforms. This is why you need to have a watchful eye and build distinct content marketing strategies for each social media platform for your business.

Research New Ways to Deliver Content

There is a wide range of ways through which a particular brand can spread its voice to a vast community. Since new brands are constantly emerging, you need to track your competitors and accordingly implement result-oriented strategies. Though consistency is essential, it does not only rely on posting the same and repetitive content everywhere.

You need to research new and creative ways to attract people and deliver valuable content to your social media community. The same old format and style of posting may bore the audience and result in losing engagement. They may even unfollow you and not recommend other people to have a look at your social media account. If you keep changing your content, you’ll be able to deliver value more excitingly. Now that’s a win-win deal!

8. Maintain Consistency

Let’s face it— in order to grow your social media community, you need to be consistent! Keep track of the content you post since its relevance and engagement depend on the time you post. You need to connect with your audience at the right time to influence and keep them engaged with you.

By curating a detailed content calendar, you can monitor all your social media activities regularly. It schedules your daily routine social media activities and helps have a regular touchpoint with your followers. Even if you are aiming to spread your brand voice, consistency plays an integral role there.

Since consistency drives your audience and keeps them connected, you need to ensure that your social media activities are always on time. Social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook offer you many reminders and countdown tools that help you be on track. This keeps your community aware of your consistent timings of posting content and keeps them close.

9. Leverage User Generated Content

You can increase engagement and establish a sense of community by encouraging your community to share their own content.

You can use UGC to build a community that trusts you, increase engagement, and save time and resources on content creation by leveraging images, videos, and reviews created by your community members rather than your brand.

Here are some ways to leverage UGC:

• Run a contest or campaign that incentivizes UGC: Ask your community to share their content with a branded hashtag.
• Share UGC: When community members create content that aligns with your brand values, post it on your own social media channels or website.
• Celebrate community members: Share their stories, feature them in your marketing materials, or highlight their accomplishments so they feel appreciated.
• Utilize UGC in your marketing materials: Use UGC in your website, ads, and email campaigns to build credibility and trust.

For example, Starbucks encourages user-generated content through its various campaign, where customers share pictures of their Starbucks cups online.

10. Build a Safe Place Online

You must ensure that your social media platform is a safe space for people to come and connect with you. You should build a social media account where people love to go and gain helpful knowledge with the help of your content. Plan strategic actions toward creating a safe online place because it’s also one of the critical elements in building a solid social media community.

Trust plays an integral role in social media platforms. You need to gain the confidence of your followers through your actions. This can be done if you keep your activities following the given guidelines of that particular social media platform and spread optimism.

Be aware and make sure your account does not include any harmful or sensitive content. Your social media platform should not promote any type of dangerous activity or go against sentimental comments.

11. Include Relevant CTAs 

The growth of your social media community is highly dependent on the actions you take to attract your target audience. Whenever you post content on any social media platform, it is necessary to include relevant Call-To-Actions (CTAs) at the end. This can consist of your website URLs, next upcoming brand activities, or your next time posting content on social media.

You can also include the links to your social media pages and accounts at the end of our website and blog CTAs. This is considered one of the powerful ways to attract more people to your company’s social media accounts and drive relevant traffic toward them.

How to Build Your Social Media Community Using Mentionlytics?

With the help of these proven strategies, we now know how relevant insights can be valuable in building a social media community. There are various dependable tools available that assist you in monitoring your social media effectively.

Mentionlytics is one such tool to build your social media community with the help of valuable insights provided by the platform. It offers you suggestions and ways through which you can grow your social media accounts. By keeping a regular track of your social media insights, you can identify the type of content that your audience loves the most. This way, you can create and post content that makes your social media community more converting.

Here’s what Mentionlytics does for you:

• Analyze your social media mentions and keep you updated on each one of them
• Gather impactful social intelligent insights
• Regular assessment of your online performance to improve your social media strategy
• Provide suggestive, risk-managing steps to deal with possible issues

Try Mentionlytics for Free over here!

The platform serves you with detailed analytics and provides you with a wide range of recommendations that help align your content calendars. It also indicates the best time to post relevant content, which would eventually boost engagements and build an active social media community.

We hope to have provided insightful information in this blog post. Stay tuned for more helpful content!