Social media: building a community

Social media can be an important part of small or micro businesses marketing strategy. Whether you are working as a social media manager or running the accounts yourself, you want to make sure the amount of time you are spending on social media makes sense. Small businesses don't need to be influencers they need to build a following that will bring customers to their doors.

​There are 3 things are essential to having a strong presence on social media. Fair warning it can be a bit of a chicken and egg situation when you are first getting started. You need to have strong content that is of interest to your followers, you need to post it regularly AND the thing that many small business don’t do is build a community that you engage with, that will then in turn engage with you.

Here’s what you need to do in no specific order…
➡️Build a community that will interact with your page. Follow|Like|Comment|Share the content of like minded pages.
➡️Post content that is of interest to your followers, that they will find interesting &  informative and will hopefully engage with.
➡️Share posts regularly. Usually 3 times a week will do it, every other day.
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Today I'm going to talk about building a community. We all know how important community is in our real lives. These are our family, friends, coworkers and neighbours. It is just as important to build these relationships online as it is in real life.

How to build a community on social media
Figure out who your community is, don’t worry if you don’t get it quite right at the start, sometimes these things grow organically.

Step #1: You need to start following other pages.
Think of businesses that you can support that have interest to your clients and/or can help you reach your clients. Sometimes it’s not as obvious as it seems.
Professionals (Real Estate Agents, Lawyers, Mortgage brokers…) can often connect with other professionals in their field but with different specialities.
Support local businesses, BIAs, not for profits, suppliers...
Like minded businesses, colleges, associations & boards...
Don't be afraid to follow some accounts that have nothing to do with your business but mean a lot to you personally. It can give your followers an insight into who you are and what's important to you.

Step #2: Like, comment and share their posts if it makes sense to you. The highest compliment is to share someone else’s post, commenting is the next best thing and liking a post helps that businesses engagement.

Step #3: If someone follows you, see if it’s someone that you can work with by engaging with them. If it is, follow them. Personally I don't love the idea of following everyone that follows you and then unfollowing them soon after. I think it's more important to build authentic relationships. 
⭐️Make sure that you acknowledge people that have commented/shared one of your posts.
You don’t need to spend a ton of time doing this, I try to take time at least once a week to go through my social media channels and like, comment and share other  peoples content. This is especially important to do if you’re scheduling your posts.
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If you’ve got any questions about this, feel free to get in touch at [email protected] I’d love to chat.