A recent survey, in which more than 1067 marketing experts participated, revealed some astonishing facts about social media communities. These include:

• More than 50% of professionals plan to create and flourish an increasing number of social media communities in 2022.

• More than 65% of online social media community experts plan to capitalise on social media communities in the year 2022.

This growing focus on social media communities is due to the fact that it helps increase brand engagement and brand marketing. Simply put, if your users are not interacting with your posts, they are less likely to get engaged with your business. So, when you have more users getting engaged, you are in a very strong place to easily convert them into loyal customers. Eventually, you achieve the result – the profits.

How Are Online Social Media Communities Created?

These communities are formed around shared goals, interests, trends, and other issues that stimulate engagement and mingling up of like-minded people.

For instance, Yelp developed an online community where people could exchange their experiences for the food outlets they visited.

You can develop your own social media communities based on your prospect’s interests that are related to the positioning of your brand.

Benefits of Creating Social Media Communities

As discussed earlier, you need to have an engaged community more than a large group of social media followers. And social media can help you with just that.

Let’s take a look at some of the benefits of setting up social media communities for your brand marketing:

1. Develops Loyalty for the Brand

When you engage with your social community members and support them in exploring solutions to their concerns, this develops their brand loyalty.

2. Boosts Word of Mouth

Setting up a social media community will allow you to interact with your existing and potential customers/clients. If they are satisfied with what you offer, they may become advocates of your brand and go beyond in spreading positive word of mouth among people.

3. Increases Brand Awareness

By creating a social media community, you are inviting more and more people to know about your business. This helps in increasing brand awareness.

4. Promotes Engagement

Beyond just liking and following, a social media community lets companies engage with the audience. This promotes engagement and interaction. For example, you can carry out surveys, polls, contests, and related events to encourage the active participation of your target audience, thereby strengthening brand engagement.

5. Reduces Costs:

Social media community platforms can best encourage members to respond to customer apprehensions. This greatly supports them to reduce overall costs by 73%.

6. Expand Your Customer Base

By using the right forms of social media content tactics, you entice probable customers who keep the same level of interest matched with the voice of your brand.

7. Stimulates Trust:

The ultimate trust of your brand realistically grows with growing brand engagement. By winning the hearts of true customers, you’re in the best position to shape meaningful as well as genuine connections.

8. Gain Some Constructive Feedback

You can best gauge how your products, as well as services, are resolving people’s problems, explore and react to customer grievances and receive deep insights from your target segment.

9. A Platform for Complaint Resolution

You owe a solid chance to answer all complaints gently in case you have an online social community. It reflects your sense of obligation to respond to your customers, an action with a sense of undertaking that extends in the long run in the case of reputation management.

How to Develop & Thrive Your Own Social Media Communities

As developing social media community takes time as well as expertise, the following are just some of the basic guidelines on how social media community can be developed:

1. Formulate Social Media Communities Regulations

Set out rules regarding what members of the community can share, their behaviour toward fellow members along with other expectations. By this means, you are capable of shaping your audience’s social media interactions as well as engagements.

2. Specify Your Community Purpose and Objective

Explore the kind of leisure activities, interests, objectives and topics will you concentrate on? Define your goal very specifically and stay targeted on your community’s social media page.

3. Make It Easier to Explore

There are multiple strategies to go about this:

• Invite users to unite with your community

• Make use of hashtags.

• Advertise across numerous platforms.

• Send invites to customers.

4. Develop Your Online Community

You can begin by attracting known people in your network. With the spillover effect, you can exponentially grow your contacts having similar interests.

5. Maintain A Good Level of Communication

Maintaining a good level of communication and monitoring timely progress as well as updates is critically important.  The idea is to invariably interact with people to develop lasting consumer relations.

Final Thoughts:

In all, by developing a social media community, you can convert transactional ties into lasting customer status. However, setting up such a community is easier said than done. You may need expert assistance in Social Media Marketing, and for this, Zoom Digital has you covered.

Contact us now and set up a robust social media community.