easy steps for building a community on social media

Happy Thursday, folks! How goes it?

Hope you’re having a great week so far and a great start to February! This week has been insanely busy, but super fun and fulfilling. First off, the sun is out in NYC so basically my seasonal depression has disappeared. Second, if you’re looking for a new workout spot, check out Session in Brooklyn. I took Emilio’s MetCon class and feel like a weight lifted off my shoulders literally in every medicine ball throw I made. I spent some time with my best friends dogs and now am about to go hang out with the Little Sesame team to get a BTS look at something coming soon! For the cheery on top, I got approved for my Expo West badge so if you’re going to be in Anaheim in March, shoot me an email back and let me know!

This past week, I had a conversion with some friends and new clients all about the difference between building an audience vs. building a community.

It’s important to have both, but how do you keep them engaged WHILE growing it?

Today’s email is solely about scaling a community deeper AND wider. A lot of these insights are learnings from what I work on with clients over the last 7 years. I know that everyone is different whether you work in DTC or B2B or just have a personal brand, but you should be able to walk away from this email being able to take action immediately. If you have any questions, just shoot a reply and happy to learn more to make sure I can help!

Before we hop into today’s newsletter, I want to give a shoutout to Jonathan and the team at Springboard, a boutique customer service agency that I have gotten the chance to work side by side with for the last two years on the Graza account. Their efforts on Graza and other clients like IQBAR, Made by Nacho, Aura Bora, Patrick Ta and more have not only made my job easier in forming a true relationship with our customers across clients’ socials to answering them in Gorgias, but has shown itself since they are now the most highly reviewed agency on Gorgias.

If you’re looking for Customer Experience/Service agents that:

• Can seamlessly capture your brand and tone of voice so that you can get your time back and use it to focus on your brand priotiries

• Will put their heart and soul into every answer no matter how hard or how easy the ticket so that you don’t have to worry about your inbox being in the wrong hands

• Will never let you have a backlog of tickets (P.S. they charge only for resolved CX tickets)

• Can handle facebook comments, service platform reviews, and even send out handwritten notes (!!!) to your customers. Fun fact: Comments hurt the quality of your ad score & account. You could have a great ad with horrible comments and FB will deem that as a poor ad and your CPMs will go higher.

You should at the very least chat with Jonathan and his love for the Buffalo Bills. Click here to book an intro call now or start your free onboarding and tell him I sent you.

What’s the Difference Between an Audience and Community? Is One Better Than The Other? Can You Do Both?

An audience is like talking in a huge stadium if you have a megaphone telling them about your product or what your mission is. They’ll listen to you. They are a mix of people from all walks of life who are there to see and react when you have something to say online, engage, and keep on scrolling.

A community shares an interest or a value or, in this case, a brand or product. A community interacts with one another in the comments of a social media or in real life.

Having a broad approach to your social media strategy and who you’re talking to may result in a great audience, but you can simultaneously scale your reach and audience size while getting to know the members to end up turning it into a stronger community through conversation and content.

This is why lately more and more brands whether new or have established brands are really pushing for hiring community managers who can help educate, entertain, bond with their members, explore new places a brand can act to activate a new community, and bring insights to the larger team that can help inform the overall social and content strategy. Also, this is why having a solid customer service team is also important to make sure that any order mishaps, questions about the products, are promptly handled correctly and efficiently.

So, How Do You Create Content For Those Who Follow You?

You listen to them.

I wish it was just that simple, but at the end of the day, it’s true.

You have to create for your community NOT your C-Suite. Why?

To attract and retain those who engage with you your content cannot be salesy all of the time. Link in bio here, link in bio there, take a breather.

Ask them about themselves. Encourage responses through strong and engaging captions that have a fun Call To Action (CTA) like this post from Graza.

How To Make Your Community Flourish

1. You have to be social on social media. Similar to uploading content, how you engage on your content and others’ needs to be consistent. Crazy concept, right? In order to grow brand awareness and community, you need to show up where your potential consumers and current consumers are.

   For an easy start, it’s liking and commenting back on your own content where people are commenting or content that you’re tagged in using your product. It’s writing back to DMs promptly and putting effort into your response. It’s showing up, in general. Upload frequently. Your followers will let you know what they like.

   You can also use tools like Brand24 for social listening, which helps you see what people are saying about your brand across a variety of social platforms and even creators who are mentioning you that you didn’t even know about.

2. Spotlight the community you’re building! Make your content relatable through breaking it up with on-brand User Generated Content (UGC). Don’t shy away from diversifying what you upload across platforms either. This doesn’t mean you should not have content pillars because you should, but the formats and mediums in which you expand on them don’t have to always follow the same formula.

3. Want to expand into new communities? Then, show up. You cannot always expect people to find your brand. You have to equally put in work on the outbound side of social media. My personal first step here would be to begin seeding and gifting product into new communities every quarter or every month to that niche’s key players and creators, big or small. From there, they can expand into more paid creator initiatives to large stakeholders in that community that integrate your product or a product into their day to day life. Over time, this will allow you to diversify your content and communities’ interests.

4. Don’t be afraid to test content formats and topics. I personally rather be seen trying to create engaging content than never taking the risk. Will some things not perform? Sure. Will things you thought may not perform as well perform better than expected? Oooooh yeah like this. 

   Here are some concepts that you can test:

   • Content that you can repost from other that highlight your brand and personality in a new way to encourage sharing. Ideally, these concepts can relate to your community yet are broad enough (because they don’t call our your brand name specifically) to make it relatable. An easy example for a quick reference is the whole notion of screen-shotting tweets and bringing them over to Instagram like this or this.

   • Take a POV on certain situations to help push a certain initiative (ex. sale, an opening, or launch) or just for general brand awareness when necessary and in a fun way.

   • Find ways to bring your community into the mix outside of UGC. Is there a video interview series you do? A Day in the Life Series? Get Ready With Me’s? Perhaps you just collaborate with creators you love on recipe content to expand into their communities as well.

   • Test education around your product in a fun and digestible format to encourage comments around the product or for folks to save it.

5. Surprise and delight your community. Send a special something to your subscribers if you’re a DTC business like how the LMNT team sends you a free water bottle. Reward your top community members by sending them some product to encourage them to keep on spreading the good wood. Create limited time drops that make people want to share said product on social media since they were one of the few to receive.

I need to to figure out how to break this emails up because I feel like I can write forever on these, but I’ll leave you with those 5 easy tips. If you start trying them out, keep me updated on what you end up seeing.

Now, onto today’s…

BRAND OF THE WEEK: GNGR LABS

Every week, I like featuring a brand I love or have recently tried that I can’t stop talking about online. This week is my friends over at GNGR Labs. You can usually find me at their booth at expo shows pounding ginger shots from all the weird samples that have been consumed. If you know, you know.

GNGR Labs recently released a Sparkling Probiotic Drink that first launched at Expo East. Imagine a healthy Sunkist loaded with 5 grams of prebiotic fiber, a touch of apple cider vinegar, and natural juices and all that good stuff that your gut wants and loves. I have been having at least one per day over ice.

If you’re a bev lover like myself, add these to your fridge line-up because having real food in your fridge is overrated.

THAT’S A WRAP!

I hope you enjoyed today’s newsletter! Thank you to all of you who have been emailing back or shooting me DM’s. It really does make my day every single time. It’s been a really fun learning experience so far. We passed 600 subscribers!!!!

I hope you have a fantastic weekend and if you’re watching the Super Bowl, who are you rooting for? I personally just still can’t believe how Taylor Swift put the Chiefs on the map - I joke, I joke. But, I am rooting for the Chiefs.

I’ll see you next Thursday! As always, if there’s a topic you want covered, just shoot me an email or DM me on twitter. If there’s someone one your team or a friend that you think would enjoy this newsletter, you can just shoot them the link right here 🙂 https://kendalldickieson.beehiiv.com/subscribe

TTYL besties,

KD

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