create content Archives - Barbara Genest

With more social media and online communication, being genuine and trustworthy are two important characteristics many consumers are looking for from businesses more than ever.

With authentic engagement and communication, you can foster communities that work together to empower each other and your brand. It provides the knowledge you need to improve your products while also helping the members solve problems that can then be used to improve their lives and others. It’s about being real, inspiring your community, and doing your best not to mislead or misdirect them.

The following are five important principles to learn and incorporate to inspire authentic community engagement and grow your business:

Get the Community Involved and Active Right Away

Don’t wait until you have a lot of members to start publishing information and activating the community. At first, your community may feel a little lonely until you get more members but keeping it active and full of information that will still be there when people join is very important to building a dynamic and vibrant community.

Encourage Trust and Integrity

Set the rules of your community to establish trust and highlight your integrity to the group. As you communicate openly with members of your community, others observe and become more trusting of you as they notice how much integrity you have.

Foster Community-Led Solutions

As a business owner, you need to create and or find solutions for your ideal customer’s problems related to your niche and your expertise. The impressive thing about having a community is getting input to create more solutions from the people who need them.

Be Consistent, Clear, and Open with Communication

It can help to create a branding guide that includes your business personality and voice to ensure that all content and communication are consistent, clear, and accurate. It’s a lot easier to be open when you know for sure where your values lie and how to ensure you stick to them.

Empower and Support Your Audience

The best thing about a group is that you will have one of the best advantages in empowering and supporting your audience. After all, you want them to succeed, and if they succeed, you do too.

Create powerful and informed content that serves your members and only your members — meaning don’t just automatically share content that has been shared in other places unless you changed it in some way or added additional meaning to it by connecting it to a success story or a point you want to share. The more personal the content being shared in the group, the more likely your members will come back and engage with each other. Content is how you keep your target audience interested and involved, so make it worth it.

How Community Member-To-Member Engagement Grows Your Business

A brand community is only as valuable as the work you put into it or provide. Meaning you can’t expect the community to do the work for you at all times. You must put work into it first to gain the amazing benefits brand communities return. Strong communities share your messages across many different avenues, starting with their closest friends and family, ultimately increasing your brand awareness, recognition, and credibility.

Here are six community building strategies to learn and how they can grow your business:

Incorporate Customer Feedback – When you receive any feedback from a customer, whether email, in the community, or otherwise, use that information in the community. If it’s positive feedback, call out the customer in the group and thank them. How you respond to negative feedback demonstrates how you will make it better or change something you do. This shows your customers you are listening.

Respond to Product Reviews – If someone gives you a review, don’t just ignore it. Instead, respond to it by thanking them, providing even more greatness, or if it’s not as good as you’d like, make it right by being understanding and letting them know you are here for them.

Embrace User-Generated Content – The remarkable thing about building a community is the user-generated content that can be used and put to use. For example, you can ask for advice in a group about something relevant, compile it, and then make a blog post about it.

Host Online and Offline Events – You can also start hosting events once you have a captive audience in the community or group. Events are great ways to bring your community even closer and get to know your audience even more. The wonderful thing is you can do events online or offline as long as your particular community is interested.

Develop a Members’ Affiliate Program – One way to get your audience in the community engaged is to let them earn money or prizes promoting your products, services, and community by setting up an affiliate or referral plan.

Six Tips to Improving your Social Media Story Content

Create and Share Valuable and Unique Content – Most importantly, use your community to create and share valuable content that stands out from the crowd. The more tuned in to your community, the easier this becomes.

Be sure to incorporate these strategies as you grow your own brand community if you want to reap as many benefits as possible. Again, the more valuable information or resources you provide or add to the community, the more they are willing to return. If they go to bed tonight having enjoyed the interaction in your community, they will be back tomorrow, which means you need to ensure something more is there for them tomorrow.