These past several weeks, we have covered the 3 C’s of Social Media: Content, Consistency, and now, Community. Getting regularly scheduled content posted and scheduled is important, but neither of these pieces can stand alone and achieve results for your business without the third C: Community.
When your business focuses solely on sharing content on a regular basis, you are primarily broadcasting to your audience. Interacting with your audience shows that you care about what they have to say. Building your community helps to form solid relationships between your business and potential customers, current customers, and other businesses that complement yours. Soon, you’ll have fans shouting from the rooftops about your business, which will only help you stand out from the crowd.
Most small businesses suffer from being able to establish a community because they forget to interact with others on their social media networks. Social media engagement–while it appears like a simple task– requires a significant amount of time in order to reap the benefits of a thriving community and increased brand awareness.
Two Types of Social Media Engagement: Proactive and Reactive
Social media engagement comprises of two parts: proactive and reactive engagement.
- Proactive engagement is when you actually seek out others and interact with their social media posts through comments, sharing their content to your social media accounts (retweeting, re-gramming, et. al.), and generally showing your audience members that you care. A more passive (and very simple) proactive engagement tactic is liking others’ posts.
- Reactive engagement is when you respond to others’ proactive engagement through comment replies and favoriting/liking their comments to your posts.
We recommend doing more proactive engagement starting out, as you will not be able to partake in reactive engagement if nobody knows about your business first! Reaching out to your audience can be very subtle and natural: the next time you notice a user’s post on your social media platform of choice, write a thoughtful comment in response to the post and see if the user responds to your engagement in kind.
The Importance of a Community Manager for Your Social Media
Building your community on social media requires more time than most small businesses anticipate for. We know that you are busy focusing on building your business, and eventually, you will want to pass off the management of your social media to a future employee dedicated to your business’s social media or to an outside agency. We will explore the topic of community managers for your social media in a future blog post (or blog post series).
Conclusion: The 3 C’s Will Help You Achieve Success
And there they are: the 3 C’s of Social Media. If you follow these 3 C’s as you set up (or revamp) your social media presence, you will create a successful foundation in increasing your business’s presence online and achieving more sales, publicity, etc. Of course, there are advanced aspects of social media success that the 3 C’s cover only to a small extent—but these three guidelines can help you get started on the road to social media success.
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