"Community building." It's a term that gets tossed around a lot these days - particularly in social media circles. It's the goal of Built in Denver - to create a community for digital startups. But what does it really mean, and how do you do it?
When you're talking to potential investors, reporting back to clients, or just trying to get a grasp of your own online community, it's easy to simply look at metrics: your number of Twitter or Facebook followers, how many RT's you received, or, if you're really savvy, "potential impressions." But, while numbers are important, they're not the heart of the community. They don't actually tell you anything about what's happening. What really matters is the relationships you're building, and the conversations you're having.
You can have 5,000 people following you with no engagement, and that's not worth nearly as much as 2,000 or even 200 active, engaged, contributing members. Building a large community is easy (you'd like pretty much any page if I offered you $1 to do it, right?) but building a strong, active, and engaged one takes effort and awareness.
To me, these are the keys to building a strong online community:
#1: Be consistent. Post on every network, every day. Touch base with key contacts on a regular basis - everyone is busy, so stay on their radar. Just don't be a pest. (See #2.) Write yourself a calendar of what you're going to post when so that you don't run into the "what should I post today?" conundrum.
#2 Create quality content. If you plan your content ahead of time, it will be higher quality, because you will have given it thought, instead of whipping something together in 5 minutes before your next meeting. If it's quality - relevant, interesting, and useful - people don't mind hearing from you frequently. Quality will help you establish your expertise within the community; people will take you more seriously when you demonstrate that you know what you're talking about and present it articulately. Always proofread your work. You wouldn't buy a $400 suit if it was dusty and wrinkled on the rack; people won't buy-in to your million-dollar idea or even a blog post if it's full of errors.
#3: Be responsive. This goes hand-in-hand with being consistent. You have to be out there and aware of what's going on every day, so that you can respond in both a timely and appropriate manner. In order to become a central resource for your community, you have to respond when people need your answer. If someone asks a question on your Facebook page about an event happening tonight and you don't get back to them until tomorrow, they're not going to ask next time. They just won't go. Speaking of events...
#4 Bridge online and offline experiences. Constantly look for ways to get your online community to meet in-person, or at the very least, interact across multiple platforms. Create tweetups, invite the people you interact with most online to meet up for lunch, if you see someone check-in at an event on Foursquare, make the effort to go shake their hand. The relationships you build that cross over into face-to-face time will be the strongest, most engaged ones you can create.
#5 Be nice. Be someone your community actually wants to talk to. Ask questions, offer resources, help where you can, be active in the conversations they're having. We all prefer to do business with people we know, so make friends, not just business acquaintances.
These are just a few of the basics, but they underscore any good community building strategy. Questions or responses? Comment or ping me at @NicoleinDenver.
