You create wonderful products and give top-notch support. People who use your product and do business with you love your product and share their thoughts on social media, but still, your posts fail to get the attention it requires and lack the interactions you desire. What’s the problem? That’s what we are going to see in this post. 

The Feel of Belongingness

Community is a place where each individual can find people with shared interests, where the people’s ideas are valued, and most importantly, the community gives the people a feeling of belongingness. 

Community helps a brand to build brand loyalty and create a strong bond with its customers. Before the digital age, some brands conducted special events and meetings for their valued customers, which is done even today. The present digital world gives brands endless ways to connect with their audience, so creating a community isn’t a big issue. 

Where the challenge lies is in maintaining an active community. The crucial elements of an A-C-T-I-V-E community are:

A – Address the people’s needs.

C – Curating helpful content.

T – Targeting the issues people face.

I – Include community members in your post.

V – Voice of your Brand.

E – Empathetic approach.

The six elements mentioned above are the ones you have to check when people aren’t engaging with your community post. Let’s see what each element means. 

Address the People’s Needs

A community post is not always about your product and your service; it must also address the people’s needs. 

For example, you design your products after having several meetings and brainstorming sessions with your engineers & designers. There are chances that we might have missed one or two features. When people use your product, they might feel that this product will be even more awesome if it has this particular feature.

You can hear these suggestions in your customer support, forum discussions, and online discussions. When you create a post that addresses this pain point, your community members will automatically respond to it. 

Best Brand Practicing this point :  WordPress is the best community when it comes to addressing user’s needs. Being an open platform, there are thousands of contributors to this platform.  WordPress considers users’ suggestions & needs and creates posts that share the upcoming features and features that are under development.

Curating Useful Content

Content curation is one of the best content strategies followed by many big brands. The success of this strategy is by sharing useful content with your audience; you are not only educating the users but also let the audience of other brands notice/recognize your Brand; it is a win-win for all. 

For example, you are running a website, and there are chances you might be using a marketing tool like Hubspot, MailChimp, etc. These brands also create lots of content to meet their audience’s needs. Sharing this content with your audience by mentioning the content’s author or website will improve your post’s reach. 

Best Brands Practicing this point: As said before, many brands are effective in using this strategy. Some of the best brands are LinkedIn, Medium, and Product Hunt.

Targeting The Issues People Face

Sometimes having a broad view will help your community post get trending in other groups as well. 

There might be a common issue that all types of audiences are facing. Creating a post regarding the issue or sharing a solution for the issue will get your post recognized by all the audience who are facing the issue. 

Best Brand Practicing this point :  CoSchedule is a social media scheduling software. It is one of the brands that utilize its resources and creates useful tools to help audiences solve their problems.  For instance, their Headline Analyzer tool shows how well the heading will perform based on the clarity, word balance, sentiment the title reflects, and a lot more in its report.

Include Community Members In Your Post

As said at the beginning of the post, the community is all about the feel of belongingness. So, when you include community members in your post, it induces a personal emotion and automatically leads to engagement. Plus, this method creates a strong bond with your audience. 

Best Brand Practicing this point :  Nike is the best example of running a successful business with a strong community. Social media managers in Nike use different methods. They feel that including members in their posts and sharing their run easily with the community is the most successful method.

Voice of your Brand

When it comes to creating a post or interacting with your audience, you must respond as a brand, not as an individual. Maintaining a clear brand voice in your community makes things simpler and lets your members understand what they can expect from you. 

Try to spend a reasonable amount of time researching your community, see how they interact, and identify the posts that performed well. Then, make a GUIDELINES based on your research and ask your social media handlers and community managers to follow the guidelines.

Why I am emphasizing GUIDELINE is because it is different from rules. Guidelines help your executive keep on track and make their own decisions without affecting the Brand. Rules are meant to be followed whether it is right or wrong. So, try to make a guideline, not a rule book. 

Best Brand Practicing this point :  Apple is the best when it comes to brand voice. No matter whether you are interacting with them on a support channel or their social media campaign, or their WWDC event, their response will always be in a friendlier manner. It is more or like chatting with your friend. The executive makes the decision freely and also adheres to brand guidelines to match the brand voice.

Empathetic Approach

The important reason why a man or a woman joins a community is to find like-minded people, to share their thoughts, and find new inspirations.

Ensure that you hear the audience’s thoughts and make the audience realize that their thoughts are heard. Maintaining this approach in your community post will see a drastic improvement in the engagement rate. Always encourage your audience to share their thoughts below your posts or run a poll to understand their mindset. Most importantly, respond to your audience’s messages in the comment as much as you can. 

Best Brand Practicing this point :  LEGO has a crazy fan following. Started as a toy company, this Brand has franchises of movies, video games, and amusement parks now.  What this Brand does to keep their community active is let them share their original ideas and run contests. Then, they use these ideas from their customers to create their next products. As a result, people show more interest in sharing their ideas with the Brand because they believe that their concept will become a real product and decorate their shelves one day.

Does Your Post Follow These Points

Above mentioned points are actually working solutions; that is why many big brands utilize them effectively to keep their community members active. 

One important point that connects all the elements mentioned above is TRY TO BE HUMAN. Creating a post with beautiful graphics and eye-catching animations all are good. But, a post without a human touch goes unrecognized. So try to be realistic and let the audience feel that they interact with an actual human being, not some bots.