Community management: 9 steps of building a community around your brand

In this article, Natalia Serebrennikova, community manager at Topface Media, shares instructions on how to create a brand community. Many businesses have questions around how to create a community, where to begin, what to undertake, and so on. We share our experience.

First, you need to find out who is already talking about your product or company brand and what platforms they use.

If a user group is already discussing your product you need to join this group and take part in the discussion on behalf of the brand. This is important, even if you weren’t intending to build a community on this social network.

Locate these groups and conversations using queries in search engines like Google. Just type "brand name + reviews" into the search.

You may also use purpose-built monitoring systems such as Brandwatch, Linkfluence, and others.

Monitoring systems are more effective, since they provide more information: popular discussion platforms, gender, age of authors, and tone of mentions.

When first creating your community, involve all your friends and acquaintances. Just tell them what you want to do in the community and ask them to join the group. This will help you get your first subscribers, and your group won't look empty. Emptiness scares off newbies, see social proof theory.

Another option is to attract users to the community through webinars or conferences. For example, make joining a group a prerequisite for participation.

If you want users to talk spontaneously about your brand, create the conditions for that. For example, add embedded social media buttons to your website.

In addition to the "Share" and "Tell" buttons on the site, you can add the ability to subscribe to your mailing list. Set up your registration process to ask new users to subscribe to you or add information on Odnoklassniki.

You should always remember that the quality of subscribers is more important for the community, not their number. A group of 50,000 members promoted via ads or bots with 1 like on each post is not a community. It's a wasted ad budget.

It’s more important to have a few genuine subscribers who will be interested in your brand and create unique UGC. These users inspire more trust in other people: According to a Nielsen study, 77% of consumers trust the recommendations of friends, 62% trust brand reviews on the Internet, and only 30% trust ads on social media networks.

The goal of community management should be to build a group of supporters who will help spread the word about your brand, rather than gaining a million subscribers who mute your group and don’t participate.

Just seeing your first 100 subscribers to a newly created social media group doesn’t mean you’ve built a community. The most important factor in a community is communication. This communication should come from the brand and between group subscribers.

It is necessary to find or create a platform where users can freely communicate with each other. If the group focused on your brand began on Medium, don’t drag those users. They won’t be comfortable there, and you have no guarantee that all participants will switch.

Make sure people within the community are interested in communicating. This elevates your subscribers from a group of random users who once joined a group to loyal followers and brand advocates.

Do you know why a small community is better than a large one? It allows you to try new things without a lot of risk, since the rates are low.

For example, you can create a secret mailing series: brand bonus emails that are only sent to community members. Or create a private chat “for your friends” so the user feels important and connected with the brand.

If you are asked to name a few brands you have interacted with online, who comes to mind first? Why? Most likely, these brands have their own characteristic style and communication tactics that made an impression.

Look at examples of community management from other brands and think about how your brand's voice will sound.

Humanization helps here (depicting an object or animal in the form of a person is an example of humanization). Imagine if your brand were human: what would it look like, what character would it have, and how would it speak? Can they send memes in response to messages, or do they always respond formally even to detractors?

Make a portrait of this person (down to clothing style and hobbies). Start with these questions:

• What do they look like?
• What character traits do they have?
• What are their habits?
• What are their hobbies?
• What are they interested in?
• What are their values: what can they accept, and what do they categorically reject?
• How do they spend their free time?
• What is their social circle?
• How do they speak with different people (what tone, how fast, what words do they use, etc.)?

Set the goals and KPIs you want to achieve. Keep track of statistics and compare them with these goals. Analyze which actions bring results and put more effort in these areas.

To assess the effectiveness of the community, you can focus on:

1. Participant activity and retention:

• Offline activity;
• Online activity;
• Email newsletter opens;
• Website traffic;
• Number of active volunteers.

2. Growth in the number of participants (at the beginning of the period or month and at the end).

3. Participation experience:

• Trust level;
• Number of participants at offline events;
• Responsiveness: how quickly participants answer questions from other participants;
• Generosity of support: how often members are willing to help or advise each other;
• Holidays: birthdays of members and other important events;
• General closeness: the expression of positive emotions in correspondence and communication.