You might be a social media influencer trying to build a long list of devoted followers, or a business website that wants its target crowd to not just follow the page, but come together as an active online community. Whatever the situation might be, the fundamental tips to building an online community don’t change much and we are going to discuss three of the most effective ones next.
Identify Their Needs
In order to build an online community, you need to know what is it that appeals to your target audience first. Unless you know what it is that they need, it would be difficult to prepare engaging content that is designed to fulfill that need. Conduct surveys via email, and create social media posts on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Post a small video on your site and on your YouTube channel, directly asking your viewers and customers what they want to see from you. Do be aware of the fact that people’s needs and demands change with time due to unpredictable external factors, so act on your findings fast, before the trend changes and the present data doesn’t remain as useful anymore.
Engage Your Audience With Quizzes
Once you have found what you need to center your material around, it is time to create content that not only appeals to your target audience, but actually engages them as well. People love answering questions when they are related to the things in which they are interested, which is why quizzes are proven to be one of the best engagement tools in an online environment. By adding a simple WordPress plugin such as Quiz Cat, you will be able to create engaging quizzes based on the data acquired in the previous step, regarding what your followers and subscribers are looking for.
The quizzes could be on anything from pop culture to personality assessments, but they should either be trendy in general, or targeted specifically to appeal to your target audience. Conveniently enough, Quiz Cat even helps you gather analytics and insights about the kind of quizzes which would be, or is currently the most effective, by allowing easy user activity tracking. People love taking quizzes, and if the quizzes are popular enough, they will get you a bunch of social media shares and email subscribers every single day.
Engage With Your Audience Personally
YouTubers often try to reply to a lot of their subscribers, even after they gain popularity. The same theory of engagement applies to blog and Facebook comments as well. Of course, you need to be discretionary regarding what to say and to whom, but the more you engage, the more you are contributing to the creation of that online community. A community is a place where people speak to each other, and therefore, in order to build one around your business or yourself, you do need to engage with your followers/subscribers/customers personally as well. This also encourages participation from the other members.
Depending on the size of your business, it may not be viable for you to reply to everyone that comments on a popular post on your blog, YouTube channel or social media page, so in that case, you should consider hiring a social media manager to act on your behalf with the same ideals that your business represents.
The idea is simple; when you are giving them what they want or need and engaging them on a regular basis, your target audience will slowly turn into an online community quite naturally. It takes effort for sure, but once you figure out the basics and start taking the right steps, creating an online community doesn’t seem that complicated anymore.
I hope you enjoyed this blog post about the top tips for building an online community successfully for the long term.
Interested in more articles about online community building?
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