We have now discussed how to engage with your community and we looked at a few examples of successful communities. In order to build a successful community, there are a few things you should try to avoid. Here’s a list of the top 5 things to avoid when engaging with your online community:
1. Do not lie
If you want to gain the trust of your community, you need to be truthful to them. The same rules apply to any relationship. It will take time to gain their trust, but if you lie, you will lose them within seconds!
Now, don’t be fooled! You WILL get caught out and they WILL find out, if you are untruthful.
2. Do not fight
Your community won’t always have nice things to say about you or your brand. It is important that you do not get involved in any ‘brand bashing’ comments. Try and reply to all comments calmly and modestly.
You get those who’ll simply criticize all you do. Do not get involved in any argument. This will only aggravate the person and may encourage others to join in.
There’s nothing wrong with starting a healthy debate and facilitating the conversation. Be cautious when discussing issues close to your brand, as this can easily get out of hand and damage your brand or company’s reputation.
3. Do not self promote
Even though getting involved in a community or building one online aims at benefitting brand awareness, brand reputation and sales; you cannot simply bombard your community with promotional material.
You cannot build trust and loyalty in your community by throwing promotional material their way. Engaging with your online community means taking part in a dialogue – a two-way conversation. You need to listen and respond.
4. Do not be everywhere
In other words, be focused. Choose your preferred social network to engage with your community and stick to it. Do not try and be everywhere at the same time – you (as a community manager) won’t be able to keep up and lose your community.
In another sense of the term, be focused in your cause. Ask yourself “What am I trying to achieve?” and “Why would someone join our page?” You must have a specific purpose – one your community can relate to.
5. Do not ignore questions
Your community will get annoyed if they are being ignored and they will stop engaging. As with any relationship, both parties need to talk to each other, or it will fail. Sometimes certain questions can be tough to answer. Simply remember to be truthful – if you don’t know the answer or if you don’t know what to say – don’t lie.
So, in order to build a successful community online you need to be honest and truthful, clear-headed and respectful, modest, focused, and most of all, caring. Like your spouse, your community will become unhappy once they pick up that you don’t care about them – unlike your spouse, your community will leave you that very same day!
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I really liked point number 4.
We have not launched a fan page on facebook and have chosen twitter at this stage as our first social media channel, with things like tweetdeck and hootsuite, some of our followers have leveraged facebook for us with RT’s but we have found that the way were doing all this is proving to be better for us.
We have people that are following our tweets that are genuinely interested in the content and have not just “liked” a fan page to have another thing they “follow” in a very busy space that is facebook.
With a target market that is broad (16 and older) and niched (people going to theatre) at the same time, we would never be able to monitor everything right now the way it should be done.
There are definite plans to tackle the faceworld soon. Our slower growth may not make for huge numbers of uniques each month, but these people are coming back more often and staying longer. Our growth will continue and we feel it will be more sustainable than a huge spike one month and then a drop away again.
I hope this made sense?
Hey Rory, Yes, it makes perfectly sense!
With regards to point number 4; the mistake a lot of brands make is to launch a Facebook page or create a Twitter account just for the sake of being there. When choosing your platform you need to take into consideration where your community hangs out. There might already be a forum where you can get involved so, for certain brands it might not be necessary to join the main stream social platforms.
It takes a bit of research and trial and error to see which platform will be best for you (and it might be more than one). Just, know why you are there and what you want to achieve
cool article, point no. 4 resonates with me
Have rather dismal results with our twitter account, but absolutely amazing results and conversions with our Facebook page.
One golden rule. PATIENCE. from an retailer. You’ll be asked some really stupid questions, alas sticking it out and being patient, 9/10 times results in a customer for life and a quick hit sale
Very true Naeem. Community Management and engaging with your online community takes a lot of patience. Since, you’re representing a brand/cause/company you cannot lose you nerve. You need to constantly feed your community with positivity and respect. It takes patience… a lot of it, but it helps to remember what you are representing and aiming for.
There was an interesting experiment that was done to determine where to build a path for people to walk on. First lawn was planted all over the location and as people walked over the lawn a natural path was created that followed the natural way people moved. Then the paths where paved to make them more permanent. Essentially the community created the channel and then it was re-enforced.
So the process is listen to the community, then facilitate the conversation and then engage. It takes time but it’s very effective if done.
So true Zibuka! That’s a stunning example of listening to your community