Creating Community To Drive Business Growth

In a commercial world that understands the power of word-of-mouth it continues to puzzle me at how slowly business are catching on to fully leveraging the web to build their brand online (aka "€œthe fluffy stuff"€). Looking beyond search engine marketing, for example, as a means to drive targeted traffic.

This post by sixrevisions.com felt topical and started me thinking about how important community building is for sustainable and defensible traffic building.

In my mind, communities are a place for fans (fans of your products, services, ideas, beliefs or brand) to connect. They might be customers, but don't have to be. Commercially, they represent a place where you can interact and earn the right to re-convince fans of your brand"€™s worth.

The sixrevisions.com post asks three questions and then lists the answers of five highly experienced community builders. Remember, "€˜community"€™ does not necessarily mean building your own walled garden, community can also be the broader context for engaging with fans, leads and customers over a range of existing networks, like a well executed Facebook fan page, others being Twitter and LinkedIn.

I"€™ve summarised the key learnings from the post and distilled everything to several key takeaways right at the end:

What are some of the more successful approaches used to grow a fan base?

• Since personal recommendation is key, make it easy for people to talk about and recommend you - think about this, why would they? Engage users in real-time conversations, Twitter is a great example
• Attract people through social media to your community - find relevant like-minded minded people to connect with who are likely to be interested in what you"€™ve got to say
• Create great apps, widgets and of course content. It helps give people reasons to return and refer, especially when the community is small and less active
• It"€™s obvious, but ensure that you make your site easy to index by search engines - this, alongside the inbound links that great content should naturally attract is really important

How do you keep people engaged and returning?

• Take a stance on something, be tribal, topical and have ideas that encourage discussion
• It has to be said (again) - create great content. It"€™s a little cliche, but content is king (so long as you market it), consider, games polls and quizzes to create talking points and keep the site "€œalive"€
• Ensure you place content outside of your site on other people"€™s blogs or networks where users might be interested in what you have to say. Give away any branded apps or tools that may add value as well - it will drive traffic back to you
• At a risk of being old-school - email - it"€™s the unsung hero to keep people informed and prompt them when they must check back in - of course you have to have something worth telling or you"€™ll have the opposite effect!
• Customise the experience for your users based on preferences and previous behaviour

What about advice for people just starting up?

• Be different, relevant and think before you start - the net is saturated with half-arsed communities - why will you be unique? What service and value add are you bringing?
• The community is your brand - what does your brand stand for - people need to identify with it first and foremost
• Fresh content is *the* draw - it takes time to get communities interacting and talking so new content matters, are you ready to create it?
• Be committed - it takes time and effort to grow a community and it will need a lot of your time in the short to medium term
• Make using the web site simple by designing it that way from the outset, ensure that features enrich the user experience and make participation more likely - anything that inhibits this should be thrown out early on
• Make signing up to follow you (Twitter, Facebook, Community) a no-brainer - and make the forms short and simple

In Summary

• Get started by making something simple, different and easy to engage and identify with
• Before you take the first step, make sure it"€™s something you"€™re passionate about, you need to commit for the long haul.
• Grow your community by building something that"€™s worth talking about, make it practical and useful
• Be active in your community every day, initiate discussion and give feedback to get users involved
• Providing great content with a message is crucial - and don"€™t forget to market it
• Create actionable emails than inspire re-visiting the site and forwarding to friends