Okay, engagement is cliché, forget about it. Think of it this way. If you’re a website / product / service owner, how would you measure success with engagement on social media ? One often repeated factor is social media engagement. Build a community around your site on social media, and if you can retain the community with a good chunk of loyal folks, you’re half way through.
Once you create a community, you could do anything with it. Sell stuff, branch out to different levels, you could diversify to different products – anything. The community remains the core.
But that’s easily said than done. Building a community is most important as well as most difficult.
To develop a rich community, certain factors are very crucial
Lets take some ideas.
Stickyness is essential in a community
A community is only as good as a bunch of random people is the users are not sticking to your website. That is they need to come back to your site. There are many tactics to ensure stickyness like exclusivity, bonuses, points system etc. Regardless of the strategy, the core idea is that users/ clients should directly get involved in the core product.
Emotional attachment with the reader
There is essentially only one reason why a reader would come back to your site. Emotional attachment with the site. There are several ways why a user would feel emotionally attached to your site, it could be your picture or your style of talking or the content itself. Whatever it be, emotional attachment to your site is a must.
Engagement is key within the community
Engagement is crucial. What many people don’t realize is that you cannot sell a product or service without letting the user feel that “he is the one”. Every website/product makes a typical user feel or reinforce that he is the right user for the product. Many a times a user carries this mindset in his mind and only needs a reinforcement. Sometimes it could be persuasion with a material benefit or something similar. Either way, the user should feel important as the product.
And social media is the best tool available to build a community and engage uses within.
Here are 5 tips that will help you create a great community with rich user engagement.
1. Brands should come down to the user’s level and be with them
Brands/products/services or websites not easily can adjust to the idea of coming down to the user’s level. Why ? Because they are insecure doing it. Because most of the times, the user is at a level that is genuine and real. They criticize, they swear, they rip you apart and do all that – and brands cannot stand all that. Their mentality is “We made a product with a great deal of effort – and we deserver a win for the efforts”. Not always true. Unless the brand-and-user come into a straight line in unison, the equation never gets balanced.
2. Make the user feel important, right in the middle of everything
Who does that ? Successful brands. And quite honestly, not everyone can do it because it requires great deal of humility, patience and precise calculation. Either because its too much deal with or because its too risky, most people ignore it. If its a website, and the owner is on social media, he doesn’t answer silly questions being asked to him on the channels. Which is a fail. You are on social media because you’d like to answer those silly questions and questions will always be silly. So if you’re up to it, take it head on otherwise, don’t even bother to try.
3. Formulate a content strategy around the user not your product
Simple mistake isn’t it ? Most folks first decide the product (as they should rightly do) and then figure out ways to attract people. Go the other way around. First find out what attracts people and then create/tweak your product to match their expectations. Easy way out.
4. Engagement doesn’t mean asking questions
Many folks have recently joined Twitter and what they do normally is ask questions to get people to answer. What happens usually is that none or only few answers. The reason ? Credibility. Anyone who’s making a big evident joke out there is obviously trying to get your attention, and you don’t want that person to be you. Instead, figure out how you can get friendly with the users, be one among them before asking questions. Asking questions is fine but make sure that users trust you and would genuinely be interested in answering them.
5. Engagement probably is the wrong term. How about “Marriage” ?
Okay, lame joke that one. But the idea is that engagement today means another bait. Which is wrong. It shouldn’t be. Social media is an open space and instead of engagement, times have come that both parties, irrespective who’s on the giver-donor side, should commit to each other. Because that is where several other important factors come into picture. A much more transparent and just environment that will provide a win-win situation for each.
So user engagement though technically sounds as a one sided process, really is a dialogue, not definitely a monologue. It might sound very easy from an outsider’s view but nurturing values such as trust, transparency and commitment is not easy in a community. If at all anything, they are the factors that matters most today in social media community management and user engagement strategies.
source: dailybloggr
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