3 Ways to Truly Build Communities

Being online is all about reaching out, understanding, and getting in with your community. It sometimes seems almost unreal that the people we meet on a day-to-day basis online become a somewhat robotic figure that just meanders in the background, but when you know them it’s a completely different atmosphere.

Go Offline

Building communities online is great. The best way, though, to build a community is to take your online presence and go offline.  A worked with Carrboro Creative Coworking for a summer and one of the ways I used to build our community was to create a TweetUp. This allowed people to come into the business, explore, tinker, and become a part of the place even if it was for just a couple of hours. By getting people together so they can know each other on a personal offline level the interactions and the lasting effect of being around and shaking hands is infinitely stronger than just chatting it up on Twitter.

Be Human

Being human goes to even Social CRM. The key aspects of being human isn’t to sit around, automate everything you do on an online profile and just let things whip by. I’m not saying you need to be online every hour of the day, or respond to every single email that comes your way, but the simple fact that people recognize that someone is out there filtering information and only passing on what matters becomes a strong point in the eyes of the people that you’re engaged with. Being human isn’t about the vicious cycle of commenting, retweeting, or liking, but rather an obvious and empathetic point of view online towards others.

Email Works

Email marketing is by far the most optimal and effective means of Social Media Marketing. Personalization, transparency and basically not screwing it up, you’re better off with email as a more direct and thorough way to really reach out and build a community around your brand. Check out Blue Sky Factory or hit up DJ Waldow (@DJWaldow) for some info on their email marketing, and how you can build a strategy through BSF.

When it comes down to the end, what really matters is how are you giving back to the people? Are you giving them what they want, what they need?

Start building and stop being a robot! What do you think? Leave a comment!