Social Media Marketing for Business

There’s an incredible natural resource in this world that’s increasing in both availability and untapped potential. Social media unearthed it, and as a business with an online presence it is your privilege to mine and refine it to support your brand. It advocates, it evangelises, and it’s a source of new ideas (under your expert eye, of course). It is… the consumer. Oh alright, consumers aren’t new, but they have evolved – we’ll call this social media savvy resource Consumer 2.0.

Brand Community

Are you using social media to talk to your customers, or at them? Today is brand community day and those of you familiar with the concept should kick back and enjoy the show – you’ll ace the quiz at the end. If you haven’t heard about brand community before then pull up a chair.

Two challenges that many businesses face are dealing with many customers on a one to one basis (maintaining that personal touch, but on a larger scale… thank you, Internet), and pulling meaningful, business relevant information about how consumers are spending time and money. How would you solve these kinds of problems? Trying to get your customers in one place is a great solution – welcome to the world of brand community.

‘Brand community’ is a community built around your brand, which is pretty much what it says on the box. This isn’t a marketing strategy – deciding to invest in building a brand community is a decision you need to commit to as a company. Sort of like using social media in marketing where you can’t simply carry on with a dated marketing strategy, you need to adapt in order to effectively support your business with new tools and strategies. This won’t be easy, but having an excellent community built around your brand pays dividends. The Harley Owners Group and My Starbucks Idea are two examples of success resulting from a solid brand community. Is your interest piqued yet? It should be!

Influence Engagement

Here’s a question for you: which Holy Grail of our business/consumer relationship comes before ‘The Sell’ and can be influenced by brand community? Engagement. Your brand isn’t something that you feed a rep and let them dictate from a soapbox anymore. Focus on the fact that a successful and responsive business today is conversation centered. Pardon the dated technology reference, but anyone can dial in.

You can use social media to mediate four kinds of relationships that will influence the trust placed in you by your customers:

• Consumer to business
• Consumer to brand
• Consumer to product
• Consumer to consumer

Maintaining these first three alongside your quality, consistent and customer-valued product will nurture brand trust. Be aware that without brand presence in your own community, customer to customer relationships can drag this trust down. Imagine a brand follower has an issue with your product and publicises it within your brand community. What do you do? It’s an opportunity for your brand to be seen handling the situation, take it as one! I won’t stray into customer service via social media but unresolved complaints in a brand community space could cause people researching your brand to think twice about using your product.

Who Joins Brand Community?

Five reasons people might join your brand community:

• Curiosity
• Friend/social network connection influence
• Looking for help
• Looking to learn more
• To voice problems

The different reasons for people to join or speak out in your brand community can indicate future tendencies. These personalities will introduce conflict which is nothing to be afraid of, welcome it and make sure you have guidelines in place to deal with it.

Building Brand Community: Why?

“Why are you building a community around your brand?” Think about revisiting this question in order to keep your brand strategy aligned with your product. What metrics are you using to monitor your community space? If it’s new visitors, active members and a post count then good job, but if you’re reading this article then that should not be good enough for you. I know that you know there’s more to people than numbers. How are you addressing the market insight you’re getting – not to mention the potential for idea generation alongside a place to seed new incentives?

Your brand is trustworthy because you are open to and don’t dictate your brand community. How do you stand out among the many brand communities your customers may be subscribed to or participating in? As a business you can only court your customer because controlling them is out of the question. What this means is that building real relationships, providing the best service at every point of contact and facilitating open discussion about your products, brand and company are all techniques you should consider building into your brand community.

Building Brand Community: How?

As part of your strategy, you may want to keep in mind the ‘Three Forms of Community Affiliation’:

Pools: loose associations and a shared value or goal connecting everyone (e.g. political groups).

Webs: strong, friend-like relationships between people in the web (e.g. Facebook).

Hubs: one central figure has a strong connection to other people who in turn have a weak relationship with one another (e.g. celebrity following).

Just by being here, making yourself aware of brand community and thinking about how your business could be using it puts you ahead of the game. A big mistake some companies make is to bring social media to the table without a strategy, keeping marketing and customer service old school – I don’t need to tell you how bad of an idea that is. Putting a brand ambassador on a preacher’s pulpit just won’t cut it for your audience. Is your Facebook page just a fan bucket or is it a tool in your brand community’s arsenal – are you making real, social connections?

So how can you tell whether or not you’re already on the way to building your own brand community? Three things you should look for:

• Shared consciousness
• Shared ritual
• Obligation

I did say at the beginning of this post that there would be a quiz. There is no quiz (sorry), but here’s your action item – start working on your brand community today. Mediate your engagement and brand strength will follow.

Welcome to the conversation.

Meet Arianna Schuler Scott

Arianna Schuler Scott is the quality assurance specialist on Heyo's development team. Since starting out in June, it's been a baptism by fire into the world of social advertising and digital marketing and she's enjoying every minute!