The people who work for your company need to be the core of your community, online and off, if you hope to build a community around your brand that draws people to you.
As a business, you are all together to build something you believe in. You work with people who you have something so in common with that you spend 40+ hours a week together doing it.
When people look for you online, what they need to find is your community, sharing and amplifying each other's content and talking with each other, like friends and colleagues do. Your social media community is the heavy lifter of your inbound marketing strategy. Trying to draw people to your brand without it is as unlikely to succeed as not advertising was back in business 1.0.
Here’s the basic Sociallogical prescription for building a brand community:
- Get your team online. Make sure they understand what social business is and how crucial it is to the future success of your business.
- Decide together, the staff and leaders of your business, how you are going to operate as your own community, publicly online for all to see and interact with.
- Build a community strategy that relies on the foundation of your own people socializing online with each other, with their own personal networks and activities.
This active community you build with your first line of stakeholders is the best social asset you have available to you. If you don’t socialize with each other, why would anyone else want to?
NOTE: The Photo above is the Hemmings House team, who we had the privelege of working with this year. A fantastic small company that is an attractive core for a growing and engaging community for their brand.