How to Build A Positive Social Community
A social community is not something that only exists face-to-face interaction in the age of the Internet. It is now something that can be achieved online with the right environment, structure, and participants. The good news for your brand or business is, if done correctly, you can use this to your advantage. Unfortunately however, an online social community is not innately positive. There is a lot of potential for online environments to produce negativity (people can tend to go sour when they know they don’t need to look their peers in the eye while doing so). This can ultimately lead to negative content and a bad experience for your other members.
Not only does this negatively affect the social community, but it can have lasting negative implications for your business. Because people tend to remember negative experiences more than they remember the positive ones (thanks psychology, for bringing this one to the surface), if too many people are having a negative experience on your site, they may inform others and thus actually limit the business that is coming in. This is where a positive social community becomes so important.
How to Create a Positive Social Community Online for Your Business
I highly recommend checking out this article that covers a presentation I saw at the SEJ Summit in Santa Monica last month from Srinivas Rao, CEO of Unmistakable Media. Rao mentioned a few of the items below, and a few are based on other studies, information, and draw on personal experiences:
Inspire Them
You have a goal and a vision for your brand. Help other community members see that and help to inspire them. What this does, ultimately, is allow them to have goals and dreams of their own. When creativity is happening in your online community, and discussion of ideas are happening, you have contributed to the positive outcome of your social group. You can see what people are really looking for and help tailor your product and experience to them. Therefor, by inspiring them you can also listen to them, take their advice and suggestions, and make your product even better. Best of all, this will help them return and keep participating in your community. Knowing that they will be both inspired and heard for the long-term.
Teach Them
There are so many ways that you can use the content you are producing as tools for teaching (e-books, webinars, blog posts, Google hangouts discussions, other online presentations, etc. The list goes on). Consider what knowledge can you share with your community. How can your knowledge drive real efficiency in their life or business? Share your best ideas, and it will have a positive outcome on your brand’s social community. People like to learn about their interests, and if they are following you, they are already interested in what you have to say.
Make it Easy
Make it easy for people to want to participate in your social community. To do this you need to make sure that your site is up-to-par and pleasant for those who are using it, meaning you need to have good navigation, compelling content, impressive images, etc., which you can learn more about here. Secondly, you want to provide enough opportunity without bombarding your audience (no one likes to be spammed). However, if you let them know that you host a webinar on the first Friday of every month, and you publish that to your site, and then send out an email with a link the day before, you make it easy and pleasant for them to get involved.
Establish Clear Community Rules
Okay, back to avoiding the negative. People can be different online than they are in face-to-face interaction. It is unfortunate, but this often leads to behavior that is just not respectable in online forums and other social platforms. To avoid this, you need to establish some very clear community rules. In order for the social members to participate, they must abide by these community rules; otherwise they will be kicked out of the forum. Your rules don’t need to be a constant looming presence in order to be effective for your community. They do need to be easily available for all members, and you may need to give an occasional gentle reminder to the group at large if you notice the start of a trend toward bad behavior. The truth is, a lot of bad behavior can be stopped before it starts by having rules that everyone knows to follow. Ultimately, you also need to be prepared to follow up on infractions with fair punishments to keep your community on the right trajectory.
Improve Your Community By Improving Your Community Members
While you want to encourage your community members to get along, you shouldn’t spend all of your time trying to reform the most negative members of your community. Sometimes paying them attention will only encourage their negative behavior, especially if they don’t want to be reformed. So, don’t be afraid to impose harsh penalties, like bans, in the appropriate situations to help make the community a more positive experience for everyone.
In the end, you want to have a positive experience for your social community. This means not wasting effort on people who will never follow your rules, and instead, just getting rid of them! This means that the people who are apart of your social group will have a positive experience and enjoy the interaction with others who feel the same.
Listen to Your Community
One of the most important things you can do is listen to your community. As tempting as it may be to delete negative comments, or avoid some of the issues that you cannot immediately resolve, they are there because your members feel strongly enough to write it, and you need to listen and do your best to come to a solution. While you don’t want to pay attention to every negative thing being said, you also want to acknowledge that there may be more that you can do to improve your social community’s experience over all. So, take the positive and negative feedback and always try your best to be improving the experience for those involved. This can be particularly tricky when working with an ecommerce company, so I recommend checking out this page to learn more about ecommerce communities specifically.
The Takeaway
A positive social community is one of the best aspects of your online environment and it is crucial to any brand or business in the age of the Internet and online marketing. Take a look at some of the negative happenings in order to make improvements, but also do your best to listen to the positive feedback as well. Evaluate your community’s feedback for both things you are doing right and wrong in order to shape a positive experience for everyone!
Do you have experience reforming or shaping your social community to be a positive one? Do you have any strategies that were not addressed in this article? Let us know your story and your thoughts in the comments section below.
About The Author
Jason Hawkins / http://www.themiamiseocompany.com
Jason Hawkins is the CEO & Co-Founder of The Miami SEO Company. He has over ten years of experience in search engine optimization, conversion rate optimization and lead generation. His core responsibilities include identifying ways to increase value of services rendered, training staff on advanced SEO topics, and A/B testing internal processes to consistently improve client return on investment.
