Want to excite your audience and create higher rates of interaction? Excitement is the magic ingredient that will help maintain a constant flow of interaction (it should also help your followers fall in love with you and your brand). Best of all, it will make social media rankings fall in love with you! Continue reading to learn the basics of community building.
1. Document Your Daily Life
If your brand’s character is connected to you personally, then this should be the easiest step. Simply document your workplace and show things that you like. Share what inspires you, and don’t forget to tell your audience why. Think about why your work is exciting, and find a way to express that sentiment. Encourage your followers to comment and engage with your posts, and ask for their opinions.
If your brand’s character is not suitable for this approach, you might have to be a bit more mindful about your content. Still, the same lesson remains: share things that excite and inspire you.
2. Show Work in Progress
Document your design process. Share glimpses of your next graphic project. When it comes to engaging content, GIFs and videos are always better than static images. If you do your own photo shoots, you can create a feeling of exclusivity for your followers by showing some “Behind-the-Scenes” content.
3. Competition
If you can afford it, start a competition. Give away shirts or build fan packages. However, make sure you’re sticking to the respective social media competition guidelines.
4. Collaborate
Look out for a separate community that shares the same audience as your brand. Get in touch with the individuals and ask if they’d be interested in collaborating. This shouldn’t require much effort, but they can lead to great results for both parties. Be prepared before making your move, and have something of value up your sleeve that will appeal to others. For example, offer some products from your shop.
There are many ways you can collaborate, from simply sharing each other‘s content on Facebook, creating guest posts, recording a podcast or making a YouTube video together.
5. Instagram Takeover
Instagram takeovers are a very popular way of expanding your exposure. It’s a strategy that’s worth mentioning, even if it may not be suitable at the early stages of your community building. Takeovers work best when you already have somewhat of an established audience… that’s the Instagram currency, after all.
The general idea is to let someone take over your Instagram for a day or a week, and both of you benefit from the crossover audiences. You can let someone take over your channel or be the guest on someone else’s.
6. Finding an Influencer
It’s important to have a “quality over quantity” mindset when looking for influencers to collaborate with. Don’t just look for a high follower count; instead, look for motivated individuals who are confident in your product and believe in your brand.
Start by browsing your current followers. You probably have some influencers with similar interests who also like your brand. Take your time and go through their content. Observing their images and videos can help determine who’d be suitable to team up with. Engage these influencers and start building a trustworthy relationship. Don’t get discouraged if an influencer doesn’t want to work with you. As long as you’re driven and confident in your brand, your fan-base can only get bigger!
5 Most Important Tips
- Don’t stop – Even after a successful campaign, you always need to attract new fans.
- Don’t fake – Do not invest time in trying to create an artificial image of your brand.
- Be agile – Avoid steady advertising. A good mix of entertainment, inspiration and a bit of promotion will work.
- Learn and adopt – Keep an eye on the competition. What works for them will probably work for you.
- Feedback loops – How do non-related individuals feel about your brand? Feedback will help detect flaws with your brand recognition, and this may open doors you haven’t seen before.
Have you found any other strategies that work well? Have you had success with any of the tips mentioned above? Give us a shout in the comments.
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