Julie Gray offers her advice for building thriving online communities

 "Fostering online communities"

The web is packed with community- base sites, such as Mumsnet and MoneySavingExpert. But how can you harness the power of social spaces to improve engagement among your customers?

First, make sure you get to know your community. It’s essential to be a part of it as well as managing it – get involved! Knowing your community helps you provide content that will be of interest. It also gives insight into how the community thinks and acts, allowing you to talk to them appropriately.

How do you do this? By understanding when and where you can reach them. You also need to understand the reasons why this is the case – where will they be, what will they be doing? If your audience is mainly singles under 25, posting on a Saturday night isn’t going to be the optimum time to speak to them. It may sound obvious but you’d be surprised how often timing isn’t considered.

Once you’ve cracked where and when to find the right audience, you’ll be able to figure out how to communicate with them effectively – you’ll get to know how they want to be spoken to, but even more importantly, you’ll be able to balance the organisation’s objectives with the needs of the community, so you can plan creative ideas in advance and also pin down the detail, like your tone of voice.

How do you encourage people to communicate directly with you? Make it easy for your audience to reach you too. Make sure your Facebook page and Twitter account have easily searchable names. Make the profiles identifiable as you. Keep it short and simple, as this will encourage people to tag you or mention you on social media. Don’t needlessly take up valuable characters. Don’t forget to promote what social media platforms you’re on by linking to them from your website and putting them, where relevant, on marketing literature.

Then, when someone from your audience reaches out to you, acknowledge it. Really listen to what they’re saying. After all, they’ve gone to the effort of taking time out of their lives to interact with you so make sure you make it worth their while. It doesn’t have to be direct contact either – you can make the most of free listening tools available. Hootsuite, Facebook Insights, SocialMention and Google Alerts make it easy and efficient to listen to what’s being said about your brand online.

Communities hosted on social media platforms are, in general, public and so anyone can see what’s being said on them. Just because your content is visible doesn’t mean it needs to be ‘wishy-washy’ so as to avoid confrontation. Don’t be scared to really show your organisation’s personality. If people like it they will tell you, if people don’t they will most definitely tell you. Just remember, as long as you can justify why you’re posting something, then go ahead.

In fact, customers like when companies are nice to them, plain and simple. Think of your community as an extension of your customer services. Being nice, understanding and, where needed, apologetic will help.

So, building a community online for your brand can simply be a matter of planning and executing the right content for your audience. Find out about them, listen when they talk to you and your social communities could develop into a much-loved public face for your business.

Julie Gray is a community and social media manager at Whitespace and a member of BIMA.