Tips for fostering online communities
Grow your business, search engine optimization | Comments (0)
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Among the most common search engine optimization tactics today, binding SEO with social media marketing strategies has become the norm in the rich, interactive landscape that is the social Web. With all the engagements site owners and Internet marketers create, brands online have learned to effectively optimize their Web sites and content to be more social media friendly, and to help propagate their presence on the social networks—all these to reach out to their demographic.
During your run on the social Web, you’ll most likely gather up followers along the way. It would be wise to develop a relationship with your growing followers through regular interactions and a steady flow of content they would find valuable.
These can help influence loyalty among them, converting them into an army of dedicated friends who will have your back, instead of mere followers who may jump in only when something that interests them should cross your feeds. Here are a few suggestions to help your growing community of online followers grow and thrive online.
Attract and Round ‘Em Up
Your goal here is to pull in everyone else into your fold, and unify them into an active community around your brand. First thing you’ll need to do is identify the people who make up your demographic. Naturally, the people here represent different aspects of your community; they come from all walks of life, different age groups, races and locations. And each one has their own personalities and interests.
A study that breaks down your projected demographic will certainly be crucial when mapping out your strategies. It will help you understand the kind of approach to take to appeal to them, the language to use in your content, and the types of tools you’ll need to leverage on.
Feed Them with Compelling Content
Give your followers something that can grab their attention, feed their curiosity, and answer their questions—all these polished to help and prompt them to respond to you. Content has always been a great tool for this. The operative term here is “compelling.” This entails covering topics that are inherently interesting to your target demographic, with enough calls to action you can leverage on to create buzz around your brand, and interact with the people who are on the consuming end.
Make Your Content Easily Accessible
There’s little sense in creating content if your target consumers won’t even get to them. To make the most out of your content marketing efforts, you’ll need to make sure that whatever you throw into the social Web will be easy to find. Content needs to be easily searchable online. This is where your tried and tested SEO strategies come in, where you’ll need to optimize your content for both search engine spiders, and human readers to get your pages to the top of search engine results pages. And since we are on the social platform, site owners will need to make use of the social media sites to help distribute content or links to pages.
Accept and Respond to Comments
The goal here is to develop a relationship with the community of followers built around your brand. To jumpstart this, brands need to initiate conversations with their demographic. Obviously, conversations influence the exchange of ideas which enriches the user’s experience with your brand or Web site. This is where the depersonalization is broken, allowing both parties to face each other as people with human attributes, instead of having them stare at text and images that may be devoid of any personalities they can relate with.
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RSpears @ November 21, 2011
