The Company That Stopped Being Worried About Numbers
In 2021, my B2B software client achieved a significant milestone: they hit 50,000 LinkedIn followers! There was a great deal of excitement around this announcement… every team member in the company congratulated each other on Slack and there was even a slide in their Marketing Deck showcasing this great accomplishment!
Then, during the monthly review meeting, someone asked an equally depressing yet honest question, “How much business did we sell from LinkedIn in the last quarter?”
When it was time to answer the question, the room was quiet. After a lengthy pause while looking at spreadsheets, the Marketing Director explained that the company was unable to attribute a single closed deal to the company’s LinkedIn page! Not even one! Even though they had 50K followers and had been posting content regularly on LinkedIn for quite some time, and had spent a considerable amount of money in manufacturing that content.
They had an audience! They didn’t have a community. And that difference is not philosophical — it was the single biggest gap in the entire company from a marketing standpoint.
The Difference Between Audience and Community – Why It Matters Millions!
While there are many similarities, there are also many differences between the way that an audience and community interact with their content.
An audience consumes your content through their feed (usually through some sort of social media). However, a community connects with your content at a deeper level by forming some sort of bond with your brand and belonging to your community. One can be considered a passive relationship maintained by the algorithms of social media; the other can be considered an active relationship maintained by the shared identity of the individual within the community of the brand he/she/they have created.
The marketing implications of these two types of consumer relationships are tremendous and quantifiable.
This is evidenced by the research put out by Sprout Social; they reported that 57% of consumers are willing to spend more money with a brand with which they feel they have a connection; whereas 76% will select that brand over a competitor.
Building a community is not just about creating a soft feel good marketing concept; it can also act as a significant revenue generator, with quantifiable multiplier effects on customer lifetime value, consumer referral rates, and switching costs from competitors.
Organic reach vs. paid reach: The average organic reach of a Facebook page is 5.5%, while Instagram’s average engagement rate is 0.54% (Rival IQ). You may be able to purchase impressions but cannot exchange that purchase for trust in the eyes of a person recommending your product without your solicitation in a group chat.
Paid/organic: Community builds capital. Once you exhaust your funds, the campaign is over. The community continues to build up.
The Reason Organic Engagement Will Always Be The Best Long-Term Strategy
Let me clarify what organic engagement means because too many people have misused the term.
Organic engagement is not just likes and comments; it is how people will engage with your brand when they believe in what you are creating. Organic engagement can be someone tagging someone else in your post who had this same issue the day before or someone defiantly commenting on your post about why you are a great brand without you ever asking. Organic engagement can be from a prospect who has been following your company for six months before contacting you.
Four Community-First Social Strategy Foundations
Creating a community is not a fluke. It is thoughtfully and intentionally designed. Below are four rules for creating a community-oriented social strategy:
- Your perspective should come first before product.
Communities form because people see their beliefs mirror one another and will therefore be more engaged on social media through interaction with a specific brand. The companies that have the biggest and most active social media followings generally have opinions. They will generally agree with some and disagree with others, but they will also provide FiJi free-spiritedness through which people feels safe to reply.
Conflict is good. True debate (normal discussion) can occur instead of polite discussion and erroneous actual dismissal because of no “justifications”.
If any post you create can be written by another company in the same position as your business, you do not have a voice. You are filling space with unnecessary content. You are trying to portray a position that will help you build an audience of users who understand and relate to you as their own or as one of them.
- Development of Conversations, Not Content
Generally speaking, social media strategies are usually dependent on having a content calendar, post frequency, content pillars, asset types, etc. While all of the aforementioned items represent useful frameworks for the operation of social media marketing, the main error committed when utilizing social media as a broadcast medium to share information with fans and followers, instead of utilizing social media as the two-way medium it truly is (involving conversations).
Brands that attract and nurture engaged communities will ask members of the community more questions than they will answer. Brands will take the time to engage with customers’ comments, thereby providing a personal response (i.e. original responses), instead of just sending form letters back to each customer. Brands will also highlight their customers and display user generated content (UGC) while making each member of the audience feel appreciated.
Engagement is not so much a reporting metric, as it is an action to perform on a regular basis.
- Recognition of Contribution on a Sale-by-Sale Basis
Brands’ sincere concern for their customers will show that they value and appreciate contributions made by community members, whether it be within customers’ loyalty to a brand or their satisfaction with the brand. Genuine concern for the way the brand is perceived by their customer base will help build brand loyalty among consumers.
Brands can showcase customer-story content in various forms of media — without an advertisement being the focus of the content — and create a space (for example, a newsletter, a private Facebook group, and/or a regular live event) in which community members can interact in ways that are not brand-specific.
The primary focus should be to convert your social media marketing presence from an area from which you will deliver content to your audience members to an area in which your audience members will want to gather and/or participate.
- Evaluate What is Truly Important
This is the area in which the vanity metric trap closes down on the majority of brands. They optimise growth and impressions for followers since these types of numbers are not only very easy to report, but they are also so satisfying to watch numbers rise.
At the same time there are many metrics that provide insight in regards to the health of a brand’s community, however, they are much harder to quantify. Examples include; the quality of comments (are people having relational conversations?), share rates (are people passing along the brand because the brand represents them?), community leaderboard generation (are people coming to the brand due to a referral from a trusted source?), and brand retention in a community owned space.
Redefining your reporting framework in light of these metrics will naturally improve your overall strategy.
The Problem with Paid Reach Dependency
As brands who primarily grow their social presence through the use of paid reach, the painful reality is that they do not own their audience.
When you stop funding your budget, you lose your visibility. There are no trust relationships that are built up, and no community you can rely on to promote your brand after the campaign ends. Unfortunately, the audience does not have an organic way of getting to you without advertisement, and you are really only buying advertising to put your brand in the feed of users.
The result of this is a very weak structure that becomes painfully clear when there are budget cuts, the economy is in downturn, or there is an algorithm shift with the platform. Brands that build authentic communities are able to take the hit from these interruptions since their audiences are still engaged with them, irrespective of whether or not they are running paid advertising campaigns.
This is the kind of strategic discussion that **Yeasinarena** engages in for their social media marketing strategies. Instead of optimizing reach and follower growth as primary objectives, they design their social strategies around building a community and developing the content, conversation and engagement mechanics that will create true brand equity over time. This is a very distinct brief from what most agencies will tackle and produces a significantly different set of long term results.
If you see your social media activity as a broadcast channel as opposed to a community, or if you have reports showing how many people have interacted with your posts but do not feel that those numbers mean anything, it could indicate that your content strategy needs to be evaluated. Yeasinarena helps develop social strategies that create an impact through equity rather than solely by reach. Think about talking with us about this if you want to be successful long-term.