“Yo, how many retweets for a year of free chicken nuggets?”
On April 5, 2017, Carter Wilkinson may have changed an entire subsection of the marketing industry with one post. The fast food brand in question, Wendy’s, responded with a half-serious “18 million” and ignited a tweet-storm that fundamentally reshaped how brands perceived their followers on social media.
Rejecting the idea that replies needed to feel ‘brand safe’ and line up with the corporation’s bottom line, the sarcastic tone of this post became the blueprint for a more authentic, approachable tone-of-voice.
To some users, Wendy’s has become more famous for their ‘unhinged’ social media presence than their hamburgers or frozen desserts. And companies like Duolingo and Nutter Butter have fallen directly in step with this attention-grabbing approach to social media management.
But not every brand can (or should!) emulate the edgy attitude that risks alienating users in favor of massive impressions. Developing an effective Community Management approach is essential to create a sense of commitment and positive association between your company and target audience. A strong community management strategy ensures participation is intentional, inclusive, and aligned with long-term goals, rather than being reactive or fragmented.
By implementing clear strategies, organizations can cultivate stronger relationships, build trust, and encourage ongoing dialogue. With informed decision-making, input sourced directly from your community can provide valuable insights that shape campaigns, products, and future initiatives.
In this blog, we’ll explore how well-executed community engagement enhances brand loyalty, drives advocacy, and creates a more resilient and connected network.
What is a Community Engagement Strategy?
At its core, community engagement is meant to foster meaningful connections and collaboration between individual users and a large brand. It isn’t just about answering questions and providing solutions. It can play a crucial role in brand development by encouraging active feedback and empowering people to influence brand decisions that affect them as customers.
Through inclusive engagement, diverse perspectives are amplified and give way to more resilient and innovative networks that are capable of addressing challenges collectively.
When devising a content strategy for your brand’s social media channels, you’ll have an ideal audience in mind for each post. While these segments will certainly overlap from concept to concept, sometimes you want to focus on one segment more than another.
Your community engagement strategy should follow a similar structure, accounting for how each group will receive the message. By clearly defining your goals and tone of voice, you can plan additional tactics to foster participation and build relationships among your followers.
A thriving community keeps users eagerly anticipating your next post and actively engaging with familiar, recurring content.
The desire for community engagement initiatives on social media channels can be traced back to organized and informal conversations between members of neighborhoods, academic groups, and other movements. In terms of brand marketing, these opportunities to connect directly with followers can replace town halls and surveys to go straight to the source.
A well-designed strategy ensures that engagement efforts are intentional, sustainable, and aligned with both organizational objectives as well as the needs of your users.
Successful Community Engagement Tactics
Before you begin developing a new approach to how you want your brand to be perceived and reacted to on social media, you should have a clear structure in place to evaluate success. If you aren’t meeting your audience where they’re most active, or if you’re talking about things they aren’t interested in, you aren’t giving them any compelling reasons to build a relationship with you.
The first thing you want to consider is your ultimate goal for opening up this community:
- Are you simply looking to get more replies and comments under your posts?
- Do you want to build awareness for a new product or service?
- Is there a competitor in the space that you want to steal attention away from?
These are all valid objectives! But determining how, and where, to move the needle will help you stand out in a sea of sameness.
Similarly, knowing the ins and outs of your audience will give you a healthy advantage:
- How would they react to the chance to directly provide input on an upcoming announcement?
- Where do they go to provide unfiltered feedback on your company?
- Do they feel like your social media channels are being run by a robot or a real person?
These are important questions to ask, and knowing the answers can help you predict user behavior and set attainable metrics for your strategic rollout. This approach can also help you surface more opportunities to leverage UGC and create a feed full of can’t-miss content.
Look at brands like Ollipop and Poppi, offering essentially the same product, but who each have diehard loyalists on their side thanks to a colorful, effective outreach program driven by social media. Opening the door to an ongoing dialogue between you and your followers is a great way to build trust and convert unaware users into lifelong advocates.
5 Steps to Develop a Community Engagement Strategy
So you’re convinced that you need to be more active on social media, building direct relationships with your target audience and creating more content that engages users and helps them feel positively associated with the brand. But, keep in mind that it’s a lot more nuanced than just choosing to start posting call-and-response questions and commenting back to every mention notification you receive.
Following a structured rollout plan can help you get your strategy off the ground efficiently and allow for actionable insights to expose themselves along the way.
Define What Success Looks Like To You
Your target performance metrics and key objectives are directly related but don’t necessarily have to be the same goal. At first, your motivation may be more abstract: more positivity in the community, better attitudes, and cultivating “good vibes.” But even these can eventually feed back into raw data.
With the right sentiment analysis tool in place, you can follow the feelings among your followers and see how they ladder up to statistics like follower growth, owned conversation, and impressions from outside your network. If your brand’s social channels are known as friendly and fun, you’re much more likely to convert curious customers into followers.
Choose the Right Place to Show Up
If you’re already thinking about how to develop a more engaged community before your channels have even gone live, congratulations, you’re way ahead of the game. But for most social media marketers, these tactics compose an additional strategy that builds on top of your best-performing platforms.
When considering how to execute an approach that opens your audience up to community engagement, carefully consider where the ideal user you want to reach is already spending time. Take stock of your owned channels and follower count on each. Does the size of your audience accurately reflect how many likes, comments, and shares each post is getting?
When rolling out a more aggressive community management strategy, start with the areas that natively make it easier to talk directly to your network, like LinkedIn and X, as well as using features like polls and questions on Instagram Stories.
Branching out into a private Discord server or starting a community-led Reddit page may also be great long-term goals to gather respondents from a burgeoning audience.
Integrate a Realistic Schedule
As much as social media marketers would love to believe it, most users don’t really live and breathe their commitment to their favorite brands. An engaging piece of content shouldn’t just do well because it was seen within the first few seconds it went live, but because it provides an intrinsic value that isn’t necessarily time-sensitive.
When considering how often to check in and activate your brand’s community, start with one repeatable checkpoint that will build habits. Maybe it’s an opportunity to recap everything you accomplished during the week before signing off on Friday, or it could come to life with a recurring hour-long open Q&A session on any given afternoon.
By creating serialized conversation starters, you’ll organically make your presence on social media feel more approachable. Then, you can begin branching out into more opportunities.
Foster Active Participation
If you’ve followed best practices to pave the way for an effective community engagement strategy, you’ll start to see familiar faces and power users emerge. The volume and diversity of your active community members should always have room to grow, but these early advocates are a great resource in your approach.
Take note of how the conversations in your audience evolve, and plan content pillars around recurring topics, pain points you can address, and produce guides and tutorials that can serve as an encouraging introduction for new members as they join. This is also where you can utilize user-generated content to turn real feedback and commentary into public-facing posts that spread the word about all the great things your brand has to offer.
Create a Sustainable Feedback Loop
The long-term health of your community will rely on a consistent flow of new users entering and interacting with the existing audience. As your strategy evolves, you will need to consider how your content serves members along every step of the journey.
There are many ways to incentivize advocacy within your community, beyond offering referral programs that gamify the process. You can also make new members feel welcome by celebrating your progress together. Turn major follower milestones into a collaborative social campaign, or track towards lofty goals by encouraging new user behaviors with the promise of an intrinsic reward.
Once you’ve shown that you can nurture an accessible, eager-to-participate audience, it’s your responsibility to put guidelines in place that encourage productive conversations and reflect positively back on your brand.
Setting Yourself Up for the Future
Now that you understand the potential of a dedicated and engaged community, it’s important to plan for ongoing evaluation and adaptation. Your audience’s needs are sure to shift over time, but if you have built a transparent, trusting relationship, you can steer your strategy effectively through challenges as they arise.
Similarly, by anticipating the contentious issues and complex topics your audience faces, you can instill confidence among your followers. Proactive content that provides solutions and offers an understanding perspective goes a long way in keeping the community on your side.
Even the most robust community engagement strategy is never set in stone — but offers an evolving set of values and aspirational content that is in line with the core values of their customers.
If you’d like to learn more about ongoing community engagement strategy, get in touch with our growth marketing team today!
