With more social media and online communication, being genuine and trustworthy are two important characteristics many consumers are looking for from businesses more than ever.
With authentic engagement and communication, you can foster communities that work together to empower each other and your brand. It provides the knowledge you need to improve your products while also helping the members solve problems that can then be used to improve their lives and others. It’s about being real, inspiring your community, and doing your best not to mislead or misdirect them.
The following are five important principles to learn and incorporate to inspire authentic community engagement and grow your business:
Get the Community Involved and Active Right Away
Don’t wait until you have a lot of members to start publishing information and activating the community. At first, your community may feel a little lonely until you get more members but keeping it active and full of information that will still be there when people join is very important to building a dynamic and vibrant community.
Encourage Trust and Integrity
Set the rules of your community to establish trust and highlight your integrity to the group. As you communicate openly with members of your community, others observe and become more trusting of you as they notice how much integrity you have.
Foster Community-Led Solutions
As a business owner, you need to create and or find solutions for your ideal customer's problems related to your niche and your expertise. The impressive thing about having a community is getting input to create more solutions from the people who need them.
Be Consistent, Clear, and Open with Communication
It can help to create a branding guide that includes your business personality and voice to ensure that all content and communication are consistent, clear, and accurate. It’s a lot easier to be open when you know for sure where your values lie and how to ensure you stick to them.
Empower and Support Your Audience
The best thing about a group is that you will have one of the best advantages in empowering and supporting your audience. After all, you want them to succeed, and if they succeed, you do too.
Create powerful and informed content that serves your members and only your members --- meaning don’t just automatically share content that has been shared in other places unless you changed it in some way or added additional meaning to it by connecting it to a success story or a point you want to share. The more personal the content being shared in the group, the more likely your members will come back and engage with each other. Content is how you keep your target audience interested and involved, so make it worth it.
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