Social Media & Community Development: Connecting Online & Offline

How do you build an online community?

The first, and easiest step is to start with the people you already know. Who among your existing contacts also fit the characteristics of your ideal  community member? Approach them first. Here’s a flytebiz article for taking this first, basic step building your personal followers on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

What if, however, your contact list is limited or if the people in your contact list aren’t the people who you’re targeting in your online community? Then what can you do? In addition to asking your contacts, customers and connections to refer, link, and friend you… you go searching; literally.

LinkedIn - Use the advanced people search feature where you can search for LinkedIn members by geographic location, specific company, school, professional title, etc. You can also search among your connections’ connections, and their connections – so you know you’ll have a likely introduction to the people you find in your results. If you’re doing business in non-English speaking locations, you can even specify Spanish, German, French, etc. profiles.

Keep in mind, this is the search step.  Once you find people you’d like to connect with, reach out and make contact. It’s easy if you already have a common connection or are members of the same LinkedIn group. If not, getting in contact can be more difficult. One option is the premium LinkedIn membership that allows you more access to non-connections.

Facebook - If you want a “business” presence on Facebook, set up a business page. As a general rule, unless you ARE your business – this is the recommendation I give to every organization – large, small, for profit, non-profit; “Set up a separate business page.”

Don’t use the regular profile page for your business. It’s not a good practice for a few reasons, one-of which – well, it’s “not allowed”. Now, far be it from me to complain about not following the rules… I’m the president of the “rules are meant to be broken” club. However, there are security issues and privacy issues involved. Not only that, if the Facebook police catch you they’ll kick you off all together and THEN you’ve really ticked off your “friends” who’ve signed up with you.

With your Facebook page established, “suggest” the page to your personal Facebook contacts. (See Rich’s post to build your personal Facebook contacts.) As people ‘like” the page they, too, can “suggest” your page to their friends – and so on.

A Facebook ad can be a great tool for building your community. The cost is still relatively low and, provided you target the impressions well, have strong ad copy and a good call to action /  landing page, a Facebook ad could be an excellent value for building your Facebook fan base.

Twitter - Much like LinkedIn, Twitter has an advanced search (www.search.twitter.com) where you can search for people by geography as well as keywords in what they do or don’t tweet about. Twitter doesn’t store much bio information, but some other search tools that make it a little easier to find people by what’s in their bio description include http://tweepsearch.com/ and http://tweepz.com/
A couple of good directories of Twitter users – sorted by hundreds of categories – are http://www.twellow.com/ and http://wefollow.com/

Link Me, Like Me, Tweet Me! If you haven’t already, add the social media widgets to your website and blog pages, as well as to your email signature, to your online newsletter. Need some icons? Free icons here.

And don’t forget about offline communications! Include your “social” URLs in your print ads and on business cards and brochures.

You’re thinking to yourself, “Wow, this is a lot of work.”

Yep. Yep, It is.

Not only that, building the community is just the beginning. But, done well, a strong and loyal online community can turn into strong and loyal supporters of your offline business.

by the way – Link Me! Like Me! Tweet Me!

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