Without community engagement you can’t continue running a good community and you won’t have any interaction. Communities exist but to identify them, give them a place and involve them, just sharing content is often not enough.
Community engagement depends on the benefits for the members constituting it. Here are some techniques to start community engagement and more important, to keep it going.
[the_ad id=”27933″]Check out these six emotional community engagement tips.
1. Get people to tell stories.
People love to share themselves with others. If you become a conduit for this type of communication between people, you will capture the emotions of your audience like no other. You get bonus points if you provide a large audience for the true performers in your ranks.
2. Use images.
Images are better able to convey emotion. Make sure that the images that you publish have as much emotional impact as you can put into them.
If a normal image is worth 1,000 words, then a truly emotionally charged image is worth a million words or more.
3. Be a responsive community engagement leader.
Make sure that you respond to the people that take the time to respond to you.
There is nothing more emotionally satisfying than receiving encouragement and understanding from a leader of a social circle. If you want to emotionally engage your audience, become emotional right along with them (in a positive way).
4. Make sure that your contributions stay grounded
It is easy to become irrelevant once your network begins to grow a little. You may start to think that you must cater to a wider spectrum by glossing up your image.
What ends up happening is that you try too hard and people begin to see through you. Your community audience is growing because of what you are already doing. All that you have to do is keep doing it. Keep your posts grounded. The same posts that engage 10 people deeply will engage 1,000 people deeply.
5. Community engagement starts with understanding and adding value.
If you always come from the mindset of making someone else’s day better, you will get great emotional responses from your audience.
No matter if your posts are entertaining in nature or serious in scope, if they are relevant and precise, you will always get a great response. Community engagement is understanding what members (and their connections) want and acting upon it.
6. Fall back on entertainment and education.
If you cannot find something with the appropriate gravitas for the day, you can always fall back on entertaining and educational content.
It is sometimes good to break up the monotony with a lighthearted story that everyone can get into. Entertaining content is also much easier to relate to on a large scale.
However, remember: community engagement is not just about sharing content!
Communities are much like coral, as they grow, they attract others to the community and create more dynamic interactions. It’s up to marketers to create a space for the coral to form and nurture the growth around it.
