When you have a message, you want to share it with the right community. And as your message develops, you want your community to grow, too.
This way, you get to engage with them and they get to interact with one another. After a while, you start to notice patterns, assess their pain points, and learn how you can further improve your message.
Once you have all that set up, it will be easier to bring everyone further into your world. And when that happens, you can start finding ways to solve their problems, make an impact, and create meaningful relationships.
So, how does it work? How do you build a community around your message? How do you keep them engaged with each other? What are the best ways to engage with them?
Like your personal branding framework itself, building your community consists of three things:
DEVELOPING AUTHORITY
Would you listen to a crime podcast by someone who knows nothing about crime? Or watch cooking videos put out by a questionable home cook? No. No one would. To gain a following, you’ve got to have authority and expertise.
Authority and expertise are directly connected to your message. You need to be known for something, and you must have — or develop — authority around that topic.
Just existing in a content space long enough kick-starts your authority in your subject matter. Your message might resonate or it might not, but just through your consistency, people will begin to understand that you have some expertise in the subject.
But as the person who’s providing that content, you can curate it to further your authority through several means:
- Bringing in subject matter experts as guests
- Sharing the expertise of other authority figures
- Answering specific questions from your clients/readers/listeners
All of these create authority in your brand that you can share within a commuter community, and that’s why people are gathering.
AUTHORITY AND YOUR COMMUNITY
You don’t just build a Facebook group or a community around a product or an idea. You create a community around something that they want to grow and change and learn from and interact with.
For me, I bring people into my community to learn about marketing, to talk about their businesses and to exchange ideas and get access to me. They join my community to become more educated marketers, or get little tips and tricks to move past a barrier, or access me to ask an unanswered question.
Now, if your community lacks focus, you’ll never know what to say that is relevant. What might this look like? It’s a community that:
- Is too broad or too vague.
- Has no specific subject or goal.
- Consists of your friends, family, colleagues and clients.
What you want to do is create something your community members all have in common and enjoy talking about together so that they engage. And you can facilitate that engagement through some common experience question or by asking them to share about themselves and with you.
GETTING DISCOVERED BY YOUR COMMUNITY
Obviously, to build a community, people need to be able to find you. And that can happen in two ways:
- You post organically, or
- You pay for eyeballs through advertising.
ORGANIC REACH
The key to organic reach is posting for groups, not individuals.
Being followed by individuals is where a community starts. People will interact with your content, or they’ll see you leave a comment in a Facebook group, or you’ll meet them in person and they could follow you on social media — and that’s fine.
But when you post on social media, they likely won’t see it because on social media, only about 3 percent of your followers are even seeing the things you post at any given time.
But if you have people within a group, they get more notifications that say your group is active and there’s something happening that they need to pay attention to.
And more importantly, when you’re out there engaging with other people, you don’t have to try to sell something. You can just direct them to your group.
You could say, “Hey, I actually have a whole group that dives into what you were talking about. I think it will be perfect for you since you’re at this similar place in your business, so feel free to check it out.”
It’s free, and it’s helpful. And those personal invites can help grow a community pretty quickly. And as you grow your community, you grow your opportunity to drive people toward your content and toward your products and services when they make sense for them.
How else can you get organic reach? By physically being in the community. Interviews, appearances, PR, speaking on stages. Again, you can use that exposure to drive people to your community.
ADVERTISING REACH
Now a lot of people focus on the organic side because it’s free and it’s something you can do every day. The problem is that people who did it early got the best ROI from it. Those who are starting now don’t get the same benefit of discovery from organic posts.
So what happens is you do all this work to create posts and no one sees it. Ultimately, it becomes an ROI problem.
If you’re doing it for free yourself, go for it. But if you’re paying someone to manage your social media, you’d better make sure the ROI of paying that person isn’t something better spent on a paid ad.
What I see all the time is brands paying someone to post pretty pictures every week on their social media, and only around 200 people see it. If you spent that same money on a Facebook ad that you build once and you run over and over again, you might have tens of thousands of people seeing it.
Now, platforms like TikTok and LinkedIn offer a tremendous ability to grow your following organically, but that’s just not the case for something like Facebook or Instagram.
If you’re trying to start from scratch on Facebook or on Instagram, you’ve got a lot of work to do. It’s not going to happen that quickly for you. While you’re building your community, the fastest way to grow an audience probably isn’t going to be organic. It’s going to be paid.
At the end of the day, if you’re willing to wait five years, great. Drive it all organically.
But if you’re not, you’ve got to start building up quickly, and that’s probably going to come with an advertising cost.
GROW YOUR LIST TO FILL YOUR COMMUNITY
When you build your community, you have more opportunities to grow your list and gather essential data such as your audience demographics. You can use the information as touch points when creating a strategy or finding ways to leave an impact.
So for example, someone joins my Facebook group because they see value in it. They either like my message or want to be a part of the community. To join, they have to give me an email. And, I get to ask them a couple of questions such as:
- What are their biggest challenges?
- What podcasts do they listen to?
With that information, I learn more about them and the group as a whole.
So if out of a hundred people, 90 of them say that they all have a similar challenge, I get an idea of what I solve in terms of the products that I’ve built.
Also, list building provides me with a way to continuously contact them on various channels. So if social media shuts down one day, I’m not affected now that I have their emails. I can still send something each week to let them know about an interesting topic. I can also notify them in case I schedule a Facebook live show, podcast cast release or a new blog post.
The people you bring into your Facebook group because of your direct interaction with them may not already follow your content. But by giving you their information, you now can start to deliver content to them that comes from the platform you built.
OFFERING VALUE
So how do you do the list building? You have to give them something of value for them to give your information, things like:
- Facebook groups
- Freebies
- Useful tools
Make sure that your business has some kind of freebie, some kind of useful information or tool or course or blog or resource or steps or whatever. Something free that you create that’s digital that you can send them in exchange for an email.
Whatever question you get asked the most is typically the thing you can build a lead magnet around. Build a solution, then you can say, “Actually, I’m glad you asked that. I have a resource that takes care of that for you.”
They’ll have to give you an email to do that. And that’s where you bring them onto your list.
You now, again, have control of your communication with them, which is all you really want. The more touch points you can build the better.
If you can get people’s email address, their phone number, their DM, get them in your Facebook group, you have more opportunities to connect with them. I’m not saying do all of them all at once, all the time. I’m saying you have more chances.
GROWING YOUR LIST
If you can continue to grow your list faster than people unsubscribe, then you’re starting to build a group of people that you can ask questions. You can tell them about your latest launches and your new content. You can ask what they need.
Then you can start to figure out what they will actually buy that solves the problem. That is the key.
A lot of people avoid list building because sending emails is a lot of work, or because coming up with lead magnets is a little bit of work that no one knows how to do, or because they think they can just become an Instagram star.
But there are so many people that have built Instagram or Facebook followings. However, when they tried to sell something, it didn’t work. It has to do with the nurturing they haven’t done to that community. But it also has to do with it the amount of communication they haven’t pulled from social media, into their own world, into their own channels, into their own platforms.
Your list is the number one thing you could be focusing on, especially if you are starting by selling some coaching services or you’re doing some one-on-one work.
It will start small, and that’s fine. Just start emailing people one by one: anyone who is qualified, who has found something that you’ve offered for free, who shows interest in what you might be selling in the future
Once you build the list, you now have people who you can nurture. If you start now, you’ll already have their attention when they’re ready for the thing you’re selling.
MORE ADVICE AND INTERVIEWS
If you’d like my full plan for how to build your content marketing strategy, check out my free Content Marketing Starter Guide.
And here are some more of my most popular thought leader interviews!
- What Business to Start with John Lee Dumas
- Personal Branding Masterclass with Chris Ducker
- Built to Serve with Evan Carmichael