How To Build A Strong Community For Your New Brand

Think of how amazing it would be if you didn’t have to pay a dime for your advertising. And think about what it would be like if the positive comments about your brand came from trusted friends and colleagues of the very population that you are trying to reach.

Yeah, I know, pretty amazing!

This is the idea behind community management.

Some of the most successful companies have achieved success based on community management strategies. Consider Harley Davidson, Nike, and Kiehl’s. All are excellent examples of successful community management. See this post where I talk about why.

The question addressed in this article is how do you build a healthy community program if you are at the bootstrapping stage of your organization?

(1) Have advocates apply to be in your program.

This strategy gets to a basic premise of human psychology. Have you noticed how when you try to give something away, you get a few takers. But when when you charge a small fee, you get a lot more takers.

The same idea is that if you make your audience do a bit of work for you, and apply to qualify to be in the program, then you will get more engagement (at least at first), and more good messaging will spread about your brand. In the organizations where I have worked as community manager, I used Google Forms for the community application. It’s a free tool that met our needs with 11 different types of question formats.

(2) Respond to applications immediately.

It’s important for your advocates to both feel that they are taken care of, and feel like they have a support person to reach out to. This is why it’s a good idea to send applicants a short note with the community manager’s contact information, and send this right after they submit their application. This, too, is possible for free with Google Forms with the Form Notifications add on.

(3) Give accepted applicants something to share on social.

Once you have accepted people into your advocate community, give them something to celebrate! Maybe you can give them a personalized…