Did you know that social media has over 5 billion users worldwide?
Selecting the right social media platform and leveraging it to build a community around your brand helps boost your reach and makes it easier for you to connect with your target audience.
However, it may be overwhelming to be active on all social media platforms and engage the intended audience.
So, a viable strategy is to have an active presence on mainstream platforms that are readily preferred by your target audience. Facebook is one of the most popular ones for you to consider to build a community and establish a strong bond with your audience.
In this article, we will discuss five data-driven strategies that will help you build and grow a Facebook community.
So, without further ado, let’s get started.
Importance of Building a Community
Before we dive into the strategies that may help you build a Facebook community, let’s explore why you should consider doing that and the importance of building a community around your brand.
A common misconception is that people use social media either for entertainment purposes or to connect with their friends and family. In fact, 43% of people use social media platforms to learn more about their preferred brands and research solutions before buying them.
By building a community around your brand, you provide your current and potential customers with a platform to connect. It serves as a platform for like-minded people to interact and learn from the experiences of one another.
By leveraging the community you built for your audience, they can easily access relevant information and make smart purchase choices. As a result, you get to bond with your target audience on a deeper level and earn their respect as a people-focused brand.
Benefits of Building an Online Community
Building a community for your brand has a variety of benefits. Here are a few important ones worth mentioning.
Increased Outreach
Building a community around your brand not only helps you connect with your target audience on a deeper level, but it also boosts your reach exponentially.
Through your community, you can make your voice heard, generate awareness about your brand, and get more eyeballs with ease.
If you use renowned and widely preferred social media platforms like Facebook to build a community, you will get to leverage shareability, as your community members will likely share your content with their social circle.
This greatly amplifies your reach and makes it easier for you to generate traction for your brand organically.
Word of Mouth
The members of your Facebook community have the potential to become your brand advocates and voluntarily promote your solutions on your behalf.
These members are the ones who have acknowledged positive experiences through their journey and hold great respect for your brand.
Around 99.9% of people look for reviews before deciding to buy anything online. They seek recommendations from other people and learn from their experiences to avoid making a bad purchase.
Your community members sharing their positive experiences with their networks generates word-of-mouth, which helps you attract a relevant audience and convince them to try the solutions you offer.
Trend Discovery
Creating a community helps you explore the latest trends in your respective industry and identify new opportunities to scale your business.
Your community is where your current and potential customers interact with one another. They don’t just talk about your brand or the experiences it offers. They also discuss the latest happenings in your respective industry.
Keeping an eye on such discussions can help you discover new trends and pave the way for you to ensure continuous improvement.
You can tailor your products or services as per the customers’ expectations and pivot your business strategies according to new discoveries.
Customer Insights
Another thing that helps you ensure continuous improvement is customer insights. Knowing about the needs and interests of your customers helps you offer personalized experiences and acknowledge lasting customer relationships.
Customer feedback is an excellent way to improve the solutions you offer and ensure high satisfaction. The problem is that only 6% of customers end up reviewing the products or services they purchase.
A community is an excellent medium to reach out to your customers and ask them for their valuable feedback. Not only will it help you access useful insights, but it will also enable you to make a great impression, as your customers will think that their opinions matter to you.
You can also identify the pain points of your customers and minimize the friction in your customer journey.
Strategies to Build and Thrive a Facebook Community
The following are a few of the noteworthy strategies that will help you build and grow a Facebook community.
Identify the Purpose
The prerequisite for building a Facebook community is being clear on its purpose. As discussed above, building a community has many perks. However, you need to be clear on your objective before getting started.
This will help you steer your efforts in the right direction and achieve the desired results. You will be able to come up with viable strategies that help you foster engagement and attract new members to your community with each passing day.
Know Your Audience
To grow your Facebook community, it’s important to know your target audience and get acquainted with their needs or preferences.
Understanding what makes your audience tick is essential for building a community that attracts relevant people. The only way the intended audience will be interested in being a part of your community is when it resonates with their interests.
For this, leveraging Facebook’s audience insights tool may come in handy. It helps you assess users’ behavior and know how people have been interacting with the content you post through your business page.
You can also access useful information from your customer database, such as demographics, buying history, customer feedback, and so on. Based on this data, you can come up with different audience personas representing diverse demographic and psychographic characteristics. This information helps you devise personalized targeting and engagement strategies to connect with the right audience.
To get started, check out these demographics to get an initial overview of who you can reach on Facebook.
Share Personalized Content for your Facebook Community
People don’t join online communities just to interact with like-minded individuals. They also use these communities as communication channels to reach out to their preferred brands and stay tuned for the latest updates.
So, it’s important to create and share personalized content to grow your Facebook community. The goal here is to engage your target audience and make them want to share your content with others. This will amplify your reach, which will help you attract more members and grow your community.
Try different content formats, keep an eye on the insights to track engagement, and see what works for you. Tracking your content performance metrics may help you craft a recipe for creating high-performing posts that are capable of driving more engagement on the platform.
You can also consider leveraging our social media content sharing guide to know what, when, and how to share.
Leverage Groups
Another viable strategy to grow your community on Facebook is to create different groups to attract diverse audience segments. Groups enable you to fine-tune your targeting and engagement strategies, allowing you to dive deep and operate on a micro level.
You must have already identified different audience segments based on the data from Facebook’s audience insights tool and your customer database. You can now do pinpoint targeting by creating different groups that resonate with divergent audience characteristics.
Leverage Paid Advertising
Another viable way to build and grow a community on Facebook is by strategically using paid advertisements.
When you have just gotten started with building a community, attracting a relevant audience may be a challenge. The more members you have in your community, the easier it becomes for you to generate traction organically.
However, when you are new, your reach is very limited. So, growing your community organically may be a bit more difficult than you expect.
Leveraging Facebook ads may come in handy here, as they give you a much-needed boost and help you attract a relevant audience to your community.
Just make sure that you keep optimizing your ads and fine-tune your targeting criteria based on the ad performance data.
Final Words
There you have it: the five data-driven strategies to build and thrive your Facebook community. If you’ve been wanting to generate awareness about your brand and engage a relevant audience, creating a community around your brand is your best bet.
It helps you convey your message to the masses, leverage social proof, and attract quality leads for your sales funnel, fueling the growth of your business.
This article showcases useful strategies that will help you create and grow your community with ease by leveraging one of the most popular social media platforms.
Syed Balkhi is the founder of WPBeginner, the largest free WordPress resource site.
With over 10 years of experience, he’s the leading WordPress expert in the industry. You can learn more about Syed and his portfolio of companies by following him on his social media networks.
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