Category Archives: Community Building

3 Quick Steps to Find and Connect with Your Community on Twitter

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You built a community, now what? Sitting there by yourself isn’t a lot of fun. How do you find others to join you and share your community?

Since most communities are based on interests, hobbies or brands, they will usually appeal to a fairly widespread audience. The question is how do you find that audience? Twitter is the perfect place.

Use Twitter Search to find people talking about topics your community is built aroundThere are tons of searchable conversations happening on Twitter every moment of every day. There is no better way to find people who want to talk about a topic than on Twitter.

To keep it simple and quick, since we would rather have you building your community and enjoying it, we present…

3 Quick Steps to Find and Connect with your Community on Twitter.

  1. Identify Your Community Keywords
    Think of these as the 5-7 best words to describe your community focus. Write down the key words you would or those that someone interested in your community might search for.

    If you aren’t sure what words are best, refer to the tags that you included when you initially built your community. Those would be the search words or terms that someone would use to find your community.

    If you need help just stop by the Follr Support Community and post a message, we will be happy to help you identify your perfect search terms and keywords.

  2. “The Twitter”
    Twitter is the holy-grail of search. If it is out there being discussed, you will find it on Twitter. Twitter has great search features, whether it is the standard search on any Twitter page, or the advanced search, you will get some amazing results.

    Some people like to search for hashtag specific topics. It’s an option but results are limited to the words only with the # in front of them. An open search without the hashtag will return many more choices. Try to search without the hashtag first, then use the hashtag if the results are overwhelming. To refine the search, add additional words to the search to focus more on the target conversations and people.

  3. Follow and Share
    Now that you found people, follow them. When you follow them you might also want to reply to the message that led you to them, you could retweet it, or reply to it, and mention the common interest. But don’t ask them to join you just yet!! Wait until the individual replies to your message, then keep the conversation going. When it feels right mention your community and share the link, ask them to stop by and tell you what they think.

Be a conversationalist. Include your community in your conversations, the topic, and even share posts that are there, invite people to the conversation.

Add your Community link to your bio, and become an authority on your Community focus. In no time instead of looking for your community, your community will be finding you on Twitter.

Happy Community Building!

Building on the Basics: 3 Steps to Be an Online Community Builder

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If you are already an online community builder or aspire to be one, our goal at Follr is to make the experience as simple and fun as possible. As we continue our series on building a solid foundation for success with online communities we will focus on creating the community identity.

Become an Online Community Builder with your own Follr Community - simple, easy and freeWhen creating a community you should have a clear definition of the community focus and purpose. Creating the community mission statement, as well as a comprehensive list of related keywords, is more important than many understand. Focusing on the recommendations here will result in an increase of online community engagement, interaction and posting, once you’ve opened your doors to your new community.

As soon as people read the term “key words” their minds automatically connect the term with search engine optimization (SEO), in this case that is a secondary benefit of your primary purpose. The primary purpose is to help focus on the content and direction of the online community you are building. Once you have a good list of 10-15 keywords, or terms, related to the community you are building, and the mission statement you defined, you will see a true community begin to form.

3 Steps to Be an Online Community Builder resulting in huge Online Community Engagement

  1. Define your purpose: A Mission Statement

    It might sound tedious but taking time to plan and focus will help create a more viable, and vibrant, online community. When the purpose is clear then people will easily be attracted to the community, don’t allow confusion to be a barrier to community success. A clear definition and statement of purpose make a transition into a new community much easier for a potential member.

    People are hesitant, they resist change, for maximum engagement in a new community being clear in the focus and purpose will put them at ease. By defining this in the community description, and even seeding content into your community, will result in seeing conversations begin at a significantly faster rate than the average online community builder does.

  2. Keyword: Success
    Identifying keywords which relate to the community topic and purpose allows for powerful online community building tricks. The first is that now potential community members can be found via social search. Use your key words/terms to search and find those potential community members. The second is that if the goal is to ramp the interactions up in the community even faster, you can use those same words and terms to invest in SEO and purchase Adwords via Google.

    Notice the focus on sharing the community with people on other social networks. By being “discoverable”, and in turn discovering, a rapid decrease in the odds of community survival shift in the favor of the community builder.

    Using social search tools, you will find people who are “talking” about your topics and focus, and get into the conversation with them. If you have seeded enough content and encouraged your community members to do so as well, you should have no problem bringing the conversation back to your Follr Communities website.

  3. Target: Locked and Engaged
    Once you begin to identify people who are conversant on the topic for your community you want to begin to have conversations, on the topic with them. Create saved searches (eg Google Alerts) to monitor – blog posts, tweets, shares, statuses, etc. that have already happened or are happening live.

    Take time to review the conversations, be sure there is something relevant posted within your community. If not, consider posting something – take the topic and spin a question out of the conversation or post. Try to build a few responses to it from your community before you get into a discussion with the target of your attempts at engagement.

The goal of these key steps is to create a community alive with conversation and engagement. Searching for people and focusing on being found is a very genuine way of finding people who are like-minded and want to participate with you and your community. Don’t feel as though you are being “sneaky” – there is nothing sneaky about connecting and sharing with other people, it is the entire purpose of building an online community.

Show us how it works for you, create your Follr Community – they are simple online communities to build, with an elegant format similar to a template, and all you do is fill in the information and voila you are up and running.

There really is no simple way to be an online community builder than with Follr.