Tag 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.

There 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!

How to Set Expectations for Community Growth and Success

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Setting expectations helps to secure success in life and business. Online communities are no different.

By setting expectations you help to establish community guidelines and direction, giving focus to the purpose and mission of your community.

To help those building new communities we want to focus today on some of the simplest ways to help set expectations in a new community. These proven suggestions should help to grow engagement, build community interest and establish a solid foundation to grow from.

One of the easiest ways to set expectations is to provide guidance on using the community resources, whether posting questions or topics of discussion, setting standards for interaction and behaviors help to make a community a comfortable place for people to engage with one another.

Community Engagement comes from establishing positive community expectations.

Community Standards
Establish some basic community standards. Suggestions as to the tone of posts, responses and conversation being focused on positive contribution helps to encourage open and creative communication.

People will disagree, people will debate, but as long as the communities remembers to respect the views of others and the community the contribution of those involved will flow much more freely.

Post Forum Topics
Set some basic forums within the community for people to post in. Ideally include a general topic area, questions and answers, and an ideas section. The ideas section will be where your community can provide their ideas for new topics for forums, or even potential opportunities for community involvement or growth through outside connections.

Make It Predictable, Therefore Comfortable
Be certain to seed your community with conversations, questions and shared content. This will encourage others to do the same and help establish the value of the community engagement.

Part of that is establishing a regular posting schedule, a daily topic section or similar style areas to encourage the community to come back regularly and establish a “habit” or checking in.

With these few simple steps you will be on your way to growing an engaged and dynamic Follr Community. How are you helping to set expectations and encourage community interaction?