LinkedIn floats, Twitter goes after another round of funding, Facebook hits 750 million users, Google+ hits 25 million users in record time.

Social Media is no longer a toddler, it’s now started to grow up, and as a result we have to change our collective attitudes towards it.

There’s no longer any doubt that Social Media should be a part of any company’s marketing mix; it is providing us with the platform to engage closely with our consumers in a way that simply wasn’t possible previously. Even better for marketers, it’s providing us a platform to engage with more closely with the most valuable segment of our consumers – the advocates.

So it always surprises me when companies concentrate most on racing after followers. As if the size of your community is the most important measure of success. It’s the online equivalent of an untargeted, shoot-from-the-hip direct mail campaign.

Give your fans something to shout about… (Credit: IMLS DCC via Flickr)

The question we should be asking ourselves in regard to Social Media Marketing is ‘how do we build, retain and leverage our community’. And this applies equally to small businesses or large enterprises. A strong community will support you, rally to your cause, and even cut you some slack when mistakes are made – advocates even more so.

Creating a community

Creating a community isn’t easy – certainly not as easy as losing one – but it can be done, and there’s nothing revolutionary about it. Its basis is in common courtesy – if people have made the effort to come to you, you need to make the effort to engage with them.

This can be achieved in a number of ways:

  1. Respond to their questions and queries
    Organisations that respond positively to their community, whether their comments are good or bad, show themselves to be open and approachable. One way conversations get stale very quickly. Also make sure not to shamelessly self-publicise, your followers want to talk to a human being, not a PR machine.
  2. Offer them incentives to stay active
    Most users are going to ask a simple question: ‘What’s in it for me?’ Make sure you provide something. Provide them with early access to information or updates, or create offers and discounts that only they can access.
  3. Make them feel valued
    If you ask for your community’s feedback, make sure that you act upon it. If your community can affect change, however small it might be, they feel empowered and are more likely to engage with you next time you ask.

Once you have a community built, you can then start to leverage them in your marketing efforts.

How do you leverage your community?

To leverage a community, you need to understand how that community is structured. Identifying key influencers and advocates is essential, as is understanding the reach of individuals within the community. They are not a homogeneous mass, they are individuals, and as such they will have differing values to your marketing effort.

Here are two examples:

  1. The influencer – this individual may not have the most extensive following, but when they talk, people listen. Influencers of this type can be extremely useful in accessing distinct peer groups, such as the C-Level or the developer community.
  2. The networker – networkers aren’t as directly influential but they do have a wider audience. If getting the message out to as many people as possible is the goal, networkers are your friends, as they have large followings and strong reach.

The difficulty comes in identifying each of these users and categorising them efficiently.

Technology is your friend

Managing large communities is not an easy task, so investing in good tools to help you do this makes sense. There are a numerous systems available on the market that can help to you to listen to your community, but most of these are simple listening tools. However, one tool does specialise in mapping and categorising your social media landscape: SociView (disclosure: I work for the same company that produces SociView, although not as part of that team).

SociView can be used to map an organisation’s social media landscape, identifying communities around individual products, brands or services. It pulls in accounts from multiple social media networks and scores them based on their visibility, influence, reach and activity within that community.

SociView is representative of a new kind of Social Media toolset, one that concentrates on controlling and leveraging social media, rather than simply monitoring it. I expect to see more tools of this kind entering the marketplace over the next 12 months, but until then it provides an interesting next step in social media marketing.

Taking social media marketing to the next stage

Social Media presents a real opportunity for businesses to build relationships with consumers, but also to create powerful marketing opportunities. Now is the time to be implementing this approach into your social media strategy; we need to move onwards from a simple numbers game to an informed and intelligent approach, and technology can help us achieve this.