The sense of community felt by your customers in your Social Media outlets is important to maintaining their loyalty to your brand.

Using Social Media to promote your business is definitely going to get you noticed. One additional way to not only get your business some attention, but to keep your readers coming back time after time is to create a community. People love the idea of having a sense of community. It may be especially important in this day of little real face to face contact. If you can emulate a true sense of community within your followers or readership, you can expect to enjoy a wealth of interested potential clients and customers.

The Trick to Creating a Sense of Community with Social Media

The real trick is to take the generic and cold feeling of communicating by electronic machine out of your process. The inherent nature of this kind of communication lends itself to isolation of sorts, so if you can find a way to have your relationships online become a bit warm and fuzzy you will most likely see real success at building a strong and active neighborhood on your pages.

To get this rolling, think of the way you email, chat, text, or have phone convos with your live contacts. You text your brother about the new car. He responds with a comment and wants to know when he can come and see it. You respond in kind, and the text resembles the back and forth of a real conversation. This is what you will want to achieve in your Social Media community communications. It will take up some time, but when people engage each other in any form of discussion they feel a sense of familiarity with them.

Replying, commenting and sharing are essential to building good, strong online relationships.
Along with those relationships comes a natural sense of loyalty.

Creating Social Media Loyalty

There is a television character that was shown buying his life’s essential items from only people he knew best. His loyalty stemmed from simple communicating that occurred between them each time he inquired about a product. He felt as though he ‘knew’ these business people and therefore liked doing business with them. The whole point was that he wasn’t getting any real bargains from these vendors, but felt a keen loyalty to them as they engaged him in friendly conversation now and then.

This is what you need to do in an electronic sense. Your community must contain the element of friendliness and reasonable response time so the readers or followers will feel that sense of connection to you and your company. If necessary, assign someone in your organization to monitor your community and engage your potential customers in brief chats.

Use Social Media Tools

Simply having a Facebook page and/or Blog and slapping articles on it for SEO purposes is not enough anymore. You must be constantly monitoring, replying and sharing. Take advantage of the tools like Hootsuite and SocialOomph. These will definitely help you monitor and reply to comments on all of your major Social Media networks, such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.