Most entrepreneurs, markets and community builders believe that their social media following is their “brand community”.

The truth is social media is just a broadcast channel for most brands to make announcements and share product updates.

Very few realise that a brand’s social media following is not their community. Consider following points:

1. You do not own the platform, and the community.

2. It’s mostly one-way communication with limited engagement

3. The engagement is mostly superficial, focused on customer support or handling complaints

4. No sense of belonging among the followers

5. You do not control the environment or the culture (very important)

6. No way to hold meaningful discussions or build bonds among members

7. Social media algorithms are designed to limit, not amplify your reach

It’s impossible to offer a community experience to your customers or members. So, what’s the way out?

Don’t worry, let’s go step by step to build an engaged online community for your brand. Following is the TL;DR version of the process:

1. Step 1: Define the main reason your community should exist

2. Step 2: Identify your target audience

3. Step 3. Pick the right community platform

4. Step 4: Build “Painkiller” content

5. Step 5: Onboard first 10-50 members, manually

6. Step 6. Grow Community on Autopilot

7. Step 7: Evolve continuously

We’ll make it easy and fun for you to build your community. Let’s start.

Step 1: Identify the main purpose of your brand community

Brand communities are special. They are built around serving the customers of your business or brand.

Most of the businesses like Apple, Google have built their communities around serving their customers. These communities help build loyalty among existing customers and also attract new customers through user-generated content.

A brand community may have the following purpose:

• To act as a support channel for customers

• To act as a lead-generation machine for the business

• To build loyal fan-following for the brand

• To act as a platform for collecting feedback for product / service improvement

• To identify real pain-points of the customers

• To build a healthy network of customers

• To build a personal connect with the existing and potential customers

Identifying the purpose of the community helps you define its growth strategy and scope.

Step 2: Identify your target audience

For most brand communities, the target audience is their customers. This is an excellent start. However, you must also keep in mind that open (public) communities have the power to attract new customers.

When identifying your target audience, you should dig into the data collected by the sales and marketing teams.

Find out:

1. The age group of your target audience

2. The language they speak including the tone (formal / casual / conversational)

3. The geographic area they represent

4. Their prime motivations and pain points

5. Their fears

6. Their ways of finding solutions to pain points

Why this? Because it will help us build our ‘painkiller content’. It’s the holy grail of growing communities organically, using the power of SEO and long-tail keywords.

Step 3: Pick the right Community Platform

I am a big fan of open community platforms because they offer several advantages over the closed community platforms like Slack, Discord or WhatsApp.

An open community platform like Jatra lets you have the best of both worlds - automatic user growth via SEO and private channels that are hidden from everyone.

An important consideration when choosing a community platform is to know how you’ll host it. I strongly recommend fully-managed over self-hosted community platform.

I encourage you to ask questions in our Discussions section so that we can guide you with the choice of platform.

Step 4: Build “Painkiller” Content

Now, this is the most important part of community building. Remember that a community grows when it creates value for its members.

So, how do you create value for your audience?

Simple. Solve their pain points.

That is, by creating “painkiller” content. Something that immediately answers their query or helps them find a solution to a problem.

The painkiller content can be created in many ways. The most popular is by creating QnAs.

Simply answer all the most common questions in the niche your community operates.

Jatra goes beyond simple QnA and Discussions to help you build painkiller content in the form of:

• SEO-optimised articles

• SEO-powered chats

• Quizzes

• Jobs

• Events / Webinars

• Feedback

• Changelog

• Announcements

• Reviews

..and more. We call it “custom post-types” - and it’s unlike anything you’d have seen on a community platform.

The variety of painkiller content allows you to target the long-tail keywords that a typical blog will not be able to cover. It works like charm to attract trust and visitors from Google.

Step 5: Onboard first 10 - 50 Members, Manually

Once you have built a base of painkiller content, it’s time to invite your first 10 and then 50 members manually.

This is the challenging part but if you want your community to grow organically and automatically - you must do this.

Invite first few members manually and find out what content they engage with. Talk to them and update your content.

Make sure that it actually solves a pain-point for your users.

It’s important to build a personal bond with all your first members. These members will set the direction of your community and will help you create content.

Encourage them to post and comment. Make them feel at home.

Step 6: Grow Community on Autopilot

This is the most exciting phase of building community for your brand. WIth your painkiller content in place and a few engaged members, you have set the foundation for organic growth of your community.

Your role now is to add engaging content weekly and talk to users.

You should now start seeing some organic traffic from search engines. Make sure to talk to new members and encourage them to participate on the community.

Keep in mind that the growth compounds. It’s always slow in the beginning, but grows exponentially as you add more members and content.

Step 7: Evolve Continuously

Always keep in mind that a community grows when it creates value for its members. An organically growing community is mostly self-sustaining. However, it needs monitoring. Here are few tips:

• Keep the community spam free

• Look at the data to identify key members and content

• Double down on the content your community loves (events, chats, discussions and so on)

• Keep members motivated

We have built multiple successful communities using these steps. I hope this guide is helpful. If you have specific questions about growing your brand community, let me know.