Google_ for Business_ How Google's Social Network Changes Everything - Chris Brogan [52]
The same is just as true online. It’s sometimes difficult to master the nuances, but observe others, and you can gain a sense of it. This chapter has plenty of the nuances you should explore. Connecting people is a vital part of the game.
The Time in Between Is Important
Another element of growing your audience is continuity. People want to hear from you (or the leaders of your community) on a fairly regular basis. They want a sense of their online “place” being familiar and “known.”
In these busy times, many of us cannot gather face to face as often as we would like. We travel for business. We scratch out time to be with our families. We work on our own pursuits. So, getting together as often as we’d like falls fairly far down on the priority list. After the financial downturn of 2009–2011, many companies forcibly cut back business travel, which is a perfect reason to build stronger online communities.
Continuity enables conversations you’ve had in person to continue online. Using tools such as Hangouts you can invite other parts of the company into the conversation. You can gather neighborhood businesses for a quick mid-day meeting without requiring anyone to leave the stores. This need to keep a “place” alive in between meetings works for all sizes of businesses.
Familiarity and continuity help people feel connected in between those isolated events. For instance, if you make gourmet cookies, and you decide to build your community around the campfire of “gift basket design,” you might share videos from your in-store seminars and then invite others in both your offline and your online community to participate in posts you put up related to this. It’s a way to move the online and offline conversations into a continuum that can prove useful for that sense of sustained contact.
You Are a Media Company
Communities want content, which isn’t too far afield of the campfire premise. However, in this case, the audience you build wants unique information consistently posted. They want information, stories, videos, ideas, and conversations about the campfire that holds your community together.
Building an audience requires a rather consistent stream of this. Most of the examples in previous chapters suggest posting two to four times a day on average. It also means commenting on other people’s posts, sharing other people’s posts (but not as often as you create your own), and connecting with the people you build relationships with online.
This takes time. It can take up to an hour a day (perhaps broken into two 30-minute slots). Some people and companies devote even more than that per day. Try different tactics and investments in time and measure the results (how many people click through, how many comments, how many +1’s, or any other in-system metrics) to see what is effective.
Make Your Buyer the Hero
People in your community want concepts they can adapt for their own use. They want ideas that improve their own world. “Make your buyer the hero,” is a phrase I use quite often that applies here. Concepts and tactics (or recipes or something similar) are what people want from you.
I started blogging in 1998. It took 8 years to get 100 readers. The reason was that Really Simple Syndication (RSS) wasn’t invented and blogs weren’t popular. (We called them “journals.”) However, the reality I stress with new bloggers is that I hadn’t yet learned to write for my readers.
It’s the same in your efforts to build an audience. If you write about yourself and your products and how great you are, only you can benefit from that. If you create interesting posts with concepts and ideas for your community to take so that they can improve their own experience in life, you have something.
Sailing the High C’s of Audience Building
It all comes down to the letter C:
• Community: