Remember marketing your business with snail mail? Social media has been such a game changer since then.

Take my husband for example. He’s a local realtor, and he never knows how the people who receive his mailers react — except for the one time someone called the house asking him not to send them anymore. But with social media, your community will like, comment, or share right away, enabling you to gauge the effectiveness of your marketing.

That’s why community is essential to your social media strategy. In this episode, you’ll hear how to build yours. So listen up now.

In this episode of the podcast, I talk about:

  • #1 mistake business owners make with social media
  • My insider tips for engaging your community in a way that positively impacts your business
  • Industries in which your follower count truly matters
  • How my client is leveraging LinkedIn Polls to better serve the specific needs of her audience
  • The power of knowledge sharing for building trust
  • Why you won't find success on social media showing up only when & where YOU want
  • What will REALLY future-proof your social media strategy

This Episode Was Made Possible By:

Social Media Rockstar Framework Free Course
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Sendible Social Media Management Tool
The all-in-one social media management tool that my agency uses every day to schedule posts and analyze our social media results. Try them out for yourself today.

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Memorable Quotes:

  • “Community is the backbone of everything we do on social media. Without the people behind us supporting our brands and businesses, we don't really have a social media strategy. We're producing content for no one.”
  • “The surface-level proof that you've got a social media community is your follower count. It's really a visual representation of your social media success. And when you're looking at followers, there are types of businesses where followers are important. But they're not always important.”
  • “We wanna have the type of content that people wanna engage with. The algorithm loves this. First of all, the algorithm wants to see people engaging because it is a signal that you have a community. So the more people who engage with your posts, the more your posts are seen. But also, there's value in conversation as a business owner.”
  • “There's so much value as a business owner to really speak to the challenges that your audience is going through. You may describe them one way. For example, I can start talking all day about creating an Instagram Reel. Here's the technical things behind it. Here's how to do a sound. But honestly, for our audience, they just go, ‘I don't even know where to start. How do I even click over there?’ So when I'm marketing, those are the words I wanna use.”
  • “With one of our newer clients, we're seeing the value of this: instead of educating the audience, we're inviting conversation. It's snowballing to the point where our audience expects this space to be available to them to have that level of conversation. As community leaders, when you create that space first, people feel safe enough to trust you with their hard-earned money, to be able to then go deeper into becoming a client or customer with you or repeat client or customer.”
  • “As business owners, sometimes we focus so much on the short sale. We focus so much on the launch. Like, ‘I want this product out here, and I wanna sell this many pieces.’ But where the value comes in marketing to this extent is when we have built so much trust with our communities, that they're in it for the long haul with us. They're not just here to be one and done and give us their money.”
  • “We see this happening hugely for one of our clients: where they have several videos that have gone viral. They have a really strong, committed community over there because they're not only showing up on that platform, but they're showing up in a way where their community feels seen and heard.”
  • “Audiences are so much more likely to spend time with you as a business owner — to invest in your offer, to visit your website, to take action in some way — because they feel like you know them better than the competitors know them.”
  • “Think about developing your community. Really focus on the value piece of your community-based social media strategy. This isn't about content for the sake of content. This isn't about the media side of social media, where you're just producing, producing, producing. This requires active listening. Y'all, it requires paying attention. There's a nuance here to this, and the beautiful, beautiful, beautiful thing about community-focused social media strategies is that they pay dividends in the future.”

Resources Mentioned:

Episode 140: Why Risking Being Cancelled is Worth It with Lana Hernandez

About onlinedrea

Andréa Jones is a social media strategist who works with lifestyle brands to build their online presence through targeted social media and content marketing solutions. She's also the founder of SavvySocialSchool.com - a membership community with everything you need to achieve visibility, growth, and engagement on social media.