APU Careers Careers & Learning

Think ‘Community’ Online

By Jill Kurtz
Online Career Tips Contributor

If you use social media, you are missing the point if you think of success in in terms of number of followers. You should be thinking in terms of relationships and community. Your presence should serve as a hub where the people interact with each other and with you.

It takes time to build an online community. You can’t wait to get started until your community gets to be of a particular size, because you will never have a robust community until you start and take steps to build a following.

Whether you want to build your community on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or another social site, there are conscious steps that should be taken to grow a following.

Share Relevant Information Regularly

From the moment you establish your community (or make a commitment to building your community), use it to share relevant information. Decide on an interval that you can sustain and stick to the schedule.

  • Content shared can be news related to you, news about an industry or topic area, information related to clients or customers, etc.
  • Over communicating can be the quickest route to losing followers. Figure out a comfortable rhythm based on what you can sustain and the feedback of people in the community.

Use Surveys and Polls

Many social sites have built-in survey and poll tools. There are also many free tools. Use them to develop thought-provoking polls and surveys that allow followers to share information with you.

Use surveys at regular intervals each year to ensure you are covering topics that members find useful. Surveys give community members an easy way to share information about themselves and what they care about.

  • Make the survey brief and easy to respond to
  • Don’t ask for more information than you need or plan to act on
  • Share the results and your plan of action so that the members who took part in the process understand how they have contributed

Make Personal Contact

Your community is powered by the participation of individuals. Take time to respond to contributions by commenting on content, liking posts, and re-tweeting. Check in with individual members and ask about what’s valuable about the community. Explore ways that the member can participate more. Sometimes, all it takes to move someone from passive follower to engaged community contributor is a personal request to get more involved.

Comments are closed.