Let’s talk about community engagement. Once you build a brand and customers/clients start coming in, you want to stay engaged with them. Building a sense of community among customers and clients is part of what brings them back for more. Even big brands like Nike have people specifically hired for community engagement — they respond to customers on social media, create newsletters, and more. Here are some ways to create a community for your brand.

Reshare posts from customers and clients

Social media is one of the best places for engagement. For starters, you can share some of your customers’ posts about your business. For example, if someone posts a product review on Instagram and tags your brand, you can share the post to your Stories or feed and respond with a little thank you note. This way, you’re interacting with a customer while showing off how much they love your product. Win-win!

Respond to DMs and comments

You should always take some time to reply to social media messages and comments. Now, don’t feel like you have to stay glued to your screen every minute and reply to everything, but take care of a good portion. Maybe carve out an hour each day to filter through messages and reply to important ones. And when you post something on your feed/Stories, stick around for a few minutes to reply to early comments. Keep it professional, but inject some brand personality where you can!

Do giveaways/contests with branded items

Another way to use social media for community engagement is to host a giveaway or a contest. You know the ones — you’ve probably been tagged in those posts before. They promote a product or a business and say “tag three friends” or “share to your Story” to enter. You can set aside a product, or even just something branded but not for sale (like a free T-shirt), and have your followers engage with the giveaway post to enter.

Create a hashtag

This one is simple: Keep things organized in your brand community by creating a specific hashtag on social media. This should be something short and sweet that customers/clients can use to indicate on their posts that they’re part of your community! Then, everyone can see all the community posts in one place.

Send a free item with purchases

In a similar vein as the giveaway post, you can send some small freebies with every customer order. This can be, again, a free T-shirt, or even a handful of smaller items like pens and stickers. If you have the time, maybe even a cute and personalized note! This is a great way to let customers know you put care into each order.

Include discount codes or early access in newsletters

Finally, you can keep customers and clients in the loop with a business newsletter. Let them know about sales, new products, or upcoming events. And to encourage people to sign up for the newsletter, you can include discount codes or early access to sales/product drops.

Contact October Dreams Marketing for more tips.