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Kontentino is an easy-to-use social media management platform built with affordability in mind. However, this tool also has significant drawbacks, which might leave you seeking other alternatives to help you manage your social media calendar. Read on, as I’ll cover...
Mar 17, 2025
Building a community around your brand can be equal parts challenging and exhilarating. You don’t just have to worry about creating compelling content, you also have to get up close and personal with your audience members. Get it right, though, and you’ll be rewarded with loyal customers and the recurrent income that comes with them.
If you’re up for the challenge, you’re in good hands. This article reveals five techniques you can use for community building on social media.
A social media community is a group of internet users who gather on social media platforms to interact with like-minded individuals.
Social media communities can range in size from a small, intimate get-together to a large, bustling gathering of thousands of people from all corners of the globe. Size notwithstanding, community members typically participate by having conversations, sharing content, seeking and giving advice, and leaving comments.
Invideo’s Facebook group (pictured below) is the perfect example of a social media community:
The common thread that runs through all social media communities is a shared interest. It’s what brings the community members together and keeps them coming back. Interests can be anything from a group’s political affiliation to its love for a brand.
Thus, from a business perspective, community building on social media involves interacting with your customers and posting valuable content that sparks conversations.
It’s worth noting that a social media community and a social media audience aren’t the same thing. The key differences between the two groups are as follows:
An awareness of these differences will be key if your social media marketing strategy involves community building.
Fostering a loyal online community across social media channels can offer plenty of benefits. Here are a few reasons to build a social media community that revolves around your brand:
Community building on social media can be an excellent way to get customer feedback and uncover valuable insights into your brand’s performance.
When you foster relationships with community members, you’ll find it easier to seek perspectives from people who use your products or services. You can act on their feedback to improve your product offerings, marketing strategies, and customer service.
Cultivating a thriving and engaged community on social media can give your brand an air of credibility. For example, potential customers can read comments that reveal how your products are helping your existing customers improve their lives.
Social media communities are also great for earning customer trust. When you build a rapport with your community members, get feedback from them, and act on it, you create the impression that your brand has their best interests at heart.
Previous interactions with your brand’s social media community will be invaluable during a PR crisis. When you join the conversations your customers have about your brand, your attempts to reverse negative sentiments or set the record straight will seem more natural than a formal PR statement.
You’ll find it easier to drive sales when marketing to an existing social media community versus complete strangers. The trust your brand has earned through ongoing interactions with the community and a track record of excellence could make the community’s members receptive to product launch announcements, sales promos, and other future marketing campaigns.
It pays to build a loyal social media community around your brand. Make the effort and you could reap the above benefits and more.
Building a loyal social media community from scratch takes time and effort. Here are five proven strategies to make the process easier.
Building a loyal community on social media requires authentic engagement and direct interaction with your customers. In addition to sharing amazing content that engages your target audience, you’ll need to interact with the people who leave responses on your posts.
Consistent community engagement can take many forms.
It can be as simple as replying to social media post comments and direct messages (DMs) and sending DMs of your own.
Engaging with customers will also require responding to the customer service complaints tucked among a post’s comments. Prioritizing this type of engagement will be key to showing existing and potential customers that you’re dedicated to providing a positive experience for your community members.
You can also engage with customers by highlighting user-generated content (UGC) related to your brand. For instance, if a community member tags your account on Instagram or X, you can share their content in an Instagram Story (or re-tweet it) after getting their permission.
Creating content that encourages community interaction (like the Udemy survey pictured below) can also work:
Finally, you want to make it easy for community members to get in touch with you. Remember, some of these members are potential leads for your business. Therefore, generate a digital business card and share it via a link in your bio. These cards can contain detailed contact information, including your phone number, email address, and geographic location (if you have a physical store). The details make it easier for community members and potential leads to contact you.
Consistently engaging with your community members is an excellent way to boost social media engagement and build a loyal community. Facilitate two-way interactions between your brand and its most ardent fans by implementing this technique.
Brands typically use social networks to drive traffic to their online assets (i.e., a website, landing page, blog post, etc.).
Effective social media community building requires the opposite approach. You’ll need to create and share content that isn’t available anywhere else online.
Some ways to make your content exclusive to social media include:
Exclusive content like early-access previews, live Q&As, beta testing opportunities, and special promotions or discounts make your community feel more valuable. They also help generate buzz, instilling the fear of missing out and keeping your community members engaged. It can also help you grow your social media community.
When community building on social media, don’t limit your brand’s customer interactions to “likes” and text-based responses. Host live sessions, too. According to Sprout Social, 37% of consumers find them engaging.
This interactive content is excellent for community building because it lets you humanize your brand. Customers who tune in get to see and hear from the people behind the products they love, learn from them, and receive real-time responses to their questions and comments. You can host Q&A conversations, product demos, and the like on social platforms with video streaming capabilities.
Live sessions are also excellent for community building because you can use them to position your brand as an authority in its niche. For example, you can invite industry experts to participate and set up a conference call to facilitate the conversation.
Many brands host live sessions via YouTube and Facebook, but if you’d like a more exclusive feel and a chance to generate leads, webinars might be a better option.
SaaS SEO company Ahrefs regularly hosts live sessions on social media. Its X.com post below provides an example of this community-building strategy in action:
Notably, Ahref’s post combines live sessions with our second strategy: exclusive content. It uses language that creates a sense of urgency.
Interacting with customers in the comments section of your social media posts is all well and good. However, that alone may not be enough to make them feel like they’re part of your brand’s community of followers.
To truly foster a sense of community among your customers, create an official digital space for them.
Social media sites like Facebook let you create groups your customers can join to build meaningful connections and foster relationships with like-minded people. Use such features to build an online community around your brand.
Jasper, the team behind the AI-writing assistant, employs this tactic to create a sense of belonging among their customers. They’ve created a Facebook group (pictured below) where their customers can gather and interact with fellow Jasper users:
This strategy can be effective for community building because your customers must consciously decide to join your brand’s official community. By doing so, they acknowledge that they belong to a group of people who are passionate about your products and services.
Once your social media community starts gaining traction, don’t rest on your laurels. You’ll need to give your existing members incentives to keep coming back. That entails rewarding customer loyalty.
Excellent methods for ensuring your community members’ continued loyalty include:
E-commerce company Asana Beauty rewards its customers with redeemable loyalty points, as the Instagram post below shows:
Rewarding loyal customers can also provide a secondary benefit. When non-community members see how you treat your customers, it could pique their interest in your brand and convince some to join your community.
Building a loyal community on social media provides several benefits. It gives you actionable customer feedback, increases brand trust, and enhances sales. To reap these benefits, use tried-and-tested engagement techniques to foster loyalty.
Engage with your customers consistently to build rapport and deepen their feelings of connection to your brand. Share exclusive members-only content. Create live sessions to humanize and position your brand as an authority in its niche. Create an official community to strengthen your customers’ sense of belonging. Reward loyalty.
Use the techniques shared in this article to build a loyal community on social media with long-term growth prospects.
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