Social business community is a great way to have that engagement with your friends and followers coming to you, however building a community is very different from joining a community.


Building community involves getting people to come to your watering hole because of shared interest in a trusted environment. As such, consider where you want to build your community.

To build a community on a consumer site like Yahoo or Facebook, you have to consider the pros and cons of these locations.
Having people coming to your blog to comment isn’t a community.

 A community is one where members interact with each other. Example for my social business partner community, we come together to brainstorm on key best practices.

Creating an active and valued social business community, the following list outlines my top recommendation for creating a community and generating and maintaining activity.

1. Make your guide clear, explain what you’re trying to achieve when you engage your community
2. Have someone you trust, who embeds himself or herself into the community, more like someone who manages the community for you
3. Attract or invite the right members for the group
4. Encourage and stay close to engage discussions and acknowledge the feedback from the participant into your dialogue.
5. Reward contribution in the community to help it grow and thrive. It could even be something as simple as showing a great contributor with a “scoop” of new content!
6. Ensure that you add real value. Focus on the content, not in making sales.
7. Follow the trust rules, that is being consistent and responsive, open and transparent. Community members need to know that there is someone at the other end of the online community who’s listening, and who will respond and engage with them.

In the social business market place, communities are the number one social tool in use around the world. It is used to leveraging to socially empower their human relation process. Social business Communities are very powerful, it is an excellent way to connect members of a team and help them stay in touch and share information.

Communities can be public or closed, allowing community owners to control who can join community and access community content or to contribute. You can learn from other communities in your niche, to the see the value.

Building your social business community will shape the direction of your business online. The amount of members is not the key metric and does not equal strong community.

A crowd mentality is driven by the broad set of people that have access to, not a relationship with. Your social business community is about having passionate members who belong… Relationship does exist as a friend..





To your Success

Lucy Bieri