Home SOCIAL How Brands Can Benefit from Social Media Groups (#SMTLive Recap)

How Brands Can Benefit from Social Media Groups (#SMTLive Recap)

June 3, 2020 comments off

During one of our most recent Twitter chats, we spoke with marketers about the benefits of and best strategies for managing social media groups. We had an extensive and insightful conversation. Here’s what our friends on #SMTLive had to say.

Let’s start with the benefits. Understanding why and how this space can help your brand is important in deciding whether groups are a good investment of time in your overall marketing strategy.

Remember, you’ll need to invest a fair amount of time into building and managing a group for any of these benefits to be realized.

There are so many benefits to using social media groups, but here are a few major ones that our community shared with us. We’ve broken them down here to show you, first, the benefits of how groups can help amplify your brand, and second, the benefits this space can offer your audience. Though, you’ll see that the two go hand in hand.

The Benefits of Social Media Groups for Your Brand

Gathering Useful Audience Insights

You can learn a lot about your audience’s interests and behaviors by simply listening to the conversations being had in the group.

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Building Relationships, Community, Engagement and Trust

This is an opportunity to show your human side. You can use this space to have more direct, one-on-one conversations with your audience to build those relationships.

The group can interact as a whole and form a community with your brand in mind. These regular interactions can help build brand trust and loyalty.

Discovering New Ideas for Content

You can use the member feedback, new knowledge you gain about your audience and content shared in the group (UGC) to help you create better content for your other social platforms.

The Benefits of Social Media Groups for Your Audience

Social media groups clearly offer brands many opportunities for growth; but, ultimately, these groups should aim to benefit and offer value to their audiences.

A Valuable Community

The group provides a space for people with similar interests to connect and have important conversations.

Networking Opportunities

More than just offering a space for people with common interests, members can connect with others and build their network.  

Learning Opportunities

One can learn a lot by just listening and speaking to their peers.

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Feeling Heard

Responding and having one-on-one conversations with your audience will make them feel seen, heard and respected.

In general, people just really seem to love social media groups.

Those are a few of the major benefits of groups, but they’ve proven to be useful to both brands and their audiences.

The next question you need to ask yourself is: “What type of group would be beneficial to my audience?”

Clearly, you will need to do the appropriate research to answer that question, but let’s look at some examples of how brands are currently using social media groups. Their success may spark some ideas.

Examples of Successful Groups

We asked participants in this chat to share different use cases for social media groups, and here’s what they had to say.

Again, there are so many options to choose from, so knowing what type of group would interest your community is key.

Finally, we discussed tips, tricks and best practices for anyone managing (or planning to start) a social media group for their brand.

Tips, Tricks and Best Practices

Planning your content, marketing, and management strategy for a group will take time — but the time you spent strategizing and prepping will make all the difference. Make sure you have a clear launch plan, including a select-few people you can count on to help you start the conversation.

Set rules for your group and remember to be extremely clear in your marketing language so people know what to expect. Then deliver on your promises.

Listen to your audience and give them what they want. Engage like a human, not a salesman.

Remember that your audience may have different expectations of content on one platform vs another. Choose the right platform to host your group and create unique content for them on that space.

Don’t act like a robot. Have a personality and find creative ways to get group members to engage.

Know that monitoring a group takes a lot of work. It isn’t a simple project that’s done as soon as you launch. You need to constantly be monitoring, engaging and sharing a unique offering of content and perks for your members to stick around.

If you aren’t ready or don’t have the bandwidth to start managing a social media group, remember there are other options and opportunities for your brand. Many brands find success by joining and participating in other groups where your audience is already spending their time.

There were a lot more useful tips shared during this chat, but these were a few we wanted to highlight.

If you’re interested in being part of our next Twitter chat, you can learn more and RSVP here. And for all those of you who want to be a regular participant in these chats, sign up here to join our #SMTLive Tuesday Twitter Chat Club.

Socialmediatoday.com

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