Building Community by Engaging with Others Through Social Media

In this third installment of the series on the importance of building community if you want to see your blog be successful. Engagement won’t come just by typing up some education or knowledge, you have to get out of your comfort zone and engage with others if you would like to see engagement too. Let’s briefly discuss some actions you can take to engage with others through social media.

We previously discussed sharing your blog post through social media. When you share on social media, typically you will see two actions occur: people will like or comment on your social media posts and people will visit your blog post.

This post is discussing the former. When people engage with you through social media, it is important that your or a designated individual interact with them by liking their comments and commenting back. Show them that you value them stopping by and taking time out of their day to comment on your posts. If their comment warrants a response, provide one.

When you have engaged with all who took time out to share comments, take a half hour of your time and invest in those who stopped by to like your Instagram or Twitter posts. Instagram and Twitter make it easy to click on the feeds / profiles of those who like your posts. Do so and see if they share something that is worth commenting on, meaning that you would be able to add value to versus just make small talk. You want to provide meaningful input not just write something for the sake of writing it.

Facebook and LinkedIn don’t offer platforms conducive to visiting the profiles of the people who only stopped by to like your post since you have to be connected to comment. What you can do if you have extra time is visit the profiles of folks who liked your posts to see if they have linked their personal profile to a business page. If they have, you can engage with their business page if there is something that catches your eye. However, on these platforms, it isn’t expected that you would return engagement just for a “like” of your post, as it’s understood by those who use it that commenting is the only way to truly engage there.

When you invest in others by commenting back to them and showing them their time matters, they usually come back and may even start to follow you. Don’t get caught up in numbers. Engage with people. Show them you care about them. Value their input and show them you are listening. As you do this, you build a community of people who will stop by and read what you have to share if it helps them in their life or could help someone they know.

Blogging has both the science and art components to it. Enjoy both and you will find that you enjoy the people and the process!