Good communication has always focussed on people.
For a few years, our emerging communication culture distracted us with scores of platforms on which to engage. From MySpace, Facebook and Friendster, to Twitter, Tumblr, Tagged and Taringa! – we’ve been delighted, debauched and disillusioned in the short space of a decade.
Somewhere along the line we became obsessed with platforms and forgot about the people.
If you own a small business, and you’re looking to building your digital communication and digital marketing strategy, you need to become a person that people want to follow.
In other words, you need to:
- Have a community
- Create valuable content that you regularly share with your community
- Engage with your community on a personal level
FIND AND BUILD YOUR COMMUNITY
As a small business, it’s almost impossible to be on ‘every platform all the time’. You can automate your content schedules, but that starts to violate point three above, and it keeps you focussed on platforms, and not people. Fortunately, as of mid-2020, a growing number of people are becoming fatigued with social media and are slowly dropping off and focussing on following people, rather than following platforms.
This counts in your favour. It means that you can actually rely on an email strategy far more than you could three or four years ago. I have always felt that email is the most powerful way to stay in touch with your community, but now it is levelling up. It also means that you can focus on one platform to find, build, and engage with your community.
CREATE VALUABLE CONTENT
Good quality blogs are going to become the deciding factor in how much engagement you will get from your content. Just creating content for the sake of it is going to become easier to spot and is going to devalue you in the eyes of your community.
So – what’s a good quality blog? That’s not a straight-forward answer, unfortunately. But some guidelines I would offer is that they need to be conversational, relevant and evergreen, balanced between educational and entertaining, and authentic.
Rule of thumb? Will this blog lead to a conversation with the reader?
As a bonus… your readers may take your content and share it on other platforms for you, simply because they find it valuable and want to share it with their networks too.
ENGAGE WITH YOUR COMMUNITY – YOURSELF
For large businesses, this is outsourced or managed by teams. For small businesses, it’s going to become a crucial skill for the business owner and their team to develop and nurture. Scheduling content is okay, but only if you check in with what’s going on in your stream and messages. If you just send content out, and never reply to feedback, your community will stop finding value in their engagement with you.
All this means that not only our strategies will change, but the metrics for measuring success (I prefer calling it ‘progress’) will change too. We will no longer be consumed with likes, shares and views – instead, we will be focussed more on the people and having better conversations with them.
I’ll leave you with this quick thought from my daughter: Communication has to be kind and it can’t be all about work; people like you when you talk about your family. (true story)
What are your thoughts?
