Creating a Community around Your Content
ByIf you believe media futurist Glen Leonhard then you should be creating a community around your content. He says content (digital products) is less important than the experience around the content.
People are spending more and more time on social networking sites such as Facebook. So as marketers we want to be on those sites. But rather than sending people to your normal Facebook profile you’ll want to create a Facebook page for your business. One of the reasons for this is there is no limit to the number of friends you have, as there is with a regular profile.
The beauty of sites like Facebook is that if someone is a fan of your Facebook page, they will see the posts you make from that page in their news feed. So they might see you multiple times a day in their feed whereas you can’t usually email them multiple times every day without annoying them. So this keeps you in their minds. Don’t just spam offers though, you’ll want to provide some useful relevant content to your following.
The idea behind this is to create a community around your content. The content itself isn’t as valuable as the experience of the community. Then you offer things for sale to this community and some percentage will purchase this from you.
So how do we get people to sign up for our Facebook page? Well at first I used to say ‘join my Facebook page’ in emails and not much would happen. Then I offered an incentive (free upcoming live webcam guitar lesson) and the signups started happening. This is the same as an email opt in page. You need to offer something of value. I got this idea from Ryan Lee who offered a free digital book of his when you became a fan and sent him an email with your Facebook user id.
To create a community around your content, encourage feedback, comments and a cool idea is to get video submissions from your fans. People can post on your Wall or create a discussion. Create a contest where people submit a video telling why they love your product or why they want to win the prize, etc and have them post it to YouTube and your Facebook page. Do things on your Facebook page that you don’t do elsewhere. Keep it useful, fun and subtle.
