To become an influencer in your industry, you need to answer a lot of questions your consumers have. And, you need to make direct connections.
NB: This is an article from Staah
Facebook Groups and Quora are your bridges to these conversations and connections, making them imperative for a well-rounded marketing strategy. They come in handy when the advertising budget is limited too. Let’s see how.
Facebook Groups
While a Facebook page is a profile of your brand on this channel, a group is a platform for people to come together around a common cause, issue or activity. It is a backdoor to building a more engaged community and deeper connections with your customers. For instance, you could be a motel with your own Facebook page but create a group on travel experiences in your location. On your Facebook page, you will be talking about your brand. And to push your message further, you need to pay – it is an advertising platform after all!
A Facebook Group is a place where conversations could be more around general travel to your location, where to eat, etc. This direct engagement, which is not a hard sell, gels well in a social scenario. You’ll end up with a few more people who associate your brand with that topic, improving your organic reach. With Facebook pushing groups out more prominently, once you’ve established yours as one where “meaningful conversations” happen, members will follow. Think of this as your brand building, moving target audiences from cold to lukewarm.
If you don’t have the resources to create and manage a group, join somewhere you will find your target audience. There are several groups that bring together travel enthusiasts. Being active and participating is important to keep engagement up.
A few tips to be effective on Facebook Groups:
1. Give your group a name that has good searches. A keyword search would be handy.
2. Engage actively in the group. When participating in a group, you’re a person. Make sure you engage like one.
3. Avoid brand talks. Don’t do a brand talk on groups.
4. Post topics around people’s interests. Work out a list of topics of interest for your audience and create conversations around them.
5. You can pin a post on groups. Use this smartly; don’t make it spammy.
6. Use Facebook Groups for polls. Members typically love these. Only sometimes, it is ok to put an offer through on your group page. Be warned, too aggressive promotions are a no-no in groups.
7. Manage notifications Don’t push out every post in the group as a notification. Your members may tune you out completely. Monitor posts and remove spam posts immediately if you’re an admin on a group. Once you have enough members, share the group management with other members to keep things growing.
Quora
Most searches on the internet are questions. While there is no dearth of sites for this style of content, most can be spammy and biased. Established in 2009, Quora is different and has established itself quite well in this space with more than 200 million visitors per month. Quora is another platform where you can establish yourself as an influencer on a topic.
Equally important is the information you get back from this platform – what people are thinking, trends, etc. This allows you to stay ahead of the curve. Since this is a new platform for most, Quora works on a community-based moderation
model. If you like something, you upvote. If you don’t, you downvote. Content with more upvotes gets greater visibility.
Check out these tips to make the most of Quora for your business:
1. Knowledge matters. Your success on Quora is based on your contribution. If it is valuable, you’ll be upvoted. Choose the conversations you participate in based on your subject knowledge.
2. Don’t oversell. You’re typically put under scrutiny for answering more than 3-7
questions.
3. Use Quora’s features Such as the ability to attach images, format text, add hyperlinks etc. Post original content rather than quotes and re-posts.
4. Create a business account for Quora. This will help your business form its own persona and not get mixed with your personal one.
5. Create a great profile and link it to other social accounts. Follow others in your industry to see where they are commenting and what people are talking about.
