50 Tips to Energize and Inspire Your Social Media Community & Audiences

Are you breathing life into your social media communities and audiences or are you taking it away? Are you inspiring and energizing your community members to do more, be more and simply be better at what they do?

Are you serving up great and valuable content that serves as energy to your social media communities, blog readers and audience when they feel zapped? Or are you the one zapping them and bringing them down?

Communities are not built over night.

Successful communities take time and investment in real people.

I recently wrote an article titled “Communities Create Markets: 13 Tips to Build Tribes of Loyal Brand Evangelists” of which I explain the diagram below in detail. As you can see in the diagram below, moving your community members from the left side to the right side takes time.

It takes investment in content, relationships, and learning to energize your community to become loyal brand advocates and customers.  A new community member is not likely to hop right into your community and immediately become a brand advocate. You must earn their trust and nurture relationships over time.

Below are 50 ideas you can try to help energize your community. With every post, tweet, status update and blog post you should be thinking about what positive impact it will have on your community. Are you breathing life into your communities and relationships or are you sucking it away?

50 Ways to Energize Your Social Community & Audiences

1. Inspire them.
2. Connect with them in an authentic, human way.
3. Entertain them.
4. Educate them.
5. Empower them.
6. Listen more than you talk.
7. Learn early on it's not about you, it's about them.
8. Know them well. What keeps them up at night? What problems do they have that you can help solve? Download this audience analysis worksheet to help you prioritize your audiences and align your social media efforts to business goals and audience needs.
9. Want their friendship and authentic relationship more than you want their follow, like, or visit to your blog.
10. Don't take their trust for granted. Just because they trusted you with their email address or connected with you on LinkedIn doesn't mean you should take advantage of it and spam them.
11. Leave a good first and last impression with every visit to your blog, website and social network profile.
12. Respect their time, attention and presence in your social community.
13. Never take their membership in your community or readership of your blog for granted.
14. Don't over burden them with requests to like, tweet, retweet and share.
15. Make them feel emotion of any kind. Make them belly laugh or do the happy cry.
16. Tell them stories that they can relate to.
17. Communicate with them in words they speak and understand.
18. Help build them. Help them build their knowledge, business, worth and brand.
19. Help them solve problems.
20. Help them be better.
21. Help them do more with less and drive efficiencies.
22. Offer them something unique. Give them something more than they can get with a simple, expected Google search. Serve them up the unexpected, not status quo!
23. Help them connect with others.
24. Help them obtain new business and referrals.
25. Encourage them to share their best stuff.
26. Help them transform their life or business.
27. Help them break an old and bad habit.
28. Help them start new healthy habits.
29. Help them find new resources offered by others.
30. Help them learn new words, phrases and their meaning.
31. Help them better communicate with their peers.
32. Make them feel cared for.
33. Help them feel part of your community.
34. Treat them as a human being, not a number of your fan base.
35. Help them obtain visibility for their work, content or business.
36. Invite them to join your communities. They may not know they exist.
37. Host an online or offline event to bring community members together and build deeper relationships.
38. Pick up the phone and have a real conversation.
39. Simply be their sunshine on a rainy day.
40. Respond in a timely manner when they ask you a question.
41. Give credit where credit is due. If a community member inspires a blog post or other content, give them full credit and public acknowledgement.
42. Leave your own turf sometimes. Visit other people's blogs, social communities etc.
43. Give them something compelling to remember you by.
44. Share the social love. Visit their blog or networks where they are sharing great content. If you like what you see, share it with your community.
45. Don't give social love with an expectation of return. Give to give, not give to get.
46. Keep it real. There is only one you so be that person or that brand, period.
47. Acknowledge your community is made up of human beings. Humans are not perfect and make mistakes. Allow for mistakes and deal with them as a human.
48. Post community guidelines and communicate openly why you have such guidelines.
49. Empower people within your community to become organic leaders. Encourage them to teach one another and help each other grow.
50. Provide them the most relevant, valuable content and conversation possible. Download this content editorial calendar to help you plan, organize and deliver the most engaging and helpful content you can offer.

Inspire – Connect – Achieve

My motto of life and business is pretty simple. Inspire your audiences and people in your life to connect with you with a goal of helping them achieve their goals. When you help them achieve their goals, you achieve yours organically. Inspire, connect, achieve. Don't make it any more complicated than it needs to be.

Your Turn!

What do you think? Are you energizing your audience and communities? What can you do better or different to bring them greater value? What brands or leaders bring you value? What makes you feel energized?

Heartbeat of Social Media Series

This blog post is part of a series titled “The Heartbeat of Social Media“. It includes a deep look at how communities work, what people are doing within them and how businesses can better understand how they can fit in, provide value and derive benefit as both a business as well as individual people.

Subscribe to the series for updates and access to special videos, webinar training and more. Would love to hear your input and have you participate in discussions and debates as we challenge each other to be part of what makes the social network heartbeat healthy and alive!