Building a community around your company is hard work. Just like SEO, there are no tricks. Nothing you can buy in bulk. There really is no ‘easy’ way to do it. Even when you’re working with an agency, you can’t just put in an order for a large community at the drive thru window and expect it to happen over night. You’ve got to do the work.

Building community is about building awareness, and that involves a cohesive blend of many crucial components, including SEO, content, and social media marketing.

If you want to effectively use social media to grow your company, then you have to build a community around it. At the heart of building community is sharing and providing something of value.

What is value?

Simply put, value is something that holds worth. Something that is important to someone. Something that serves a purpose. Something that has significance to someone for one reason or another.

In the world of content and social media marketing, value can translate to a video, a photo, a blog post, a checklist, a whitepaper. With value, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so you’ve got to know what constitutes value for your audience. If you’ve got music lovers on your hands, maybe that’s the latest soundbite or leaked video. If it’s engineers, maybe it’s an infographic that beautifully lays out all the data they need to quickly digest (rather than, perhaps, a narrative or a spreadsheet).

Value is something good. But if you only remember one thing about this post, make it this:

Value is not all about you.

Focusing on the customer vs. focusing on you

People like to talk about themselves, and when you’re a company who has something to sell, it’s easy to think that the

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To read the full article:
Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/wccHS6HAJ8Q/building-community-with-value