Engage your Audience

The next crucial step in your influencer business plan, is to engage with your audience. That means building a lasting relationship with that audience, so that they will feel as though they are not just reading your blog and watching your social media, but as though they are actually invested and involved in what you are doing.

So how do you build a community around your brand?


Interactions


The first and most obvious way to galvanise a community is to interact with those people following you. To begin with, that means responding to the comments people leave on your posts and profiles, and it means answering direct messages and emails.One of the worst things you can do for your reputation is to ignore these, which makes it seem as though you don’t care about your audience or aren’t interested.


By interacting, you create a dialogue and you make people feel as though they actually know you. A single response can mean a great deal to the right user – so take the time!

If you find that you aren’t getting much action on your posts to begin with, then this could be partly because your audience has grown large enough yet. In this case, you want to try and encourage as much interaction as possible. One big way to do this is simply to invite people to comment in your videos and posts. Instagram has lots of stickers that allow you to invite interactions, while you can simply talk to the camera in YouTube.

One of the BEST ways to encourage your audience to interact with you as an influencer, is to invite them to help out or to get involved with some aspect of the creation of your brand. Let them vote on the content they want to see next, or let them make suggestions for names and the like.

By doing this, they now feel as though they have some ownership of the brand. While this might sound like a bad thing, it’s actually fantastic as far as emotional investment and engagement goes.

Different Mediums

Keep in mind that some forms of communication and some mediums lend themselves far better than others to the process of building authentic relationships with an audience. What works particularly well is live video, as well as stories.

Stories allow you to share moments from your day and your lifestyle, to give your followers a glimpse behind the curtain. You can also use these to run polls, invite questions, and more.

Meanwhile, live video lets you speak directly to your audience and respond to comments. It’s a great way for them to enjoy a little voyeurism and to show that you really are a real person. Use this to show yourself at exciting events, or just to chat with the camera over breakfast.

Engaging With The Community

Another option when it comes to building that initial community isto start by creating contacts in the niche elsewhere. Being active on a big forum or similar in your niche can make a gigantic difference when it comes to creating loyalty and recognition for your personal brand. 

October 27, 2020 — Shopify API

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