Online Groups: Can you really cultivate relationships with them?

In my previous article, I asked the question about whether or not intimacy could be scaled in marketing. I now want to explore the question about whether or not you can use online groups to cultivate relationships.

Whether its Facebook groups, Linkedin Groups, or an online membership site, online groups are used as a potential avenue to connect with your audience and develop relationships, but do they work?

My answer is yes and no. It really depends on how you set up your group, what role you (and your team) play in the group, and whether or not the focus of the group is on actually building community and relationships or simply on marketing your products and services.

Picture courtesy of Pexels

I created a few online groups and ran them for a while, and I’ve also seen other people run online groups. Some have been successful and some less so, and from what I’ve observed the successful groups tend to be the groups that include some marketing of services and products, but overall focus on creating and cultivating relationships with the members of the group.

What’s also apparent to me in hindsight with my own groups is that the key to successfully creating an online community isn’t automating and scheduling all of your posts, but instead actively engaging with the community. So with that in mind I offer the following suggestions if you choose to go the route of creating an online group for yourself.

1. Online Groups require a significant investment of your time and engagement to be successful. If you’re going to create an online community, be prepared to engage in it, every day, regularly. You’ll want to be making posts, responding to comments, and encouraging people to participate. You’ll want to come up with relevant material that’s interesting and insightful and isn’t always marketing your services and products.
2. Creating daily memes and automating your posts is the surest way to kill your group. It can be tempting to automate your online group by using services such as Meet Edgar, which allow you to schedule and post content. And you may feel like creating catchy daily memes is the way to go, to get people to engage, but while you may get a small spike of activity, that activity will die off quickly as people figure out that you aren’t really engaged. Daily memes and scheduled posts send the message that you want to put in the minimum effort and that will turn your community off fast.
3. Keep your marketing to a minimum. Do people who join your group expect you to market your services and products to them? More then likely yes, but if you do it all the time their eyes will glaze over and they’ll focus on other content. The occasional marketing is fine, but don’t make every post about your services or products. Create content that genuinely focuses on learning about who your audience is and what they actually need, but also create content that isn’t just focused on their problem. Make the effort to actually discover who these people are.
4. If you have a team, make sure they engage. If you have a team of people that help you with your business and they interact with your audience, they should be active in the online group, working on cultivating relationships with the audience. That may not be their only role, but if people will at some point work with them, why not make them part of your community (without necessarily having them market for you).
5. Empower your community to help themselves. So many online communities are set up in a way that doesn’t really empower the community members. But the best community is one where members are actively helping each other and actively empowering themselves. In such a community, the person who creates it is wise enough to back off just enough to let people create their own experience.

These are just a few tips for creating better online communities. Perhaps what’s most important to remember is that an online community alone won’t be enough if you truly want to to develop relationships with your audience. Its one means of developing an audience, but if you truly want to cultivate relationships you’ll need to reach out in other ways while also using the community to connect.

Taylor Ellwood is a writer on a journey to discover what’s next.