How to Create a Community in Social Networks

Let's take a look at our Facebook fan pages. Do we see lively discussions, pictures, links and community participation? Or do we see our own publications, and publications, and publications … followed by silence and thousands of friends in the left corner? If we see the later we need to reconsider our social networking efforts!

We have to think community, when approaching social media in a marketing perspective:

• Social media sites are built on collaborative activities
  
• The users of social networking sites must feel that they take part in an active community
  
• The sense of belonging will make them participate further in the development of the community.
  

If we fail in building an active community, we fail social media marketing. If our Facebook sites lack interaction, nobody will take the content further, and we fail to reach new audiences. We can post message after message about interesting events, but the effect will be an "email-effect": some of our "fans" will read our message, some might come to our event, but most people will not pay any attention. We need people to click, to tag, to share, to like and to tweet, and to bring the discussion further to reach the full potential of social media marketing.

So, how do we create an active social network community for our theater?


First, 1000 friends are not necessarily a community!

The importance of quantity is not to neglect, but in social media networking quality is king. Building up a community takes time, knowledge and effort. If we just want many people to see or hear our message we should consider other more suitable channels like advertising on the web or on TV, radio, newspapers and billboards.

Go out to find community members

By showing that we carry knowledge, passion and ideas that we are willing to share, we can create a sincere interest in our fan pages. We have to go out and actively participate on social media sites by commenting on others people's blog content, by participating in forum discussions, by sharing and tagging. This is an opportunity that the performing arts sector really has to grab! There are many companies that would die for employees as passionate as people working in the arts! Engagement in the art sector often comes with great passion and a big knowledge. This is the time and the forum to show that.

Let your community grow from inside and out

Don't follow the "I need more friends so people can see that I am popular"-stress! Community creation takes time. It might take a while for us to find out what trigs our community to interact. It certainly also takes time to learn how to speak to them, to know how often we can post messages without "monitoring" them etc. We must be patient and let our community grow from the inside. We need them to start interacting and to talking to each other, commenting on us and on each other. When that happens, the community will get interesting and grow.

Don't see your community as potential buyers

In social networking nobody wants to be told what to do or to think. We must stop thinking "traditional marketing" and seeing our community as potential buyers. People are not in the community to be marketed at. If they are, they will most likely find another more interesting forum to take part in.

Identify leaders and reward them

There are always some people that are more active than others in a community. This is completely normal and they are your "community leaders". Identify them and reward them. In social media, people like to be seen and recognized for their active input. We can reward our leaders by commenting on their comments, linking to their blogs, letting them know that we have seen what they have said on other sites.

Give treats to the community

We must help the community to feel like a real theater community by letting them "inside" the theater. By giving them news, behind the curtain "gossip", production in process updates we make them our "real friends". Why not once in a while let them be the first to know "secrets" like a well-known actor coming to the theater for a special play´? Wouldn't it be interesting also to see how long it would take for hot news to reach mainstream media?

Demand fair resources from the theater direction

We have to think about social media as a long term investment. The performing arts sector shouldn't be alien to this way of thinking: The effort of taking our art form into the future has always depended on how we communicate with young people, how we develop education programs and how we reach out to new audiences. We know that all the result of our efforts will not be immediate. We just have to convince the direction of the theaters to give us time and resources to create real social network communities.