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?

Make your Audience a Community in Social Media

I found something interesting on Chris Brogan's blog. Chris Brogan has been blogging for years, written books and is the president of a new media marketing agency. He is a rock star of social media. I was checking his "best-of blog posts", and found one called "What to do with influencers" which was good for my research. It is about how companies now are trying to get to know how to build relationships with communities through bloggers. He writes about how companies are trying to build relations with bloggers who have big audiences, like "publishers sought to build relationships with magazine readers and TV viewers". This is a problem because the bloggers do not have the same relationship with their readers as the magazines. Brogan means that bloggers have communities around them that they have built up during a long time, and not audiences that they can influence to sell just anything to:  "..audiences are not the same thing as communities".