In today’s social age, it’s essential for companies to build strong online presences and communities surrounding their products or brand. After all, word of mouth on social media goes a long way, especially when it comes to establishing a positive reputation and building brand affinity.

One of the benefits of an engaged community is that it attracts new users while keeping existing ones satisfied. At HootSuite, we take great pride in our community building efforts. A healthy community around your brand is hard to cultivate, but it is well worth the effort.

At HootSuite, we’ve managed to do what we think is a pretty great job at building online communities all over the globe.

Today, we’re excited to share a few handy tips we use when establishing our customer community.

1. Identify your power-users

Before we can start any of our community initiatives (Translation projects, App integrations, programs, etc), we seek out people in specific regions who are using HootSuite.

You can do this easily for your business by using geo-located searches to monitor mentions of specific terms in one region. It’s also smart to scour blogs and target niche social networks if they’re applicable to your brand. What you’re looking for are influential people in your space.

From there, we reach out and make friends with these influencers. This can be as easy as a personalized tweet, comment, like, or a +1. Whatever the method, the point is to let your users know that you are listening and that you are eager to serve.

We encourage these power users to get involved in our communities – whether by helping translate, joining our online communities and programs, or by spreading the word about our service.

GetSat makes this easy by allowing us to bring those conversations into GetSat and moves us past pesky character limits so that we can start to have a more in-depth conversation.

2. Get your customers involved

Sure, it’s great to find and reach out to your customers around the world, but why not get them involved as well? You can easily accomplish this by setting up different programs and sub-communities specifically tailored to your customers.

At HootSuite, we like to find ways to accommodate users at every level, whether through our Diplomat program, HootUp program, or our awesome customer support forum (powered by Get Satisfaction). The great thing about the support forum for us, is the ability to create new forum threads out of Tweets and Facebook updates right  from the HootSuite dash.

Allowing your customers into your culture creates a deeper relationship. This relationship is what you want as it is the basis of any genuine brand affinity.

These are easy ways to build community around your business because you allow your audience self-select and get involved more intimately with your brand.

3. Every mention of your brand is an opportunity

It’s important to treat all of your customers equally regardless of how much they’re paying you. At HootSuite, we treat any social mention the same – and each one gets a response.

With this mandate, we strive to reach out and engage with anybody and everybody who mentions HootSuite. We also track about ten different misspellings of the word HootSuite from ‘Hot Suit’ to ‘Hootsweat’… and everything in between.

#Bonus: If you’re an internationally focused business, you need to think about tracking mentions in different languages of your name. Just because an existing or potential customer doesn’t speak the your language doesn’t mean they don’t deserve at least an attempted response.

Through these continued tracking efforts, and with the help of the handy GetSat integration with HootSuite, we build and maintain relationships at scale. For us, it’s important to show how we’re more than just a corporate Twitter handle.

#TakeHome: You need to value each connection, and make sure you are present and actively engaged with your existing and potential customers.

Hope you learned a thing or two. Using these simple tactics, we’ve managed to build sustainable and meaningful communities around HootSuite both locally and around the world.

Next up, we’ll discuss more community building secrets, including events, localization, visual flavour, and perhaps our biggest secret to turning customers into community advocates. Look out for the next installment in the coming weeks.

-Connor from HootSuite