Social media is fast becoming a great way to build and improve your online presence and is becoming one of the most important parts of search engine optimisation, there is much more to social media than meets the eye and building an online community is a great extension to your online presence and will grow your web traffic as well as help you to promote brand awareness.
To build your online community you are going to have to know what will help you to attract people and what sort of things they are interested in to keep people attracted to your website and community. It may be perceived that building a community would be a job for a developer but in fact it is the marketer that will have a much bigger effect on this as it is your responsibility to update your content and your social networking websites live Face Book and Twitter but the main thing to keep in mind is to treat your community and website as separate entities.
As with anything on the web you need to get the right CMS for the job as some jobs on your community will require more integration that things such as social book marking that are less involved. Getting the right CMS will not only help you to introduce your social functions into your community but it will also allow you to provide a better social web experience for your followers.
Ideally you will need a CMS that is editor friendly allowing you to edit, add and delete your content and postings easily and in real time and be able to populate any new content to your community quickly, it also should be geared up for use with social media as it would be a waste of time having a CMS that won't work effectively with your social media applications. Your CMS should also be flexible and modular so that you can easily add new modules when they are available hence allowing you and your CMS to grow in time.
With any popular site you are also going to have to make
sure that you can cope with the vast amount of traffic that will hit your site
and with the demand of users uploading images and maybe video so make sure that
you have the sufficient server resource to cope.
With your new community you
are also going to be collecting useful information such as email addresses that
you can use for other purposes such as email marketing so make sure that you
have the option to be able to use this vital information.
The last thing that
you need to keep in mind is to monitor your follower’s activities on your
social pages, the best way to do this is to use analytics which will give you
more insight into the user’s patterns.