How to Build a Loyal Online Community That Grows With You

Building a successful career in content creation within a short time is now possible for regular people. Previously, this required being a well-known celebrity or achieving celebrity status over a long time.

This dynamic shift is due to the Internet being an enormous space with over 5 billion users seeking entertainment, learning opportunities, or a sense of community. Hence, regular people like you and me can now cater to these needs by “going viral” or steadily building our follower base with quality content that addresses the needs of our audience.

More often than not, content creators are able to become successful partly because they have a large number of social media users (followers or subscribers). This is why building a community around your brand is a crucial step in growing your social media presence.

If you’re an aspiring content creator or looking to get better at your online community management skills, this post is for you.

What is online community building?

Imagine a million views on your IG, TikTok, or YouTube video, fifty thousand shares of your Facebook post, or your tweet going viral on X. The impact of these events will be monumental for your social media accounts and, by extension, your content creation career.

However, online community building is more than just a few viral moments. It’s about creating a shared space for people to connect over common interests and motivations. These people can then connect in ways that enable them to collectively boost your brand’s value and even develop a strong sense of loyalty to it. 

Whatever content-creating niche you’re into – health and wellness, education, tech, entertainment, business, finance, or lifestyle – you’ll need the genuine support and dedication of reliable people to grow, thrive, and earn from it.

Tips to grow a successful online community: 

1. Know your audience

This is first on the list because, obviously, your content has to be for an audience. It is, therefore, very important to identify the type of audience you will be directing your content to early on. In fact, it is advisable to create an audience persona—one identity that embodies the people you are creating content for. This allows you to tailor your content to this persona, thereby helping you create relevant content that will attract the right audience.

Key demographics, such as age, location, gender, income level, and corresponding interests and values, will give you a strong sense of who actually responds to your content and why they do so.

Most social media apps have built-in analytic tools to measure and give insights into your audience. You can also use external tools like Google Analytics and Trends, Semrush, Facebook Audience Insights, and Audiense to get detailed data on your audience.

If you want to keep them coming back for more and stay engaged, use this data to fine-tune your content until it matches the preferences of your most dedicated followers. 

2. Create high-quality and engaging content

This one is a no-brainer. Once you get to know your audience well, you’ll have to perfect how you speak to their interests and needs. The fact that no one comes online to be bored does not mean that you should be comical or infuse your content with unnecessary elements.

You need to make sure your content is relatable, educative, inspiring, entertaining, and authentic. This doesn’t require overproduced videos or mind-bending setups.

Good captions, a creative thumbnail, and a unique style of presentation will do wonders for your content, whether it’s a long-form article or a short video. 

Also, ensure that you respect your audience’s time and attention by creating quality content instead of overwhelming them with low-quality back-to-back content. It is better to post two high-quality content a week than seven low-quality ones.

3. The platform matters

Many online platforms offer content creators opportunities to leverage their skills, talent, and expertise to grow user engagement and win loyalty. Social media apps like LinkedIn and Facebook connect you directly to users with a similar range of interests. And they also provide you with relevant data that you can use to your advantage.

Then, there are image-based platforms like Instagram and Pinterest that enable you to make the most of visual storytelling and tag brands related to your content.

If you’re more inclined towards videos, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok not only allow you to explore just how creative you are but also let you go live and interact with your audience in real-time.

Recently, most of these platforms have been pushing short-form video content (i.e., videos between 60 and 90 minutes long) to larger audiences. Therefore, it is advisable to create this type of content as a grow-your-audience strategy.

There are also other community-building platforms like Substack, Discord, Slack, Mighty Networks, and Circle. Each one has its strengths and purposes. Before deciding on one or more, conduct thorough research and focus your energy.

Do not spread yourself too thin!

4. Optimize or die!

Of course, you wouldn’t actually die in the literal sense of that word. However, failing to optimize your social media profiles, especially as a content creator/community manager, is a good way to fade out of the game slowly.

To stay at the top and keep your community together, you have to:

• unify your profiles across different platforms,
• put up a striking bio, and
• use keywords that will distinguish your brand and content from others.

Doing these will help you infuse a sense of stability into your community-building process. It also enables you to become more discoverable in search.

Actually, this is the first thing you should do once your profile is created.

5. Collaborate with other creators

Never pass up a chance to collaborate with other content creators, and if possible, take the first step towards this.

The benefits? It helps you gain an influx of users by widening your reach.

You can achieve this by co-hosting a livestream or a podcast, starring in the same video, and having your content reposted on a larger account. This is even more potent if you collaborate with a brand or another creator in your niche or a complementary niche.

Imagine two micro-influencers from complementary niches and different audiences collaborating on a video.

6. Always give back

Replying to comments, hosting polls and Q&A sessions, and even reposting tweets by your followers on social media are charming niceties on their own. Still, nothing endears you more to your audience than actual acts of kindness and thoughtfulness. Whether it’s a basic giveaway, fun contests, donations to charity, or simply rewarding loyal followers, giving back to people not only paints a good image of your brand but also helps further your reach on social media.

Corporate bodies and businesses have been doing this for decades, and there is a good reason why it remains very popular. Nothing strengthens a sense of community better than knowing that you are seen and appreciated. 

7. Unique ID (#YourTribe)

What do you call a group of people not bound together by similar interests? A crowd?

Whatever it is, people love the feeling of belonging to a common cause, a shared set of ideals or preferences. Fans of sports clubs, celebrities, cinematic franchises, and so on often like to be addressed by unique terms.

Apart from being distinguishing, unique identification helps foster a strong sense of loyalty and commitment, which in turn solidifies a community. Ever heard of the Beyhive?

More than just giving your community of followers a name, other means of ID, such as hashtags, branded clothing, and similar merchandise, can be helpful in this regard.

Nothing screams “Gunner for life!” more than wearing an Arsenal jersey the day after they lose a match. You shouldn’t sleep on cultivating this kind of loyalty.

8. Go back to the dashboard

This is simply part of being intentional about growing your community online. Remember those analytics we discussed earlier? Well, you can always revisit them from time to time and consider them in a manner that will allow you to tweak things, change strategies, and make new or better plans.

Tracking growth or decline lets you figure out what works and how best to capitalize on trends or see which ideas failed in execution. So you can either make minor adjustments or chart a new course entirely.

Part of building a strong online community is never ignoring the littlest details. Once put out on the drawing board, everything has to be taken seriously.

9. Stay on brand

There’s no point in building a community just to see it fall apart, right?

As a content creator, social media influencer, or community manager, your words and actions form the nucleus of the community that grows around your brand and content. And because of this, everything you say or do is capable of strengthening the community or bringing it down.

Whether you are riding trends, responding to negative feedback, or working with big brands or notable figures, your core values and those of the community must never be called into question. A tech content creator can draw criticism if they promote gadgets assembled by underage workers or promote a brand with low-quality products.

Transparency and integrity are difficult values to sustain in today’s digital space, but that’s precisely why social media users value them. Without these values, it’s hard to keep a community together for long. 

Before accepting brand deals, always conduct thorough research on the brand. Speak with other creators about their experiences working with said brand. If it doesn’t align with your values, say no! Your community’s interests are more important than one declined brand deal.

10. Bonus point- have a personal touch

I know I promised nine tips, but there’s a tenth, and it’s a more personal one. My most potent tip: send personal messages to your followers, especially the most engaging ones.

This tip is my most potent because it turned my followers into family. I was away from social media for a while, and my followers sent me DMs to check in on me. People I have never met in real life. This is the power of building strong connections that transcend the online world we interact in.

Of course, as your online community grows, it will become impractical to keep in touch with everyone. But every once in a while, check in with your day ones; they are your stakeholders. Do this while cultivating special bonds with the new followers via your content.

Conclusion

It’s hard to determine what really makes an online community “successful.” Is it the number of followers, engagement on posts, or earnings? The metrics for calculating this might differ for many people, but one factor to look out for is the stability of commitment.

It’s better to have a hundred thousand dedicated followers than a million unreliable ones.

Giveaways, analytics checks, collaborations, and optimization strategies are tested techniques that have helped many content creators build strong communities around their brands. But one thing that helps unite a band of followers and fans is the sense of belonging.

You can always create this and sustain it by seeing everyone in your audience as part of one big family. This can be achieved by sharing glimpses of your personal life, values, and beliefs, allowing people within the community to feel an intimate, almost familial connection to you.