Leveraging Instagram to build communities
How Creators can build their communities to monetize their products and services through Instagram?
The first time I signed up for a fitness challenge was back in 2019. I remember exactly, there were around 89 participants attending the live session for the challenge.
Fast forward, I followed the trainer, and I passively consumed his content on his instagram stories which induced me to sign up yet again for another challenge. To my surprise, this time the signup for the fitness challenge had 1020 participants! Wondering which fitness group I’m talking about, it’s GetFitWithKanav!
As a digital marketer, I was quite impressed with the amount of content a creator needs to push everyday and follow a pattern to build a community. I found two such creators, who have made it big by building a community and reselling their services — #GetFitWithKanav, and #dancerukmini.
It led me to research more about online communities to understand how digital creators sell their products/services specifically on Instagram. Below are my thoughts —
🎯 Building an effective community is a two-way conversation
Pandemic changed the equation people share with each other and on social media platforms. Creating and expanding communities online is becoming a necessity. Communities on Instagram is expanding tremendously and it is all about establishing meaningful connections and stay connected with like-minded people. It brings out a sense of belonging, motivation, commitment, support and teamwork.
Building a great community is not harder than what you think if you have the right cards in your deck. Communities don’t happen overnight, you create and build them everyday and for a longest time. It is always better to understand your niche and develop a community culture that sticks to your brand.
⛳ How do you attract more followers to build a like-minded community on Instagram?
There is no right or wrong way, but lets break it down to few important components that could help you understand better and get a clarity on how it should be done!
The example is done for an online fitness brand, can be used for other brands too.
To begin with, it is not very long that @GetfitwithKanav started his fitness instagram journey. He had a niche that he targeted very well — Home fitness with minimal weights or no weights requirement. He maintained a good level of engagement by posting free workout videos every morning, and evening with all diet plans. He strikes an encouraging conversations in every live sessions on his instagram page. Slowly, he build a community on instagram which currently has 77.9K followers within 1.5 years roughly.
Strategy that led to the huge success of @GetfitwithKanav instagram channel: He attuned to who they are, what his audience want, and how to add value in their lives.
6 tips to build a successful online communities
1️⃣ Making it a personal interaction
Creating a community, creates many-to-many relationships because it focuses on the group as a whole. It is essential to make each one of them feel involved and maintaining a personal interaction, makes it easier for the community to grow.
For example, @GetfitwithKanav interacts with each and every member in his community. He texts personally, replying to their queries. The advice, tips, recommendation and motivation he does during the session as well as offline brings out a brand personality in his instagram strategy. He also saves everything in his highlight stories, which brings in more visibility for his work.
By doing so, it demonstrates that the brand care about their audience and they are extremely valued integral part of the community.
PS: Don’t forget to set up comment filtering option on the community page, creating a better and safer space for the audience, keeping inappropriate and offensive comments at bay.
2️⃣ Provide value and purpose to every instagram post at the right time: Covid-19 has made most of realize the importance of hygiene, self-care and taking steps towards fitness. We have witnessed the paradigm shift where everyone shared everyday snippets of either food recipes or daily workout videos.
For example, this fitness community witnessed Kanav creating fitness videos for people who have recovered from covid, and started with mental health challenge for his followers, to support people in general. Right time matters to capture the new audience.
TIP: Uses engagement boosting instagram stories features by asking questions, conducting a poll to keep the interaction high on the page.
3️⃣ Spotlight your community members:
It is one of the best practice to share photos posted by your community members to make the it more appealing and authentic to the public. The use of hashtag by community members, make the hashtags more popular and a great sign that your community is highly engaged.
Tip: Re-post what your community members tag you on instagram stories to create an up-sell strategy for the future.
For example, #Dancerrukimi uses a pattern where she re-posts testimonials after her session, and directly highlights her next project details.
4️⃣ Ask and implement the feedback from your audience: Valuable way to gain insight is to listen what the followers want, and design it according their needs.
As an example, for the live challenges conducted by Kanav, he interacts with the community members after each session. He plans the following week’s workout based on what the majority needs which makes the audience invested in the journey to provide correct feedback.
Receiving feedbacks and implementing them help in the growth of the community and as well as the creator.
PS: Engagement is a two way street, no short-cuts!
Pro Tip: Use Later’s Conversations which offers 3 views for your instagram comments to sort and manage your comments inbox well!
5️⃣ Be consistent: Timely and frequent posting on instagram increases not only engagement but also sends positive signals to the Instagram Algorithm.
According to Social Sprout, the best time to post on IG are on Tuesdays between 11am to 2pm, and Monday through Friday at 11am. Best day being on a Tuesday and worst day being on a Sunday
6️⃣ Give back to your community too: Giving is a way to show gratitude for the support you have received from the community. It can be in forms of loyalty programs, giveaways, donations, discounts, and free merchandises in form of rewards.
🖊️ In short to build a thriving Instagram Community, remember to:
👉🏻 Create meaningful connections with the audience online
👉🏻 Expression of brand identity clearly
👉🏻 Make it personal
