Communication is all about delivering the right message to the right audience. In fact, some PR experts say addressing the wrong public is the cause of 99% of PR failures.
The same goes for what is being referred to as your tribe – the 1000 core fans and followers who truly love who you are and what you so. It may be that you don’t even need that many, but it’s the core supporters who will always be there for you.
So instead of stressing over how Facebook and other social platforms cut organic reach to our fans, remember that they’re still showing our content to the fans that show strong interest in our brand. They’re the ones liking, commenting and sharing the content. Those people are your tribe. Create relevant content for them.
How big a tribe do you need to build? That depends on what you want to achieve. You may have to connect with thousands of followers to be able to reach and influence the right core audience. Just be sure you identify that core of loyal fans.
Here are seven ideas on how to find and build your tribe:
- Figure out who are. Until you know exactly who you are and what you do it’s not possible to find true fans. They have to love who you are and what you do.
- Decide what it is you want to achieve. What will that give you that you don’t have now? If what you want is 100 loyal customers you don’t need 100 000 fans.
- Name your tribe and say clearly what it is and what it does. Once you put it out there others of like-mind can find it.
- Pay attention to the language of the group and support it. Write in the language they understand.
- Use a monitoring tool to find the people who are already interested in and writing about your topic. Set up searches in Google, Twitter, LinkedIn and blogs using keywords and phrases your tribe would be interested in.
- Monitor these results and pick out the people who seem likely to be interested in what you do.
- Engage with them. Be generous and share their content. Reply to a good post they wrote. Retweet and repost. Start a conversation. Chances are they’ll respond.
The tool I recommend for finding and engaging with your tribe is Sendible. I’ve looked at many dashboards and tools and this is the best one by far – and I am not alone in saying this.
“Sendible scores highest, according to the opinions of our survey respondents, and supports a wide range of networks, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and more.” Stuart Rogers, Venture Beat analyst. Venture Beat Social Media Management Report.
Check out the Sendible dashboard – you can get a demo, a free trial for 30 days and, as a member of my tribe, you get a 10% discount.
(Disclosure: I am a member of the Sendible tribe. I’m a brand evangelist and have become an affiliate, which allow me to give you that 10% discount).
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