A content creator wouldn’t go through so much stress just to receive little to no engagements. Likes, comments, and shares are all needed. Asides from fueling the ego of the content creator, it is a testament to the goodness of the content itself.
In the year 2022, it is estimated that the population of internet users is around five billion. Every content creator needs to have their online community, those people who would stand for you, the ones who anticipate your content and share it around. A good place to begin such recruitment is to start your content creation journey on platforms that are not so highly contested. Video content creators prefer to choose a platform like Allcreate that allows for self-expression and possesses a more welcoming audience, unlike the overpopulated social media platforms.
Be it on Allcreate, Instagram, Twitter, or wherever, these 5 steps will help you build the online community you need as a content creator:
- Define your target audience
- Research on the audience preferences
- Interact with your audience
- Reward your audience at intervals
- Ask for feedback
Knowing these steps isn’t enough. You need to be aware of the most effective ways to achieve them, so let’s get into it.
- Defining Your Target Audience
As a content creator who knows the necessity of engagements, you have to stop trying to get engagements from every Tom, Dick, and Harry. The internet is highly populated but that is just a facade to get you to think that there is an available audience. Look at it this way, no matter how much you accessorize the male restroom, it wouldn’t make everyone use it. Of course, it could get some other gender to go in but the number wouldn’t be significant. Now, imagine you unintentionally pimped up the restroom in such a way that the males don’t like it. You would end up losing your primary users.
A Target audience is a group of people with certain criteria on who you have decided to focus the bulk of your content creation. You need to be intentional about the age group, the level of education, the gender, and so many other things in the people you want to be a part of your community. Your community wouldn’t only contain the people who fit the criteria of your target audience but they would be the most populous. This is the first step in the right direction to creating an online community.
- Audience Research
When you define your target audience, all you know about them is that you would like to create content for them and make them a core part of your online community. The next step to building your community is to do an audience research.
Audience research involves conducting in-depth research on your target audience. Understanding their likes, dislikes, lifestyle, etc. It could go as in-depth as knowing their most active times of the day, their most used tools, their favorite slang, and other properties specific to them. You would go through different data types to get the low-down on your target audience, and what you come up with will guide you in being able to market yourself, your product, or your service to them.
Some parts of this research will happen while on the job. You will get direct information from the target audience themselves. Their complaints and their requests are very useful resources. These let you know their thought process and what truly pleases them. As we all know, when the buyer is satisfied, then can the salesman truly have gained a customer.
- Interaction With Audience
Looks like we are just picking up from where we left off. After in-depth research into your audience, you can begin creating content under the guidance of the information you have gotten. A lot of the learning and optimization goes on when that begins. Audiences love content creators who find time to interact with them. On Allcreate, during a stream, it is more effective to engage the audience in the public chats. Get them to contribute to the content, and talk about what they know or want to know. The same goes for any platform you can think of.
Likes and retweets are great engagements, but the most useful of all the engagements are the comments. The comment section is where your audience voices out to you and tests your personality. Your response or non-response has an effect on their affection towards you and so many more. Doing this helps build a relationship with them and that’s the point of a community. An audience is anyone who looks at your craft, but once you can take it up a notch and create a relationship, interact, and be comfortable, they become an online community.
- Rewarding Your Audience
There’s this feature on Allcreate that allows your audience to donate gifts to you. What a lot of content creators on there haven’t figured out is that to be gifted you need to have offered something to this audience. You could start off by making your audience smile or imparting knowledge to them. These little things ignite a person to do better in return.
It’s all about your capacity. If you could go further to offer added incentives like promo codes, discounts, or vouchers, you will easily win the heart of this audience and bring them closer. The point of building a community is having a connection, sort of like a family that sticks together, gives each other gifts, and shares information about their day-to-day activities.
- Asking For Feedback
We would not get into the importance of online reviews but their importance can never be overstated. Asking for reviews about each content you put out does so many things that you wouldn’t believe. It tells your audience that they are important, their views have a place in your brand, and that you want to know them.
When feedback is given, you aren’t the only one who reads them. People all over like to see what others think about your work before engaging it. There are many people who go all the way down to read the comments of a blog post before they get into the blog post itself. They are certain that you would want to give them a reason to stay but they want to know if the previous audiences approve of it.
Asking for feedback consistently is the maintenance phase of your online community. At this point, you would have gotten them. The next task is to try and keep them, and that lasts forever.
Final Tips From Allcreate
We mentioned getting a target audience and doing in-depth research. To top it up we would like you to know that audiences that fit all your criteria but are from different platforms could have their differences. Getting the audience on some platforms to comment on your post could prove difficult compared to Allcreate. The community on Allcreate is already somewhat together making it much easy to take your chunk from it. You can sign up on Allcreatehere and set sail on easier waters. We can’t wait to have you over.
