Creating A Community Out Of Your Professional Network
Any influencer, or business leader, worth their salt knows how important networking can be. It can help you find leads, collaboration opportunities, and the support you can get from a good network is invaluable and irreplaceable. When you form a professional community out of that network, you can effectively weaponize that potential and create a purpose-driven space where people come to do just that. If your market is lacking a good professional community, what can you do to foster one?
Keep reaching out
As the title of the post implies, having a network to build your community from is vital. Communities are born out of the connections we already have, it’s just about joining the dots from person A to B to C and creating a space where that can happen. As such, keep taking the time to build your network as an influencer. Get to know new people in the space, as well as those who are more established and could bring their own network to the community that you’re trying to start up. You may be surprised how many of them have been looking for a professional community space to join.
Keep sharing
One of the things that is most important in a community is recognition and validation. People don’t want to be another faceless member of the crowd, they want to know that they are valued as members of that community. As such, using social media to stay in touch, to appear in peoples’ mentions, and to boost their posts by sharing them can help incentivize a lot of people to stay in and join that community. This doesn’t mean you have to share every single post, it is wise to make sure you’re curating the best content from a wide selection of faces. However, if you’re trying to build a community, you do want to build some positive social proof, so you can’t be the only one posting for all to see.
Bring it all together
Communities are built in a variety of ways. By networking and sharing through social media, you can encourage a trickle of participation that steadily builds up numbers. However, you also want to occasionally shine the spotlight right on the community. Working with an event planner to host an expo or local convention can be a great way to do that. People can form personal connections where they know one another professionally, have the opportunity to share ideas and host conversations, and can generally boost the growth of the market and their own networks. It takes work to organize events, but it can be great for both your growing community and your own business.
Be the platform
The responsibility to build a community should not be entirely on one person or on one business. However, there’s no denying that a strong leader and a purpose-built place for that community can help make it a lot more organized and a lot easier to bring people into rather than a nebulous cluster of connections between disparate individuals and groups. To that end, creating and optimizing a blog for your industry, space, or area can help centralize the community to some degree. You could start a publication that, much like your social media, offers a platform boost for those looking to get their own news and efforts out. You can also create a platform where more serious looks into trends in the industry, as well as advice and tips on how to succeed within it, can be collated, making an important resource for many newcomers.
Start sharing ideas
You want a lot of the work of building a community to be public. You want to show off what you’re trying to build so that like-minded people will join and then the people attracted by positive social proof will follow afterward. As such, you might not want to do too much “behind the scenes.” However, if there are members of the community who are more active and willing to contribute to help you really grow something, you might want to start private group chats with them, as well. You can make plans for events, posts, and other joint efforts and really maximize off the creativity that multiple people can bring.
One person cannot create a community. It’s important to work with the network you have. However, as a leader, you can put together the events, the resources, and the opportunities for that community to grow. If you want to really be a thought leader and pillar of your network, then step up and take the mantle.
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