When I first meet with a new client or start a presentation, I always ask what the goal of their social media marketing is.
And one of the top three answers is always: "More engagement!!!!"
To which I counter question- but are you engaging with others' content?
They avoid looking at me. 🙃
For a while now I keep seeing people complaining that you can't build a community on social media and I disagree.
Building a community is possible, but you also need to be contributing to that community in a non-sales way.
Hear me out- I want you to think back to the wild times of 2020. The days when we didn’t know what exactly was going on with the world. The days where we were inside of our homes and the only connection we had outside of our covid bubble was the people we were connected to on social media.
And what we were doing on social media was sharing updates about the sourdough starters we were starting or we were sharing about the plants we would bring home from those now risky grocery store runs.
Sourdough is how we all bonded when we didn't know what was going on in the world. We asked our communities what we should name our sourdough starters. We were asking our communities what do if we missed feeding our sourdough starters.
We commented name ideas for said sourdough. We offered "discard" recipes, we saved their discard recipes. We created a relationship and essentially a community around a stranger on the internet's sourdough starter.
Basically, the sourdough starter is what transformed us from Pinterest/photoshoot quality visuals to the raw user generated visuals that are now scroll stopping. It was the Tomodachi, and we were all invested in it's daily or weekly updates like it was our own.
What a time that was.
Want more engagement- brainstorm around how we all acted with the sourdough starters. What is going to get people to stop lurking and join a conversation?
Because that's how you build the foundation for a community.
Channel the sourdough. 🍞
Did you have a sourdough starter in 2020?