Social media can be a powerful tool to connect with your potential and existing users, get feedback, and grow your software product's reputation. But how can you build a community around your software product using social media? Here are some tips and best practices to help you achieve this goal.
Before you start posting and engaging on social media, you need to have a clear idea of who your target audience is and what they need from your software product. You can use tools like user personas, surveys, or analytics to understand your users' demographics, preferences, pain points, and goals. This will help you tailor your content, tone, and channels to match their interests and expectations.
The first thing is establishing a connection between your software product and your target audience. Identify the points that relate to your audience or address the issue that is being solved by the product. Then a comprehensive outreach can be done to bring people by spreading the word.
The very first thing is identifying the targeted audience to promote the software. We have to understand your target audience's demographics, interests, and online behavior. To find the most relevant audience check your current customer's history, their work/designation and target similar kinds of people.
Understanding who your software is designed for will guide your social media strategy. Create user personas to represent your ideal customers based on demographics, interests, and online behavior. This will help you tailor your content and interactions to meet their specific needs and preferences.
Here is a framework which I've used to define your audience. 1. Who - Understand who your target audience is. 2. What - What are their Personas/Problems. 3. Why - The problem is relevanct. 4. Where - Where are your users available. 5. Wow - How can you wow them ? With a gazillion of products, its important to understand your audience. This critical step sets up everything else, so be very clear with this.
The likability factor. Consider hosting regular "meet the team" sessions. Introduce your team members through engaging posts or short videos, showcasing their expertise and passion for the product. Humanizing your brand in this way can make your community members feel more connected, trust your product, and genuinely like the people behind it. Initiative like this can enhance likability and foster a sense of community.
Not all social media platforms are created equal. Depending on your software product's niche, features, and audience, some platforms may be more suitable than others. For example, if your software product is a graphic design tool, you may want to focus on visual platforms like Instagram or Pinterest. If your software product is a coding editor, you may want to use platforms like Twitter or Reddit that have active developer communities. You should also consider the time and resources you have to manage your social media presence and choose the platforms that offer the best return on investment.
LinkedIn and Twitter are my go to platforms whenever there is a community building needed due to the below reasons: 1. User base 2. Platform Usability & stability. 3. Rich features. Along with these, we also have reddit where you can find audience of all kinds who can add value back to your product. Make sure to follow the "necessary" social norms as social media is equally capable of attracting negativity to your product.
Engage with your audience, promote community interaction, gather feedback, be responsive to feedback/comments, and collaborate with others.
Platforms are important also from the point of view of where your target audience goes to collaborate. Sometimes a platform like Discord or Twitch maybe better suited because of the specialization around the content you are working with in your software
We used Linkedin looking for companies with online stores such as online furniture stores, online fireplace stores, banks, insurance companies. Any seller to the public and businesses likely to have high incoming call volumes including call centres. LinkedIn is perfect as the filters make it easy to target your audience.
If you're doing something with software then you have to use LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube at a minimum. Pick different messages for different platforms with the idea of your segmented audience. Build out from that. Also, remember that TikTok is popular but not available in all major Tech hubs around the world!
Content is essential for attracting and keeping your social media followers. To make sure your content resonates with your audience, it should be relevant, useful, and engaging. You can create tutorials and tips on how to use your software product effectively, case studies and testimonials from satisfied users, updates and announcements on new features or promotions, user-generated content showcasing your software product in action, contests and giveaways that reward loyal fans, or questions and polls that generate conversations and feedback. Additionally, you should vary the formats of your content with text, images, videos, podcasts, or live streams.
Valuable content is less about your product and more about your audience. What pain points are they dealing with? Does your software solve that problem? Maybe that's something another application solves. Positioning your software (comparing it to other apps) helps people make decisions. Maybe your software is the best fit for some and not others. And for the love of everything that's good, please engage with your audience. Build trust and rapport. That's how you build your community. I think the best example of a software company that delivers a ton of value is #semrush. Look at their content and how they communicate with their users.
If the saying Content is king is true, formatting is the queen. Engage your community with the right content and be creative at it. - Keep it relevant - Add creativity. - Experiment with different formats. - Actively Engage - Use Gamification / Reward active folks. - Keep adding value. All things said, keep it consistent.
And don't forget: - be transparent - be direct - be humble Nothing hurts more your effort to gain an audience than being dishonest and not caring for them.
We used Youtube & Twitter for Video's with the theme, THINK, DRAW, CLICK to PUBLISH. Linkedin for surveys to find companies interested in having 60 day free demos, we also set up a referral scheme to gain further reach and word of mouth through recommendations. We created a developer community that could build IVR applications and receive revenue from the inbound calls utilising call features such as call recording, call queuing and virtual receptionist.
Offer a mix of content types, such as blog posts, infographics, video tutorials, and industry insights. Your content should educate your audience about your software and related topics. Establish a thought leadership position by providing valuable and insightful information.
Social media is not just about broadcasting your own messages. It's also important to interact with your followers and show them that you value their opinions, questions, and feedback. You can do this by replying to their comments and messages in a timely and polite manner, liking and sharing their posts that mention your software product, asking for suggestions and ideas on how to improve your software product, inviting them to join your beta testing, user research, or feedback sessions, recognizing and rewarding their contributions and achievements, and creating a sense of community among your followers.
Don’t just use jargons . make sure you have real time experience or you have real use case scenarios for the same . Put all your thinking hats before penning down few words .
To build a community around your engineering software product using social media: Identify your TARGET audience. Encourage user-generated content. Foster discussions and interactions. Run contests and giveaways. Provide customer support. Collaborate with influencers and thought leaders. Organize virtual events and webinars. Monitor and analyze engagement. you can actively engage with your target audience, foster a sense of community, and promote your engineering software product effectively.
This is one of the more important aspects that has come in via social media. It lets you get closer to your users and makes them feel included as you're able to interact with them on their ideas and feedback for the product. It also lets you sample ideas with a wider mass and even get targeted user groups for beta testing which proves invaluable in the development cycles
Be friendly with everyone as that will set the tone of the community. If you're grumpy then people will leave the community. You don't need to be real time in your interactions but you can't ignore them either as that will build out more of what you want in the future. Treat others how you want to be treated at the end of the day.
It's crucial to recognize that both you and your customers share a common pursuit of dreams and goals. This common ground allows for a more meaningful connection with your target audience. While you're actively promoting your product, it's equally important to concentrate on serving your customers by addressing their unique needs and aspirations. Highlight the significance of customer satisfaction and convey how your product comprehends and fulfills their desires, thus becoming a solution they can rely on. Showcase genuine success stories to illustrate the tangible impact your product has on realizing your customers' dreams and aspirations.
Finally, you should track and analyze your social media performance and see what works and what doesn't. You can use tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, or Twitter Analytics to measure metrics like reach, engagement, traffic, conversions, or retention. You can also use tools like Hootsuite, Buffer, or Sprout Social to schedule, manage, and optimize your social media posts. You should experiment with different content, formats, platforms, and timings to see what resonates with your audience and adjust your strategy accordingly.
Keep track of likes, shares, comments, click-through rates, and conversion rates to understand what works. Use this data to refine your strategy and improve the effectiveness of your content.
One thing I've found very useful are analytics. Here is one important thing after engaging with your community: Continuous Improvement. After we post and engage with audience, there are a variety of tools which provide you insights on how your social media posts/engagements were received by the community. Use these numbers in retrospect and learn: 1. What content/format was recieved well? 2. What could be improved? 3. What can be experimented? 4. What needs to stop? Take action based on these insights and repeat the process.
Social media platforms give you easy to use measurement systems. It lets you measure how well your software is being received by looking at industry standard metrics. This is also a big productivity play in the development cycle wherein creating and incorporating the measurement system in the past was a significant task
By utilizing tools, like Google Analytics you can monitor the impact of social media traffic on your website performance. It enables you to observe how users from platforms engage with your site, which pages they explore and whether they undertake actions for your business, such as signing up for a trial or making a purchase. Specific tools tailored to each platform, such as Facebook Insights or Twitter Analytics provide you with a perspective on your social media activities. They furnish information, on the reach of your posts the level of engagement they generate and how these metrics evolve over time.