Luke Lewis: tips on how to grow your social media communities

A couple of weeks ago I attended the lovely news:rewired event held by journalism.co.uk, where Luke Lewis editor at BuzzFeed UK and former editor at NME.com shared a few tips on how to grow social media communities.

Here are the top five tips I took away from Luke’s session:

1. Think about your social media strategy. Knowing what you would like to gain from your social media presence will help you to choose what social media network/s to join. Luke’s advice was to join Twitter first. When on Twitter be; relentless; use photos; tweet the same tweet again (if it worked the first time); use analytics; and be geeky. I agree Twitter is a good choice, it is a space where you can spread your content, monitor what others are saying about topics you are interested in by exploring hashtags, get involved in conversations by using hashtags, track responses to your tweets and get to know your audience as a result.

2. Get extra value from your content. Share your content via your social networks. As mentioned Twitter is a great space to do so. Use hashtags and tweet more than once to maximise your reach.

3. Be nostalgic and emotional. Tap into to people’s passion. Use images. Tie your self to happenings and things that might evoke feelings among your audience and then in return evokes reaction. NME did this brilliantly by doing anything from little things such as wishing a rock star happy birthday on Twitter to listing 30 beautiful song lyrics on tumblr and creating #songthatchangedmylife. People like to get involved when they can express their passion.

4. Exploit big events. Be at the same level as your audience. React to relevant things happening and do so in real time. Luke created an Olympic Opening Ceremony playlist on NME during the event and it really worked among NME’s audience.

5. Take your feedback seriously. Feedback = Editorial. NME’s #songthatchangedmylife became so popular that is became a regular feature in the magazine. If your audience are responding positively to something such as a hashtag you’ve created then there is an opportunity to turn that into a feature just like NME did with #songthatchangedmylife.