Creating social areas where your clients, potential clients, employees and suppliers can come and engage with you is more and more essential in our ever-connected world. With social media networks readily available there are less barriers to engage with interested parties from Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups to Google Hangouts, which are all available mostly free of charge in addition to paid solutions such as forums and membership sites.
To create an area where you can come and engage with like minded people is part of the larger strategy of creating a sense of belonging type of experience or even attracting a tribe of followers.
A good example of this are the Apple Stores, you tend to have areas where you can come and learn all about your new products, by default you are sharing your questions with Mac geniuses and likeminded people who just bought Apple products. When you have a problem you can book a one-to-one with a genius at the Mac bar. If you share on social media that you had issues with a Mac product, I can assure you from firsthand experience that a Mac representative will be in touch to help fix the issue. All this does is open the communication channel with the customer and you invite engagement from the very early buying decision day. Because of the friendly interaction and experience, you feel like you can pretty much ask any question however basic or complicated it may be.
