Social communities offer many benefits in the enterprise, reducing the number and severity of support incidents, speeding technical resolutions, and encouraging outside-in product innovation. They also humanize the connection between companies and their customers.

At Social Media Week 2012 on February 15, Mark Yolton, senior vice president of SAP Communities and Social Media, shared best practices for building a community around a brand. Yolton manages SAP Community Network, or SCN, an online social network for users in various information technology roles, including developers, business process professionals, and business analytics experts.

SCN began in 2003 as the SAP Developer Network and focused on informing and supporting coders. A few years in, Yolton and his team noticed demographic changes in their audience. “There weren’t just developers in the community, there were other people,” he explains. “So we had to figure out how to start new communities to meet their needs and also match with our business objectives.”

Today, SCN has a million and a half unique monthly visitors and is growing at an average rate of 30,000 new members a month. “The holy grail of social media and social networking is to form strong ties with the members of your community – your market – that are really important to you.”

Yolton offers these nine key pieces of advice on how to get there.

1. Sharpen the focus

“Don’t try to be all things to all people,” Yolton says. Instead, pick one segment of your customer or partner base and focus on, talk to, and connect with them. Deliver that audience something they can get nowhere else and from no one else.

2. Start small  

“That one piece of value that you’re going to deliver doesn’t have to be world-changing.” Yolton says. “It can be something as simple as a better way for your customer to connect with your support organization.”

Do that one thing effectively to make your mark, and expand from there.

Next page: Growing your community