Finding Your 'Tribe', Part Two

Having established who you really are, what you are really interested in, and what a group of people like that might look like in Part One, let’s take a look at how to get in touch with them.

The answer is literally staring you in the face.

Hold your own life up to the mirror. Where are you right now? Where would you like to be? Where do you hang out whenever you can?

Look at your own weekly, monthly and yearly timetables and calendars. What do you do during the week that you enjoy? What events do you attend during the year?

Your tribe will be doing similar things.

In the ‘olden days’, to find your ‘sort of people’, you had to physically go out and meet them. Certain kinds of people went to pubs; others to clubs; others to gala events or hunts or parties or libraries or meetings. And you can still do that today - but social media has made a great deal of the same kind of thing possible without leaving your own home. Try asking the following:

1. What social media sites would people like me spend time on?

2. Are there any sub-groups - such as Facebook groups - where I might be more likely to find people like me?

3. At what times would people like me be likely to be interacting with other people like me?

If you get stuck, just look at yourself again. If you’re not the sort of person who stays up until the wee hours of the morning listening to heavy metal extracts on the web, you probably won’t find your tribe doing that either. Do you go to bed early? Then so do they, probably. Do you like to visit certain groups or pages on social media? Guess what? So will they.

There are all kinds of technical tricks to help you find tribes the days - Facebook enables you to specify audiences, and even gives you the power to create ‘lookalike’ groups for their ads. But I’m not getting into the technical side too much here. Suffice it to say, there are people out there doing similar things to you and they would probably be as glad to find you as you would be to find them. If they aren’t glad, let’s face it - they aren’t in your tribe. Because one of the qualifications to be in a tribe is that you all like each other.

Mechanically, then, go onto Facebook and search for whatever groups you would personally like, and request to join them. Soon your news feed will be full of traffic that is of more interest to you, and you’ll be interacting with people who share common interests.

But you’re not done yet.

Once you have developed some confidence with these people, interacted with them, become more visible to them, and made a few friends, the following step is one of the most powerful you can do to define and make use of your tribe:

Create your own Facebook group.

It’s easy to do technically. But it has to be a group that feels very close to your heart, a group that you could create content for daily, probably several times a day. It’s a kind of marriage, actually. You’re creating a partner, someone ideally suited to you, except that in this case it’s social, not romantic. Create a group full of things that you’re interested in.

Let’s say you love deep sea fishing. Create a group called ‘I Love Deep Sea Fishing’. Invite one or two people into the group whom you know have a similar high interest level in everything to do with deep sea fishing. Ask them to invite like-minded people. The group will grow. Fill it full of content of high interest: pictures, stories, competitions, information, anecdotes, statistics, news items, etc etc. Before long, other deep sea types will join. Run a competition to get them to add more people. You’ll eventually build to ‘critical mass’ and you won’t have to work to get the group expanding, new members will trickle in each day. And you’ll be having a ball! So many people interested in deep sea fishing will be chatting, interacting, helping each other out, sharing stories and so forth. If you happen to have a product relating to the topic which you can sell, it will have found its customers.

You’ll find that you want to do more for the group, to interact with them, to look after them. And you’ll be enjoying all of it.

You’ll have your tribe.