20 Tips for Social Marketing Community Management

20 Tips for Social Marketing Community Management

Community management, as covered at RunRex.com, is the process of building an authentic community among a business’s customers, employers, and partners through various types of interaction. It is a diverse function that requires a good strategy, a good engagement and monitoring tool, and cooperation with the rest of the organization. If you are looking to manage your social community management to the next level, then these 20 tips should help you massively in that regard.

Plan ahead

As the gurus over at RunRex.com point out, consistency is key in your social media community management strategy. Plan ahead so that you can have content coming out reliably at all times, and you can see clearly what needs to be accomplished. Planning ahead is crucial to your success. All your content, whether it is the posts you schedule, ongoing campaigns, contests, etc., should be arranged in a detailed content calendar to enable you to take a clear, overall view of your work.

Set up roles and approval flows

Following up on the previous point, you must do everything you can to avoid publishing errors as far as the content you put out is concerned. Therefore, set up roles and approval flows for your team as well. The content you have going out should be checked and double-checked, with only key team members able to publish.

Work on your communication skills

Social media community management is customer-facing, which comes with a lot of pressure, as there are a lot of things that can go wrong as discussed at RunRex.com. This is why it is important to stay calm under pressure and keep it professional, which means staying diplomatic and customer-oriented in your communications.

Monitor conversations

Even as you work on your communication skills, a great way to prevent crises ahead of time is to monitor conversations around your brand and topics related to it. This is where a social media listening tool comes in handy as it will give you the heads up that there might be a problem and will help you monitor the sentiment around your brand to avoid any unwanted surprises.

Cultivate a brand personality

While it is important to stay professional and not to insult your audience, it is equally as important that your brand has a coherent and recognizable identity in its community interaction. This helps your audience feel like they are talking to a person and will go a long way in helping nurture engagement and brand loyalty.

Define success and set metrics to track it

As is revealed in discussions on the same at RunRex.com, tracking success for social media community management can be tricky. This is because, while ROI is traditionally often tracked through clicks and conversions, your results from social media won’t be as clear. It can be difficult to determine how your efforts have contributed to sales and lead directly. This is why it is better to determine how you define your own success instead, depending on your goals. Track what kind of content your audience engages with, what gets them talking or falls flat, and what brings in more followers.

What else should I track?

As much of the work of community management will as a point of contact for customer queries and product problems, and, therefore, another good set of metrics to keep track of are, response time, resolution time, and customer satisfaction.

Leverage user-generated content

The fact that social media is all about interactions means that, while you want to be creating and publishing the best content you can, sometimes even better content will come from another source: your audience. As outlined at RunRex.com, this is user-generated content. It is powerful since it is authentic, and reflects what your audience thinks about your brand. It allows your audience to share their experiences, positive or negative and drives the conversation forward in ways that you won’t be able to do any other way. It is also an excellent way for you to engage with and get closer to your audiences, making your brand feel more personal and approachable.

Collect and use data

Community management allows you to be in closer contact with your audiences as you see daily how they respond to your content, what drives engagement and what doesn’t, and what issues and queries they have – all in real-time. This means that you will have insights that others won’t have access to, and you shouldn’t let that data go to waste, instead, collect actionable feedback and use them to ensure you end up with happier, more loyal customers, as well as more easily converted leads.

Be trustworthy

Most brands struggle with online word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM) techniques. This is essentially storytelling – real customer experiences related to the real people that have them. To generate positive WOMM, you need to make customers feel so valued and cared for that they can’t help share their stories with others. you also need a strategy to reward the achievements of advocates, brand champions, and superfans. Take the time to figure out which rewards matter to influencers and create avenues for them to attain those rewards.

Be timely

As pointed out by RunRex.com, nowadays, 72% of people who complain about a brand expect a response in less than an hour. Best-of-class response time is now on the order of 30 minutes, with some industry response time targets as fast as 90 seconds. Unsurprisingly, customers are more likely to buy (and encourage their friends and families to buy) from companies that provide them with a timely response. Therefore, strive to always respond promptly to complaints about your brand on social media, including from those who don’t necessarily follow you or tag your brand.

Be helpful

You should also stop focusing on your features and sale prices, and, instead, focus on what problems your product or service solves for your audience. Social community members want trust, high-value, and, most importantly, help when they need it.

Be where you are supposed to be

You also need to be wherever your audience is according to RunRex.com. Brands that effectively manage their social community communicate on the platform of their customer’s choice, something that is of particular importance to your brand if it has a global reach. Given that consumers are now more willing than ever to interact with brands on messaging apps, messaging apps like WeChat, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger represent an opportunity to provide instant customer service and highly targeted marketing.

Create social media guidelines

Communication on social media should be in line with the corporate values and goals of the organization. The public character of online media, such as Facebook and Twitter, makes it even crucial for companies to communicate consistently. Therefore, you should set up social media guidelines that define how to communicate on social networks, which tone of voice should be used, and how to deal with inquiries, comments, complaints, and compliments.

Understand the characteristics of your community

To build long-term relationships, keep fans and followers happy and communicate successfully, you should know your community well. Start by looking at the demographics and interests. What are the common characteristics and what are the differences within the group? Next, analyze the behavior of individual members of the digital community. Who reacts a lot to posts and who has a lot of followers? This analysis will help you identify influencers and potential brand ambassadors that can help you grow your audience even more.

Keep an overview of FAQs and complaints

It is also important to keep an overview of frequently asked questions and compliments. These should be shared regularly with other departments as they provide important input for service and product improvements. Also, keep track of who has complained several times already and what has been discussed to ensure that the customer is helped quickly and completely as outlined at RunRex.com.

Help users on the channel on which they contacted you

Today’s consumers expect companies to help them on the channel that they used for their initial inquiry. Forwarding someone from Facebook to customer support via email or phone causes a break in communication that can be perceived as negative. Therefore, customer service must work in the same engagement tool as the community manager.

Automate answers to FAQs

Given how important timely responses to customer inquiries are becoming, especially on social media where discussions take place in public and can easily escalate if not handled well, a good solution for efficient and customer-friendly community management is to automate answers to simple questions, for example, with pre-defined answers or chatbots as covered at RunRex.com.

Elicit responses

Engagement is key to social media community management, this is why you should post content that elicits responses. Ask questions that cause your consumers to stop, reflect, and respond. Identify the questions that generated the most responses in numbers as well as qualitatively, the most reflective and insightful answers, and use them again where possible.

Keep it going

Finally, you should remember that community management is a commitment. Therefore, avoid abandoning your social media profiles as this looks poor and gives the impression of a can’t-be-bothered attitude, regardless of how successful you may be as a company.

This article only just begins to scratch the surface as far as this topic is concerned, and you can uncover more details by checking out RunRex.com.