An Introductory Guide to Social Media Community Management for Better Engagement
When devising a social media content marketing strategy, too many brands focus on creating and publishing content alone. What they do not know is that there’s more to content marketing than content creation and publishing. If your goal is to increase engagement and maximize your social media pages as a lead magnet, you’ll need to devote more time to community management.
What is Social Media Community Management?
Social media community management encompasses all the tasks involved in building and maintaining your brand’s online community. This would include engaging your prospects, monitoring your mentions, moderating the comments under your posts or groups, and tracking all conversations relating to your brand. Ultimately, the goal is to build a solid relationship with your clients and prospects, as well as every other person in your online community.
Why is Community Management Important?
Keep Your Customers Happy
Customer complaints on social media are at an all-time high, and a single complaint could leave a trail that’ll discourage others from patronizing your business. Thankfully, the same applies to positive reviews. If you care about your reputation as a brand, it’s vital to ensure that you have more happy customers than disgruntled ones. Community management, among other benefits, gives you the opportunity to engage all customers, address their queries, and improve overall brand perception.
Improve Credibility
In a world filled with misinformation and fake updates, actively engaging with your brand’s online community adds legitimacy to your business. Your audience will trust that you’ll provide the right information, and timely too.
Humanize your brand
A lot of brands do not actively engage with their online community. When they do, the responses may be automated and generic, doing little to solve the customers’ problems. By employing a human approach to community management, you can stand out from the crowd and make your customers’ social media interactions memorable.
What are some best practices for social media community management?
Essentially, there are four vital aspects of community management. They are:
Monitoring: following conversations relating to your brand.
Engaging: making effort to start and continue conversations with your prospects and customers.
Moderating: monitoring customer complaints and filtering conversations that do not add value to your brand.
Measuring: Tracking results and identifying potential growth areas.
Monitoring
Constantly listening to conversations about your brand is the bedrock of community management. Admittedly, this might seem like a lot of work because there’s so much noise on social media, and many of the mentions relating to your brand may not need any action. However, listening at all times ensures you can seize any opportunity that comes your way, be it addressing a customer complaint or even starting a viral hashtag.
Another point to note here is that many of the relevant mentions may not tag you directly. Sometimes, customers may mention your product, misspell your name, or even mention you in the comment section of blogs or other pages. That’s why you should consider setting up BuzzSumo Alerts or Google Alerts to help keep a tab on all potentially relevant mentions.
Engaging
Aside from being critical to solidifying your online presence, engaging ensures you can steer conversations about your brand in the direction that is likely to yield the best results. Engagement as a community management practice typically entails reacting to and replying comments on your posts or your mentions. Often, brands may be tempted to employ an automation tool that likes all comments and provides generic replies where necessary. However, this strategy denies you the opportunity to show that your brand has a human touch or create a genuine connection with your customers.
It’s also vital to know that most social media platforms use engagement signals to determine what pops up in users’ newsfeeds. Thus, you should always strive to monitor your channels for any opportunity to address complaints, talk to potential customers, and appreciate your loyalists. You may also consider sending branded gifts such as T-shirts and mugs to your influencers and loyal followers.
Moderating
Another vital role of a social media community manager is managing their brand’s online reputation. This task would entail addressing negative feedback as soon as possible and keeping the brand’s social media pages spam-free. The goal is to minimize the impact of negative feedback and ensure your visitors don’t see comments that are not relevant to your brand conversation.
It’s vital to note that hiding or deleting negative feedback is not the best way to go about moderating your social media pages. Doing this can easily be interpreted as censorship, and could take a hit on your brand perception. Thus, as long as the comments are not overly offensive, it’s vital to keep customer complaints and your answers public because your customers will appreciate the transparency. You could even refer the customer to your DM if the complaint is very personal or may be complicated to address.
Another important moderation task is setting up a profanity filter to prevent users from using curse words and other spammy languages on your page. Most social media channels have this filter in their setting and they allow you to add the words you’d like to include. As much as possible, your page should promote free speech and encourage civil conversations. But that doesn’t mean you should give users the liberty to hurt others or your brand with insensitive comments.
Measuring
Measuring attempts to get an insight into your brand perception and figure out ways to improve your social media marketing efforts. Because conversations can happen everywhere and you can’t be everywhere, it could be difficult to track all your brand mentions to figure out what people think about you. Still, there are sentiment analysis tools like Sprinklr or Social Mention that can track your brand or keyword mentions on social media and analyze how people feel about your business. While these tools may not be 100% reliable, they can provide a good platform to start your measurement.
Conclusion
Effective community management presents your brand as friendly and easily relatable while offering opportunities to promote your products organically. Moreover, with the right community management strategies, you can grow a strong group of brand loyalists that will help you promote your business without any incentive. So, if you’re yet to invest in community management, there’s no better time to change that narrative, and the social media marketing experts at Tap Marketing are always ready to discuss how we can help.