Christopher Earle: Back to Basics: 5 Tips for Becoming a More Effective Community Manager

Tuesday, 25 July 2017

Back to Basics: 5 Tips for Becoming a More Effective Community Manager

Your main goal as a community manager is to advocate your brand on social networks, find and engage potential customers in an online community and deepen the customer’s relationship with the brand. Sounds easy, right?

Wrong. Community management is challenging. Customer expectations are becoming increasingly more demanding, and the customer now has more control over brand reputation than ever before. While this is a real challenge, there is also a huge opportunity for brand messaging that delivers clear, consistent and valuable content to the customer community. As a community manager, it’s important to not only link the customer community to the brand, but also to instill the brand goals and objectives throughout the community.

One in every three minutes customers spend on the Internet is spent on social media and messaging accounts, and when customers engage with the brand on social media, they expect a response within four hours even though the average brand response time is 10 hours. Clear, consistent and valuable content to the customer community must also be timely to be meaningful.

Below, you’ll discover 5 tips for effective community management that will help you take advantage of these opportunities:

#1 – Create a Good Customer Experience

We live in a world of content overload where it’s easy for users to get lost in the sea of endless content. This makes it difficult for them to find exactly what they are looking for, when they need it.

To create a good customer experience, provide consistent brand messaging and a similar look and feel so that customers can easily identify your brand’s content and find comfort with the familiarity. With each platform, craft your messaging and the types of content to the audience using that specific platform.

#2 – Engage With Your Community on a Human Level

Anonymity is the enemy. While some believe that an anonymous response, or one that simply identifies the brand, is good because the customer directly interacts with the brand, an anonymous response doesn’t connect on a human level.

Put a name and a face behind the brand’s responses to the customer, humanize the message and develop a trusting relationship. A personal response will provide a better customer experience for your online community.

#3 – Encourage Conversations

There are many types of messages that can be crafted for social media networks, and each network is better suited for certain types of messaging over another. In every case, it’s important that the customer finds the message to be valuable and relevant to fit their needs.

Create messages that are easy to understand using simple language that encourages further participation through conversation. Avoid jargon and speak to the customer’s needs. Find ways for these conversations to also be between the customers themselves. Encourage the online community to engage with itself and the brand by asking specific questions.

#4 – Conversations Should Include Brand Leadership & Executives

Getting the active participation from brand leadership is hard, but the relationship between the brand and the customer is strengthened through this type of conversation. Some common reasons why leadership doesn’t participate are because they don’t have enough time, or they don’t exactly know how.

Make the communication as easy for your leadership team as possible and show them the value of their contributions. For example, create a publishing or editorial calendar for their communication to carve out a specific time from their busy schedule. You can also use the next point to help them see the value that the brand gets from their time and effort.

#5 – Use Data to Improve Engagement

Each social media platform has an analytics tool that can provide helpful insight into metrics to measure your effectiveness. Use these insights as a baseline and continuous measure of engagement.

Social media analytics tools, among other tools, help understand how your brand will measure success and find out if your efforts are working, opportunities for improvement and provide you with information to make actionable decisions for the future.

Here is a list of a few analytics tools to help you measure success:

Google Analytics – lets you measure your advertising ROI and track social networking sites
Sprout Social – helps you monitor, measure and engage with your social media management insights to uncover valuable trends in responsiveness and engagement
Hootsuite – lets you save time by managing all of your social media marketing efforts from a single dashboard
Sprinklr – is a social engagement platform that unites customer-facing teams to create better, personal experiences for your customers
Bit.ly – allows you to shorten, share, manage and analyze your favorite links from around the web
Buffer – helps you manage your social networks by scheduling Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn messages

Putting it All Together

Sure, your day is already packed, and juggling your many tasks isn’t easy. Rather than lose your balance and drop all of those plates, implement these 5 tips to be a more effective community manager. The connection between your customer community and your brand will be stronger for it.

Still Need Some Help?

Developing relationships with your customers in an online community isn’t an easy feat. If you’re looking for help strategizing the best solution for your brand to build awareness and create deeper and more meaningful connections between your brand and customers, we’re here to help. Contact TopRank Marketing today!

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