Cutting through the social media clutter might seem like a daunting task. With so much branded content constantly being pushed out into the social stratosphere, how do you make yours stand out while engaging your customers?

Five Tips To Step Up Your Community Management

Effective community management is one of the most crucial aspects of a solid social media presence. So, how can I be a better community manager, you ask? We’ve got some simple strategies and techniques you can add to your plan to ensure that you make the most of your content while leveraging the tools you already have.

By focusing on simple follower techniques, tone of voice, quality content, a few new ideas, and a little organization, you can step up your community management game, and increase your social media ROI:

1. Keep it simple: You don’t have to have a grand plan to gain followers. Facebook makes it easy with simply clicking “invite” next to the names of those who have liked a post on your page, but have not liked your page yet. As far as Twitter and Instagram go, be sure to follow those who retweet, favorite, or like your posts on those platforms. If someone posts about your brand and replies to one of your posts in a positive manner, be sure to follow them, as well. It doesn’t hurt to follow key industry pages, too. There is a chance they will follow you back and then be able to see your content. Employing simple follower strategy through giveaways can also be helpful. For example, “enter this giveaway contest… all you have to do is follow the page, etc…” can generate a lot of follower leads.
2. Humanize your brand, no matter the tone of voice, and listen to the customers: Not all brands can be playful and fun. Some take on a more serious tone simply due to the field of work they are in. However, regardless of tone or industry, all brands should have a human element to them. After all, you as a community manager are a human with a personality. Let that personality shine through on your client’s social media pages. Respond to customers who leave comments or message the page. Be sure that your brand is not just a robotic enigma. Listening and reading customer feedback is another important aspect of community management. People are probably talking about your brand on social media or online through Google or Yelp reviews. As the community manager, it is your job to gather that feedback, positive or negative, and report it back to your client so that adjustments can be made and customers can have the most positive outlook on your brand as possible.
3. Create content worth engaging with: Factual posts are great and often necessary in order to relay information. However, don’t be afraid to give your followers and customers content that they can actually engage and interact with. Ask a question. Create a Twitter poll. Tie your content into a trending topic by utilizing in the moment posting and researching national days that make sense for your brand. You will have a lot more reach and engagement with that type of content, which could lead to a stronger potential to gain followers.
4. Try something different: Sometimes in social media, we community managers can get a little stuck in our ways. When something works, we stick with it. Which is great, but could lead to unexciting content. Spice things up with videos, gifs, or even using emojis to add a little fun. Customer-created content is something else worth exploring. You want to talk about engaging with your followers? There is no better way to do this than actually re-posting their photos or even organizing a “take-over” for a day on your social sites.
5. Keep yourself and your content organized: Don’t make your community management job any more stressful than it needs to be. Get all the upfront social media work done so you can focus on in the moment engagement and responding to customer comments and feedback. Be sure to create a weekly or monthly content calendar complete with copy for each platform you post to, along with the desired image for each post. Schedule that content out at the beginning of the week or month and then be sure to monitor those posts as they go up, just to ensure there are no issues. This is a time saving method that frees up your day-to-day so that you can focus solely on your followers and customers.

There is no one way to do community management and there is no foolproof method to being a strong community manager, but these tips can get you on your way to creating a stronger and more fruitful social media presence across the board. Utilizing even some of the methods above should help you create more engaging content while remaining unique and personable. Now, get to posting!

About Scooter Media

Scooter Media is a full-service communications agency in greater Cincinnati specializing in public relations and social media.