What you’ll read:
- 12 ways to use community management tools that will help get the most out of them.
Developing and retaining a healthy community is an underappreciated facet of CRM on social media. Beyond generating clicks and traffic, social media is the default platform for customers to seek help, flag problems, and (hopefully) relate their great experiences. Community management tools allow you to plan social media campaigns, gather all incoming comments across multiple social media platforms, and provide advanced metrics about how posts and conversations affect traffic.
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Using these tools effectively engenders a better relationship with existing customers and potential users gain a better trust of your brand. It also gives you a window into customer sentiment you can leverage to make informed decisions about everything from new product lines to the color of your website background.
With that in mind, these are some tips on how to use community management tools to build a user base that wants to interact with you.
Do: Schedule your social posts
The lifeblood of growing a brand’s social community is repeated and consistent social engagement. Regular posting across multiple social media platforms maximizes engagement and helps users engaged. But you don’t need to have a community manager sitting at their desk waiting to hit “submit” on a perfectly timed post — community management tools like Hootsuite allow you to schedule posts in advance. Since each social media platform has its own peculiarities of engagement — both in terms of what time of day to post, and what type of content — being able to plan a campaign in advance lets you maximize your impact.
Don’t: Run scheduled content when a disaster or tragedy occurs
Even as you line up the perfect queue of tweets over a long weekend, have someone able to pull the plug in the event of a disaster or tragedy. Gleefully tweeting about your product in the midst of a national emergency is at best tone deaf and at worst could lead to viral interactions in a way that hurts the brand. Prepared to cancel a scheduled campaign quickly; you can usually just run it a few days later. Tools like SproutSocial can also alert you if there’s a large spike in messages, which can be a flag that something has gone wrong.
Do: Establish your metrics
A community management tool can give you access to detailed analytics beyond those social platforms provide natively. You can measure the ROI of a post in terms of comments, follower number changes, reshares, and more. Establishing what sort of posts garner a large number of social media responses can help shape future posts — as can knowing that certain topics or tones cause your follower numbers to drop.
Don’t: Live by them
Just because a post doesn’t generate a large number of likes and shares doesn’t mean it isn’t worth posting. The ROI on a social media post can go beyond the immediately obvious metrics — sometimes it’s important to post something or respond to a comment regardless. This may be during a time when you think it’s important to take a moral stand, when silence would generate a negative response, or for posts that are important for establishing brand positioning and identity.
Do: Moderate your community
Creating a community online is like a garden — it does well when weeded. Every platform you’re working with will have differing levels of tools for removing bad actors. A Community manager needs to be prepared to deal with them across multiple sites. Hate speech, personal attacks, and spam all need to be removed quickly and aggressively.
Don’t: Stifle discussion
Moderating the comments on a Disqus thread under a post is very different from ruling over Facebook responses with an iron fist. Removing all critiques will make it seem as though you’re hiding something, while talking to people with issues can help resolve problems and increase trust. Negative feedback is also very helpful; if your community continually surfaces the same complaint, something needs to change.
Do: Understand the different demographics of different platforms
Community management tools allow you to plan campaigns and monitor messages from multiple platforms on one centralized application, maximizing your team’s ability to respond quickly. Not every social media platform is the same, however, so consider differing needs and demographics of each. Facebook’s numbers still skew millennial, but there has been an influx of older users. LinkedIn’s numbers run older, and TikTok’s substantially younger. That meme of yours may do well on Twitter, but is it really a good fit for the more business-minded space of LinkedIn?
Don’t: Ignore smaller audiences
Even if 90% of your community is focused on a single platform, don’t ignore the others. Users may come to a platform with questions and missing those harms your social media presence. Not only does the individual not get a response, but later visitors see them being ignored.
Do: Listen for your name
Many community management apps will let you monitor for mentions of your product name (as well as other important keywords). Using these tools, you can keep an eye on how people are talking about your product (and the competition), and if needed, respond to them directly. When people are looking for help, or have misspelled your Twitter handle, monitoring tools can flag conversations that you might otherwise have missed.
Don’t: Always slide into conversations
You don’t need to respond to every mention of your product, especially when it’s clear that this is a conversation between users and they weren’t seeking your input. (See also: snitch-tagging.) If you think they are asking directly for your brand’s help, that’s one thing, but just because the product name is uttered in digital conversation, it’s not cause to chime in. Read the room: understand whether butting in will make you look engaged or pushy.
Do: Track recurring themes
There’s no easy way to track the tone of all incoming messages, but pay attention to the overall themes. If a community support team is repeatedly seeing the same problems , being able to flag and track issues allows you to keep an eye on recurring problems — even if they happen months apart.
Don’t: Ignore minority voices
Just because a problem isn’t discussed frequently doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be addressed. This is especially true in situations where underrepresented communities flag something that other people might not notice or be aware of. For example, a single blind user noticing that screen readers break with your content is worth addressing immediately.
Community management tools are a crucial part of CRM, thanks to advanced metrics and powerful controls. With them, you can build a stronger community around your product, create a base of returning customers, and make potential new clients realize that you care about them.