Great social media community management is an art. It’s so much more than just answering questions and providing customer services. Successful social media community management recognises that you need to balance your audience and business needs to find a middle ground where everyone benefits. The following 11 tips will help you improve your social media community management to engage your audience and achieve your business goals.
1. Know your audience
For me, this is rule number one of community management. You must have an excellent understanding of who your audience is, what motivates them, what are their needs and wants, what value does your brand or organisation and this community offer them?
2. Understand your objectives
For your community to be successful you need a strategic approach and at the heart of that is the objectives you’re working towards achieving. You need to keep these objectives in mind with every action you take. When engaging with community members think about how your interaction with them is helping you to achieve your business objectives, when creating content ask yourself how it’s contributing to your goals. Make every piece of work you do count.
3. Balance business objectives and audience needs
If you do everything in your community with only your brand or business in mind, to be honest, you won’t have a community, you’ll have a one-sided sales and marketing platform. If you do everything with your community in mind, you won’t continue to receive the support of the business to continue your work. There are many times when striking the right balance is tricky, but great community managers know how to balance business objectives with audience needs.
4. Love your data
You can’t be a great community manager just by having a great knowledge of how people operate online and being an amazing online communicator, you also need to be able to read your community data to grow a sustainable and successful online community. Your data will tell you things like which content your community loves, what sort of posts convert to business goals and who your most active and most valuable community members are.
5. Prioritise your time by importance of task, not with notifications
In the busy online world of community management, it’s easy to fall into the trap of community managing based on notifications received. The best way to use your time as a community manager, is to prioritise your tasks by most to least important. It’s also good practice to review your required actions outside of notifications as notifications are not 100% reliable, they fail and don’t notify us of important things sometimes. I also recommend that even if you’re using a social media management tool like Social Studio or Sprout Social, that you still regularly check your channels natively just in case these tools have missed something. As a general rule, a community management shift should address the following, in order of priority:
- Scan for risks, action and escalate as required
- Scan for complaints to be actioned
- Follow up and outstanding tasks from previous days or shifts, especially in relation to risks and complaints
- Scan your last 72 hours of content and respond to customer queries
- Engage with your community and respond to any outstanding posts.
6. Make online relationship-building your aim
Community management is about building relationships online not ‘closing a call’. I’ve seen this often, community managers fall into the trap of acting like customer service agents with the task of closing a call and getting a customer off their hands. This isn’t how community building works, you need to express genuine interest in having conversations with the people visiting your community.
7. Be a relationship-builder online and offline
Being a great community manager means not just being able to build online communities, but building relationships within your business to ensure the long-term success of your community. You need to have the right relationships within your business to get support for your strategic objectives, to get answers to questions that you don’t have yourself, to escalate customer complaints and get prompt action, to get real-time content turned around quickly, to get legal and compliance approvals, to build trust to have the important conversations and so much more.
8. Stop and think before you post
We’re all busy, there’s a lot to get done every day, and there are those times we all go through as community managers where we’re overwhelmed with the volume of comments we need to filter through and reply to. But, you’re getting yourself into dangerous territory if you fall into the bad habit of just diving into comments and conversations without doing your due diligence. You need to have a little checklist in your mind that you run through before each interaction. If it helps, make it a physical checklist stuck in front of you until it becomes habit. These are some of the things to consider before becoming part of a conversation
- Is this the best use of my time?
- Is this person now or will they become a valuable part of this community?
- Who is this person? Check their profile details and any history of engagement
- What risks are present to the brand in this conversation?
- Is there anything I must communicate as part of this conversation
- What value does this conversation have to this user and the community as a whole? (remember all public conversations become part of your community, you might be responding to one person but many more will read your reply).
9. Exercise sound judgement to make tough calls
Community guidelines are great, but they can’t cover everything. Good community guidelines or house rules are concise and give the necessary information on what community members should do in your community and what they need to avoid doing. Outside of that, it’s at your discretion as a community manager to make the tough calls on hiding, deleting, reporting, banning and so on. You need to be able to make a call and back yourself as well as be able to communicate that decision to your community and your internal stakeholders.
10. Be conversational, get tone and personality right
This sounds easy, right? But I don’t see this done well often at all. You need to be able to write how real live human beings converse and ensure your community engagement also reflects brand tone. You need to show a bit of personality and be likeable. A common mistake I see is people not using contractions, that is, words like we’re, what’s, she’s. Using contractions is one simple tactic to sound conversations. A great tip I learned many years ago is to read content and replies out loud to really hear how they sound. Yep, you’ll seem like the office weirdo, but you’ll reap the rewards with your community engagement.
11. Ask yourself: is this person now or likely to become part of my community?
You don’t need to be part of every conversation and you don’t need to allow everyone to remain present in your community. It’s a common misconception that deleting and banning is off the table except for extreme circumstances, to be brutally honest, that’s complete bullshit. Delete and ban as required to protect your community, its members and your brand. A helpful rule of thumb I use is to ask myself if this sort of behaviour would be okay in a physical location like a store or in a phone conversation. Bad behaviour is bad behaviour, and we don’t have to put up with it.
There’s a whole lot more to community management than these 11 tips on best practice community management, but if you learn from these tips you’re on your way to becoming a great community manager.