Tips for managing a social media community

TIPS FOR MANAGING A SOCIAL
MEDIA COMMUNITY
BY: CHELDY SYGACO ELUMBA-PABLEO, MPA; LlB

INTRODUCTION
 exercising good social etiquette and managing
your social networking communities matters most
to maintain the stability of a particular network in
social media.
 Social media community management has
expanded into a growing field and there’s a lot to
think about. Several techniques, styles and
strategies must be applied to cope up with the fast
growing phase of modernization.
CHELDY SYGACO ELUMBA-PABLEO, MPA; LlB

ANSWER QUESTIONS WHENEVER POSSIBLE
 With more and more of your customers participating on
social networking platforms, businesses need to be
doing much more than posting their own updates.
Companies must also be willing to answer questions.
 A recent survey organized by InSites Consulting found
that eight out of ten American companies answer client
questions and complaints via social media. The survey
shows that US companies are very successful in
answering questions via social media: “83 percent of
companies indicate they always deal with questions or
complaints sent to them via social media. Still, only 54
percent of the companies in this survey also talk to and
actively participate in online conversations with
consumers.”

BRING PEOPLE TO YOUR WEBSITE THROUGH
SOCIAL MEDIA
 Sometimes with all the talk about social media,
businesses may briefly forget one of their original
goals for initiating a social strategy—namely, bringing
customers and prospects to your company website.
 Silvia Pencak writes, “If you are a small business
owner, social media will be greatly beneficial in
attracting customers to your website… Very few
consumers make a purchase the first time they view a
website. The initial visit may be enough to capture
their attention, but you also need to gain their trust
and convince them that your product is a better buy
than that of your competitor.”

SILVIA OFFERS TWO RECOMMENDATIONS:
1) keep your customers informed by updating your
information regularly and
2) communicate with your customers. “If a
consumer posts a comment or question on your
page, be sure to answer back as quickly as
possible. Not only will this show them that you
can provide them with excellent customer service,
but speaking to them directly will also help to gain
their trust, showing them that there is a person
behind the business.”

CULTIVATE STORIES ON HOW CUSTOMERS USE
YOUR PRODUCTS AND SERVICES
 You’ve followed the advice on monitoring your social
media activity. You see that a customer tweeted about your
product or posted a photo on Pinterest. They like you!
They really do! Well, that’s all really exciting. And maybe
you’ve even retweeted the message for the world to see.
But why stop there? Why not be more of a brand storyteller
and share those experiences further?
 Karen Lyon, vice president of brand marketing at IdeaPaint,
says her company not only retweets and reposts blogs and
social mentions from customers, staff members also share
customers’ photos of their products that they’ve culled
from social media sites to use as success stories. “We are
much more interested in talking about who our customers
are and how they use the product than we are about just
talking about ourselves.”

DIVIDE AND CONQUER
 Depending on the type of products and services
your business provides, you may actually benefit
from maintaining more than one Facebook page or
Twitter profile.
 Wakefly points out the benefits of social media
segmentation in their whitepaper with a discussion
about candy manufacturer Mars.
 “Mars manufactures the candy brands M&Ms,
Snickers, Dove and Mars… all of the brands are
positioned together on the same corporate website,
creating branding that is confusing because the
subpages are each dedicated to a single brand.
Consequently, the overall message is also
confusing because the Mars corporate brand
overrides all the others.

 “The good news is that M&Ms, Snickers, Dove,
and Mars can each have a page on Facebook and
Twitter that is completely independent of the
others with its
own branding as well.
 “Web 2.0 has created a marketplace that is highly
segmented and marketers are well advised to take
this into account. As a result, B2B companies have
an opportunity to optimize their online marketing
strategies by not only creating a page for the
umbrella brand, but also by creating individualized
social networking pages for each of the products
and services that they offer.”

ELICIT RESPONSES
 We’ve all probably heard it said a zillion times that
engagement is key to social media community
management. But the question we may find
ourselves struggling with day in and day out is:
What will be most effective.
 “A social campaign should ask questions that cause
consumers to stop, reflect and respond.”
 When you look back at the questions you’ve posed
in articles, tweets, or Facebook updates, which were
the ones that generated not only the most responses
in numbers, but also qualitatively, the most reflective
and insightful answers

FANS AND FOLLOWERS
 Someone may have once told you that having more
fans and followers should be one of your key goals
for managing your online communities. After all,
numbers matter, don’t they?
 Jay Baer hit the nail on the head when he wrote,
“Your customers don’t innately want to follow your
company on Twitter or friend you on Facebook, or
read your blog, or watch your videos. There are
mountains of great content online unencumbered by
a corporate dynamic. Thus, embracing your company
and its content is not a high priority.”

 Jay says it’s about rationale. Companies
that can create compelling reasons for their
customers to connect with them will
succeed on the social web. And those that
don’t emphasize helpfulness and relevancy
will fail.
 How can your company be more helpful and
more relevant? What can you say that will
give your customers good reasons to
connect with you?

GENERATE YOUR CONTENT STRATEGY OVER
TIME
 Rich Brooks writes, “A keyword analysis
and social media demographics will only
take you so far. You’ll need to evolve your
content strategy over time, based on what’s
going on in your industry, with your
audience and in the world around you.”
 Revisit your content strategy frequently and
be flexible about what and when you post

HONESTY IS STILL ONE OF THE BEST POLICIES
 Deborah Ng writes, “Your community
members invest a lot of time in your
brand. You owe it to them to treat them
as equals and to be honest with them.”
.

THREE BEST PRACTICES FOR BEING TRANSPARENT
WITH YOUR COMMUNITY:
 If you’re not sure how to respond to something or
don’t know whether you’re even allowed to address
it, discuss it with your team and your superiors first.
 Address criticism and rumour head on without
sweeping them under the rug.
 Respond to questions and inquiries honestly. At
times, you may have to reveal information that
hasn’t been released to the rest of the world in order
to rectify a situation

INGENUITY IS MEMORABLE
 Phil Mershon’s article about creative social media
marketing case studies, he shows how seven companies
have used their ingenuity to create memorable community
experiences.
THE EIGHT KEY LESSONS WE CAN LEARN FROM THESE
BUSINESSES ARE:
 Take advantage of photos and videos.
 Showcase your customers.
 Enable social sharing on all of your content.
 Google+ will impact search results.
 YouTube is far more advanced than you may realize.
 Optimize your content for mobile readers.
 Give people a reason to engage.
 Think about starting a LinkedIn group for your industry or
niche

JOKE IN GOOD TASTE
 Jason Miller offers tips for using humor in your
social media activities. As he says, “Humor can be a
great way to get people’s attention.” But humor can
also be a little tricky.
“The target market must always be considered.
Running tests and focus groups to gather feedback
is always a great idea. Try to use an online survey to
test your attempt at humor against an internal
audience before you send it out. Comedy is
subjective, so don’t expect to please everyone.”

KICK-START WITH GOOD CONTENT
 Getting started on a new platform? Still testing the
waters to see whether it’s the right place for your
business to be?
 One suggestion that many seasoned social media
marketers will tell you is to come out of the gate with
loads of good content before you start promoting
your new presence.
 Let’s say your blog is shiny and new. Wait until you
have a respectable number of good-quality posts
(e.g., 3-5 thoroughly researched and well-written
articles) before spreading the word. Take some time
to generate momentum.

LEVERAGE YOUR NETWORKS
 Community managers need to know what’s happening
on all of their networks. Even if you’re not the Twitter
manager, for example, you should have a good idea of
the conversations, tweets and hashtags taking place
that involve your company and industry. At this point,
social platforms work hand-in-hand with one another.
 Conversations flow freely from one network to another
and in order to be effective, social community
managers need to be able to leverage their networks
and bounce off one another.

MARKETING ISN’T A BAD WORD
 Community managers often have to work
extra-hard to avoid marketing faux pas—
being perceived as using social networking
platforms exclusively for business
marketing purposes. But let’s call a spade
a spade. When social media marketing is
done right, it’s not a bad word nor out of
line. Ultimately, it’s how businesses need
to communicate in the 2010s.

 Jeff Bullas was asked, “What should be the ultimate goal
of social media participation for businesses? Is it to create
awareness, drive traffic to your website, sell product,
branding, or something entirely different?”
 He answered, “Businesses have different goals they want
from each element of marketing. It’s no different for social
media, as it is just another marketing tool and medium.
Marketing fundamentals still apply. For some, brand
awareness is paramount. For others, it’s increased sales.
 “Any marketing strategy and the resulting tactics should
keep in mind the two key fundamentals:
1) the target audience
2) the goals. Social media is not a magic bullet and should
be used where appropriate just like television, radio or
email marketing.”
 Remember your target audience and goals, and you’ll be
fine!

NEVER SAY NEVER
 Some days the proliferation of social media feels as if
it happened overnight. One day many businesses
were claiming social media wasn’t the right strategy
for them.
 In a few short years, businesses of all shapes and
sizes have active presences on multiple platforms.
Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, etc.,
went from not making sense to being commonplace
destinations. Who knows what will come down the
pike next? With that in mind, it’ll serve you best to
stay open, flexible and go with the flow.

ORIGINALITY VS. SAYING WHAT EVERYONE ELSE
SAYS
 Vicki Flaugher writes, “A great content
marketing strategy is key for social media
success. You’ve probably seen people sharing
others’ content, sometimes via RSS feeds,
Paper.ly pages, retweets/shares, or by direct
linking. Those are great strategies to provide
useful content to your audience. They can be
an adequate stop-gap measure while you build
your own content, but it’s very very important
in social media to provide original content.”

NOT EVERYONE FEELS THAT THEY HAVE THE TIME
OR EXPERTISE TO CREATE ORIGINAL CONTENT
AND OFFERS THESE SUGGESTIONS:
 Review a product, book, movie, event, research study
or website.
 Interview an influencer.
 Create a video from a PowerPoint presentation.
 Be quotable by learning to say meaningful things in
short blurbs.
 Don’t make it harder than it is (e.g., keep blog posts
to single ideas, 150-300 words, keep your videos 30
seconds to 3 minutes tops, keep your interview to 15
minutes). Just start. You’ll get better as you go and
you’ll be original.

POWER TO THE PEOPLE—WRITE ON!
 John Lennon meant when he wrote the lyrics to the
song, “Power to the People.”
 As a social community manager, you walk a fine
line—being in charge of the content that your
business posts and maintaining a number of
presences, responding to and cleaning up
inappropriate comments all the while, working your
hardest to listen and respond to your community.
 At the end of the day, after you’ve handled all of the
necessary responsibilities, the company still needs to
continue to develop content on an ongoing basis.

 Pamela Vaughan provides tips for stellar social media
community management and offers this sound advice
regarding content: “Share remarkable, targeted
content based on needs/interests of individual
communities.
 “Without remarkable content, your brand will have
nothing valuable to share, and your community
members will either dwindle, flock elsewhere, or not
even bother to participate in the first place.
 “This content should not only be remarkable, but it
should also be easily shareable so your community
members can expand its reach by sharing it with
connections in their networks.”

RESPECT CULTURES
 Jeff Sonderman wrote about his impressions of the
policies and how they can serve as a blueprint for
other news organizations.
 As community managers, there’s a valuable
takeaway message for all of us in this passage from
NPR’s social media policy:
 “To get the most out of social media we need to
understand those (social media) communities. So we
respect their cultures and treat those we encounter
online with the same courtesy and understanding as
anyone we deal with in the offline world. We do not
impose ourselves on such sites. We are guests and
behave as such.”

SHOUT-OUT AND GIVE THANKS
 Lightspan Digital has provided an insightful
social media cheat sheet with loads of
important daily social media workouts,
including this one for Twitter:
 “Give thanks—If someone retweets one of
your tweets don’t forget to give thanks.
 Example: thanks for the shout-out
@manamical :)”
 Check out their cheat sheet for more great
advice.

THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT YOUR
AUDIENCE
 Pam Moore writes that many businesses have
the problem of using social media tools
without first doing their homework to
understand their potential audience.
 She says, “You must plan before you act in
social media if you want to have a positive
return on your investment. Random acts of
marketing (RAMs) and social media (RASMs)
will get you nothing but in the red come month-
end!”

EIGHT THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT YOUR
AUDIENCE TO CREATE CONTENT THAT INSPIRES:
 Who is your audience?
 What are their pain points?
 What does your product or service do to minimize
or mitigate their pain?
 How can your product or service inspire and help
them personally and professionally?
 How is your product or service positioned?
 What is your zoom factor?
 What is your competition up to?
 What’s your audience up to, both online and
offline?

UPDATE FREQUENTLY
 If you ask ten people about what the right frequency
of updates would be, you’ll likely receive ten different
answers. What works for one business may simply
not work for another due to a number of
considerations such as staffing, type of
products/services and a host of other reasons.
 Bottom line here is that we all need to find what
works best for us to keep the content fresh and the
conversations going.
 Ask yourself: What does your schedule consist of? Is
it working? If not, what could you be doing
differently? Have you looked at the frequency of
updates your competitors are making?

VERIFY INFORMATION
 As social community managers, we often
share information that others have
published and pass it along to our readers.
 It’s important to be careful and
discriminating about the information we
share; after all, it’s our reputation too that’s
at stake. You’ll want to verify social media
content.

 Patrick Meier offers tips for how to do this by checking
out the:
 Bio on Twitter
 Number of tweets
 Number of followers
 Number following
 Retweets
 Location
 Timing
 Social authentication
 Media authentication
 Engage the source and ask for the source of the report
He said that speed is often vital and trying to filter and
triangulate (looking for multiple reports from
unconnected sources) can be helpful.

WONDER OUT LOUD
 In the preceding tip, we talked about the
necessity of verifying information. But at
times, social media lends itself to wondering
out loud. Speculating. Making educated
guesses. Asking questions. Harnessing
opinions. And, yes, as Dragnet Detective Joe
Friday might have said, “Just the facts,
ma’am. Nothing but the facts.”
 There is a time and a place for making
conversation, just as long as you don’t
misrepresent it as fact!

E(X)AMINE HOW YOUR AUDIENCE ENGAGES WITH
YOUR COMPETITION
Pam Moore suggests that you can
learn much more about your
audience by understanding how
they engage with and react to your
competition.

MOORE POSES THESE QUESTIONS:
 How is your audience engaging with your competition?
 What is your competition doing that you aren’t?
 What type of response are they receiving online and offline
from your target audiences? Is it different than how your
audience is engaging with you?
 Does your competition have a consistent tone, message and
brand? If not, how can you enhance yours to zoom faster?
 Is your competition engaging in a way their audience
expects them to? Casual when they’re expecting
professional or opposite?
 Why are they doing such things differently? Do they have a
competitive differentiator because of this or do you have the
leg-up? Remember, different isn’t always better. You may be
on the right track.
 What are the weaknesses in how your competition is
engaging and leveraging social media that you can use to
your advantage?

YOU VS. YOUR CUSTOMERS
Steve Caputo says, “Sometimes we
overlook the fact that brands and
companies have a totally different
perception of the role of social
media—and how it can help their
business—from that of their
customers.”

TOP REASONS CONSUMERS INTERACT WITH COMPANIES VIA
SOCIAL SITES VS. WHY BUSINESSES THINK CONSUMERS
FOLLOW THEM
 Consumers interact for:
 Discounts
 Purchases
 Reviews and product rankings
 General information
 Exclusive information
 Learn about new products
 Customer service
 Event participation
 To feel connected
 Submit ideas for new products/services
 To be part of a community

“GOLDEN RULE”: “The
secret to marketing with
social media is to always
provide value.”

ZOOM AGENTS LEAD THE WAY
 The social zoom agent, as described by Pam Moore, is
“someone who takes on the responsibility for the success
of becoming a social business. They will own the success
of the engagement, content, approach, strategy and
integration.”
 As a community manager, you may be the sole zoom agent
or one of many for your business. In any event, you’ll need
to care deeply about your social communities.
 Ideally you will feel invigorated and inspired and will have a
sense of pride about the value of your work and what you’re
able to contribute. Community management is a relatively
new field and it’s an accomplishment to be in this role. Go
on and lead the way!

THANK YOU FOR READING!
CHELDHAYE

Tips for managing a social media community

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Tips for managing a social media community