Social Media 101: 3 Tips to Drive Engagement Through Community Management

As social media marketing increasingly becomes etched into the modern digital marketing landscape, so is the importance of maintaining your channels. So many businesses create social media content, but they use the “set it and forget it” mentality. This is where companies are missing the mark. When it comes to implementing a successful social media marketing strategy, business owners and marketing professionals need to consider how important it is to not only create great content for their channels but to also communicate and interact with their audience.

Do you respond to people asking questions and commenting on your social media pages? If you respond, then you are performing the art of community management. As a social media community manager, it is important to provide leadership within your industry. People are following your page for a reason, and to pique the interest of your followers, you should consider three things with your social media strategy.

1. Engagement

So you just added a new Facebook fan or a follower on your Twitter handle, or maybe someone commented on your LinkedIn post – now what? As a community manager, you want to engage with your audience. Think of your social media page as a conversation tool to inform and educate your customers about your product or service, share useful advice and get input. This is where responding is key. If someone asks a question or comments on one of your posts, even if you don’t have the answer your fan or follower is looking for, you need to send that person a response. If you don’t respond to your audience, they’ll think that you don’t care about your community and eventually disengage. Disengagement will invite them to lose interest in your page. The rule of thumb is to allow no more than 24 hours to go by between your audiences’ posts or comments and your response.

2. Reputation is Everything

Another key point to think about with social media community management is managing your company’s reputation. As a community manager, you’ll need to make sure that people aren’t getting out of control on your channels. Social media allows people the freedom to say what they want, which sometimes can be a thorn in the side of your online reputation. Keeping an eye on what people are saying on your page(s) is important to keep your reputation intact and free of profanity and other negative commenters. When someone sends a nasty message that is blatantly bashing your brand, get to the bottom of their issue immediately. If the bashing continues, simply ban them for your page altogether and report them to the social media platform’s authorities.

3. Take Action with Feedback

If people provide information about your product or service, whether it’s positive or negative, do something with that feedback. If someone can’t figure out how to do something with your product, provide that feedback to the teams in your company, such as marketing and product development, that would want to know. Likewise, if people comment on how easy your service was, share that information. This article shares great tips on how to respond to negative comments on social media.

Conclusion

Taking on the role of the social media community manager within your business can be a very rewarding opportunity. Read about a specific social media success story from Noressa Hinkler of Travel Nurse Across America, as she was able to grow her Facebook followers from 17K to 66K in a single year by applying the principles in this blog post and more. At the end of the day, your social media pages are there to both inform and serve your customers – it’s a 2-way street.

Whatever you do, please do not put your lowest-paid and newest intern immediately in charge of your company’s social media marketing efforts. Mastering social media and putting these efforts to work for your company takes a bit of time and knowledge. In our half-day social media marketing workshops here in the Denver and Boulder area, attendees will learn our six-step methodology for creating and implementing an effective strategy. Workshop participants will walk away with actionable steps that be put to work immediately.

In this hour-long webinar, Rachel Dankof, Social Media Manager at SocialSEO, and I discussed some tips and best practices and how we helped customers get more sales from their social media activities:

Please don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions you may have!