Social media provides several opportunities for connection development and direct communication with clients. The function of community manager is becoming increasingly vital for all sorts of organisations to foster these partnerships.
Community managers are often the social media voices of their companies, serving as social media strategists, customer service managers, content developers, product managers, and evangelists.
#1: Metrics - What do you hope to achieve as a new community manager?
Determine the KPIs and goals for your new position or community-building initiative. Clear expectations for KPIs will aid in your success.
Measuring community-building progress:
Customer service metrics: Monitor popular inquiries on Twitter and write entries for an internal customer wiki to reduce the amount of customer care support calls.
Sales metrics include the generation of leads using inbound marketing strategies such as blog posts, eBooks, and webinars.
Engagement indicators include the amount of Facebook fans, Twitter followers, Facebook post impressions, blog comments, and the number of organic community member debates initiated in a forum.
As it turns out, your role might be a hybrid of these. Defining your job (and being willing to alter it) based on the facts you generate guarantees that your efforts progress.
#2: Listening - Where does your target audience already hang out?
With roughly 2.93 billion monthly active Facebook users and 237 million Twitter users, it's probable that your potential community members are already on social media discussing topics related to your company.
When you're building a new town, you have to go where the fish are. You can locate them by monitoring social media.
Listening techniques include:
Subscribe to Google Alerts and Twilerts for industry keywords and rivals.
Make a (private) Twitter list of rivals and take notice of what they are and aren't publishing. Keep track on what they post on Facebook and LinkedIn (if applicable).
Determine which hashtags are used in your community. Create columns for them in a Twitter client (such as Seesmic).
Subscribe to blogs in your neighbourhood and share their material through your own accounts.
#3: Provide value to get people to join you - create a content strategy.
Monitoring your community reveals what people speak about, what questions they have, and what themes you should blog about. You'll have lots of ideas, but how will you put them into action?
Organize the components of your content strategy:
Create an editorial calendar for community - Your editorial calendar will contain how often you'll post each week and when you'll post what material.
Select your blogging team - Decide who will assist you in creating this material. Will you utilise freelancers or guest articles from members of the community or influencers
Determine your target keywords - Make your material appealing to your audience and search engines. Use Google Suggest and Google Adwords to find the best keywords for blog entries, and make sure your site is SEO-friendly.
#4: Don't overlook email - it's the glue that holds community together.
If you ignore email, you're passing on a huge chance for community involvement.
Despite the fact that social media is rapidly expanding, just 52% of Americans have a profile on a social network. Email is an excellent method to share material or suggestions with your audience that is only available to email subscribers.
Incorporate email within your community management strategy:
Create an email list -
Use your existing social media outlets to collect email addresses. Include a subscription form in the sidebar of your blog or a custom tab on your Facebook page.
Choose your schedule - Make a timetable that you can stick to: You don't want to build expectations for a weekly email if you don't have the time.
Prepare your content - Will you curate industry news or provide unique advice to your email subscribers? Choose your strategy.
#5: Make in-person connections - Incorporate meetups into your community engagement.
Allow locals to meet the person behind the programme, app, or service. Because they are eager to vouch for you, they will be more inclined to advocate for your brand.
Even if you have a global, online, or digital community, engaging your local community early on in the process ignites evangelists.
Methods for merging digital and physical communities:
What events are already significant?
Determine which online conferences, meetups, or parties your community currently attends and find a way to participate or even fund them.
Collaboration - Does a overall noncompetitive firm or group with a similar audience wish to co-host an event? When you're just getting started with community-building, one method to get into the field is to use the brand value of a co-host.
#6: Use user-generated content to help in your SEO ranking
As the community grows, your community content grows exponentially. It is huge collection of keywords and user generated content in the form of reviews, feedback. It utterly important to utilise this for your SEO ranking & growth.
What to consider while checking for SEO:
All the posts within the community should have custom slug and SEO optimized tagging of content
See how it looks when shared on social media platform. Weather you see a thumbnail or just a link on facebook, twitter etc.
Pensil provides an SEO enabled community building platform. All the open content generated on your community is used in your keyword ranking.
