How do I beat the algorithm? What type of content does my audience care about? How do I find my community to engage? These are just a few of the challenges brands face in the ever-shifting landscape of social media. The truth is, there is no single solution to drive social engagement. Community management is a complex endeavor, but we’re here to break down why it’s important and provide you the most efficient tactics to experiment with.

5 Questions to help You Learn Why Community Management is Important

The answers to these key questions below will help you construct a custom community engagement strategy.

Here’s what you need to learn:

1. Who Is Your Social Audience?

Often brands make the mistake of assuming their social audience is the same as their overarching brand audience.

However, your social audience is only a small part of your wider demographic and reach. For example, the scope of your social audience consists of who follows and interacts with your brand on various social platforms, whereas your overarching brand audience takes into account site visitors, email subscribers, social followers, and retail customers.

‍It’s also worth noting that there’s a big difference between age ranges for social media demographics compared to overall marketing target demographics. It’s important for brands with older audiences to identify this as an opportunity to engage with their community to encourage a smooth transition down the marketing funnel.

The community manager will facilitate this purchase behavior flow.

2. What Are Your Community Management Goals?

Determine your goals for engaging with your community.

Are you aiming to educate them on your brand values and products? Are you aiming to establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry?

The type of relationship you want to establish with your audience will influence how you communicate with them, which ultimately drives the kind of content you want to produce.

3. How Does Your Audience Interact with Your Brand?

By managing your social community, you’ll get a sense of how they currently perceive and interact with your brand.

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Do you have followers asking a lot of questions online? Are they always tagging your profile in their photos? Do they leave you frustrated tweets about a product or service?

Gauging their social interactions with you says a lot about what areas your brand can improve on, so it’s important to be aware of activity and leverage insights to your advantage.

4. What Are Your Audience’s Main Concerns?

Be prepared to act as a customer service liaison for your social media audience by creating a messaging workflow for frequently asked questions to provide quick, simple responses.

This means that you can increase response efforts on Twitter to resolve  immediate customer pain points, as well as implement chatbots for basic inquiries on your homepage. The trick is to make connecting with someone helpful an easy task. Plus, it builds trust and reliability with your audience quickly.

5. What are the Best Community Management Strategies?

The Internet and social media feel like an endless hole of content. How do you make your community feel more tight-knit and connected? Communication is key.

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Let’s discuss the top trending community management strategies right now.

• Have you heard of ‘secret’ Facebook groups? Influencers and brands alike create by-request-only Facebook groups to encourage their community to discuss amongst each other topics related to the brand, ask and receive advice, or make friends with like minded interests.
• Chatbots have become a popular tactic for instant customer service or e-commerce win-backs similar to an email marketing series strategy.
• Instagram recently released a new widget feature simply called “Chat” that essentially acts as a group chat. The catch is, however, that space is limited to join. Brands can use this to release exclusive offers or encourage an instant call-to-action through their Instagram stories.
• Replying to as many comments as bandwidth allows on recent posts and interact with direct messages to allow your audience to feel heard. This strategy also increases engagement and helps to rank higher to the top of the feed by suggesting to your audience’s algorithm that they are more interested in your content than brands they aren’t directly communicating with on social platforms.

How Do These Strategies Make a Difference?

Engaged audiences can harness the brand loyalty needed to convert.

A study by Bain and Company shows profits can increase by 95% when increasing retention rates by 5%. At the end of the day, the market will more likely than not always be oversaturated, and customer service in the way of community engagement will help close the digital gap between consumers and brands of any size.

The insights brands are able to acquire from community management will help develop your company and bring you to the forefront of scaling and succeeding. Experts at Hawke Media can take your community engagement to the next level, so fill out the form below to get started.