Social media is an excellent place to give your community management a boost. Long gone are the days when your social channels were little ‘bonuses’ for your digital marketing strategy; these days, social media should dominate any brand’s digital marketing efforts, not least of all because the ROI can be incredibly high – much higher, even, than the more traditional forms of advertising your business.
On top of your current social media publishing strategy, you should focus on two key elements: lead generation and community management.
Community management is all about offering your existing customers top notch service across your social channels, rather than focusing all of your efforts on converting leads. It’s all too obvious when a business is focused exclusively on driving new business, and it doesn’t often go down well with existing customers.
For that reason, here are three tips to make sure your community management efforts are paying off – not just for you, but for your customers.
1. Brand voice is key
When you’re managing multiple social channels along with your website, advertising campaigns, and outreach efforts, it can be difficult to ensure consistency across every communication you make.
But what’s the point in even having a brand voice if you’re not going to use it at every opportunity? Any inconsistency can make your customers’ experiences with your brand feel disjointed and bumpy when, really, the most competent companies are those that offer the most streamlined and smoothest experiences possible, whether a customer is reaching out on social media or on the phone with a member of the sales team.
The more consistent you can be, the more polished everything will feel, and the less you have to worry about public slip-ups on social media.
Not to mention the fact that having a clear voice is important for humanising your brand, which goes a long with way customers and leads.
2. Utilise social listening to offer more proactive customer service
The traditional pattern customer service follows is, first of all, the customer voices an issue they’re having to a member of your customer service team, or maybe a sales rep. Next, you respond – you try to find and action a solution as soon as possible. Easy, right?
But there is a way to offer more help – and more proactively. If you’re social listening in real time, keeping a close watch on specific keywords or indirect (untagged) mentions of your brands, then you can push a solution forward before they even get in touch with your brand directly. In some cases, disgruntled customers may not have even been willing to give a brand the chance to put it right. If they can respond to the issue without even being tagged, they can take a big step toward winning that client all over again.
3. Don’t delay
Nobody wants to feel like their grievance has been pushed down the list of priorities. Customers experiencing issues or running up against pain points should always be considered a priority, so don’t be slapdash about community management. Manage it in real time.
