Six steps to turn your social community into brand advocates.
Social Media managers have a lot on their plate.
Between finding the time to plan an effective social strategy, developing content, scheduling, posting and reporting; community management more often than not gets pushed to the bottom of a social manager’s to-do list.
However, we’d argue that Community Management is one of the most important and under-utilised aspects of many social media strategies.
Social Media allows brands the opportunity to offer a one-to-one brand experience at scale. So creating time for your social media team to engage with your social community is as much as a brand investment as a customer service necessity. How your brand engages with its social community can quite literally be the difference between losing a un-happy customer or building a brand advocate for life.
So how do you go about doing it, we hear you ask?
We’ve pulled together a list of the six crucial ingredients required to build brand advocates on social through an engaged community management approach.
1. Be proactive and develop an engaging voice
Social Media is fundamentally a two-way conversation medium and needs to be treated as such. That means like your customers, who have a clear voice, your brand needs to have one too!
Your brand’s tone of voice on social sets out the rules of engagement on how you interact with your audience. Maybe you’re a bank, and your customers expect your voice to be a bit more formal and understanding. You might be a food brand, and you can be a bit quirky and sassy.
Your social tone of voice needs to be reflective of your brand as it would look and sound in real life. But most importantly, it needs to be accessible and open to drawing engagement from your social audience.
A brand that executes this extremely well is Oak flavoured milk. Led by their ‘hungry thirsty’ brand platform; Oak engage with all comments left by their community in a cheeky, fun voice.
It’s fun, it’s light, it’s engaging, and it might be the difference between a customer deciding that they should try your new flavour of chocolate milk.
Finding your brand’s tone of voice is the first essential step in the development of your community management approach.
2. Provide customer support
In Australia, social media is fast becoming the go-to customer support channel for brands. From insurers to retailers to government, people are looking for responsive customer support on social, and we expect this trend to continue in 2020.
But, as a nation of brands, we’re not doing too well.
According to Social Baker, the average social media customer service wait-time in Australia last year was 13 hours and 21 minutes.
That’s 13 hours of an un-happy customer brooding their next public move to slander your brand, an inquisitive lead wanting to find out more information or a customer needing an urgent helping hand.
It’s important to establish an element of customer service support on social, even if it’s just an escalation process into your business’s main customer support resource. This can be done through a simple FAQ spreadsheet of pre-vetted responses or a dedicated team member whose responsibility is to respond to customer questions.
3. Be fast
Speed is the key on social. Something trending today, will be gone tomorrow, if not by this afternoon! The same can be said when looking to engage with your community on social.
Many of the big social ‘blow-ups’ that every social media manager has nightmares about can generally be nipped in the bud if you can get to the fire quickly. Speed makes people feel valued and demonstrates that their issue will be taken care of in a timely manner.
As the saying goes, you need to crawl, to walk, to run, to sprint. We recommend starting by setting up a workflow of regular ‘check-ins’ each day can help you get into a rhythm that becomes second-nature and faster over time.
4. Be human
It’s usually not advisable to have a case study of one, but in this case; think back to the last time you had to reach out to a brand for some level of customer support.
You’ve tried to pay that bill or fix that error, but frustratingly, you can’t seem to solve it on your own. In this moment of annoyance, you want to speak to a human, a real person, who’s ready to help you solve that problem, not a bot or a faceless company.
Understanding the reasons why a customer might be reaching out for support is crucial in guiding how you should respond on social. And the majority of the time, you’ll find people are just looking to chat to a person who understands their issue.
We advise all our clients to ensure that they add their first name to all their messages and public comments. There are two benefits in this approach; firstly, it shows the customer that they’re speaking to a person, not a robot, and it helps diffuse any tension. It’s easier to get angry at a faceless company versus an individual person.
5. Give your content an extra helping hand
Facebook and Instagram (as we’re sure you already know) thrive off engagement. It’s the metric that influences how the algorithm decides what content to show in your audience’s feed.
The more your audience is engaging with your content, the higher your content will be valued by the algorithm, the more likely you’ll achieve better organic reach. Your organic community is the fuel that powers your ability to build a successful organic content and social media strategy.
This tangibly looks like engaging with people who comment or share your content, in an on-brand tone of voice. When somebody goes out of their way to leave a comment, start a conversation with a friend or tell you their five cents - it requires a response.
More often than not, we’ve found this personalised engagement can be the nudge that a customer needs to make a purchase or become a qualified lead.
6. Get into groups
Here’s one for the future-casters.
As Facebook moves from ‘public spaces’ to ‘private spaces’, Facebook Groups are the next frontier for owned social channels. Facebook has flagged that Groups will be favoured ahead of content from pages heading into 2020, so it’s time to start thinking about how your brand might be able to engage a Facebook Group strategy.
A brand that is already doing this well is Qantas. They’ve developed a group of engaged members around their Qantas Frequent Flyer points program called ‘Qantas Points Hacks,’ which provides a forum for people to find the latest and greatest ways to earn Frequent Flyer points.
Lonely Planet has also built up a Facebook Group with over 75,000 members sharing travel tips, reviews and stories.
The key take away?
If you haven’t started yet, spend the time to begin strategising and building your community management approach. Social provides a fantastic opportunity to engage your customers where they’re at, so don’t pass it up!