by Marelise da Silva | Jun 21, 2018 | Community Management, Online Reputation Management
How are you supposed to track what people are saying about you all across the internet? Online reputation management doesn’t have to be an expensive, labour intensive process. Here are a few things to keep in mind:
There are over 300 social platforms on the internet. The biggest are undoubtedly Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn, but there are also many niche social media platforms that may be relevant to your niche. Following social media sites, you’ve also got blogs, forums, and review websites. Many of these sites have been created with the intent of providing people a platform where they can share their experience with a brand.
There are a number of free tools available for online reputation management, such as Google Alerts. This is a free service that works with your Google account. All you have to do is login and type the phrase that you want to track (this may be a brand, your own name, or a trademarked name) and it will report back to you on a daily, weekly or fortnightly basis of the mentions of that phrase online. A Google Alert will also show you where the term has been published, which means you can choose to interact with positive or negative brand mentions online with the help of these alerts.
Hootsuite and Tweetdeck are also great online reputation management tools that are geared towards social media activity. Both of these tools will pull information from social media sites if your brand name is mentioned. You can then choose to interact with people who are contacting you on social media.
These strategies will give you an overview of what’s being said about you online, but many companies require a more hands-on approach. WSI OMS can help you with both online reputation management as well as community management. Contact us http://www.wsioms.co.za/contact-us for more information today.
by Marelise da Silva | Oct 26, 2017 | Community Management
Many business owners are great at delivering speeches and presentations, but when it comes to getting a message across on Twitter, they battle. While most companies have invested in community managers or a social media manager, executives, sales people, decision makers, and other relevant people in your company should also be tweeting in their personal capacity. Here are a few tips to cut back on the characters you use so that you can start using Twitter more effectively:
Eliminate intensifiers
You’ve only got 140 characters, so you need to automatically delete unnecessary intensifiers from the tweets that you are drafting. Words and phrases like “very” and “most definitely”, for example, should be the first to go.
Delete filler words
Many times, you can get the same message across without sounding like a robot by simply deleting filler words such as “it is” and “there are”. These phrases don’t provide context or add meaning to your tweet, so delete fillers words as well.
Write in the active voice
If you write in the active voice instead of the passive voice, then your tweets will automatically be shorter.
Be concise
You don’t have to write that you are “of the opinion”, or are “led to believe”, or even that you “think” something. If you’re tweeting about it, then you’ve gone through the thought process of thinking it through, so you don’t need to add this to your tweet.
Need help with your social media marketing? Then contact WSI OMS today.
by Marelise da Silva | Oct 19, 2017 | Community Management
“Online communities” have been the top priority for many businesses and digital marketers over the past few years. But with an online community comes online community management, content calendars, copywriting, and social media reporting. Is it all really worth it? Yes, and here’s why:
It helps customers get more value from your products and services
Consider how tech-related online communities, such as those of Apple or open source coding like Linux, increase the number of people who start using the products or services. In these cases, the communities are a source of knowledge and they address questions and challenges that other people face.
Get feedback
In the past, if you wanted to find out where your product development or customer service initiatives were falling short, you would have to contract a market research company or wait for your company’s annual survey. Thanks to social listening tools and online communities, you can get instant access to the opinions and thoughts of your customers and target audience.
Have more control of online conversations
If people are discussing your brand, products or services, then you need to be a part of the conversation. Not only does an online community give you a platform to share information about your company, but you can foster support from your target audience and rectify negative perceptions as well.
Need help with your social media marketing or online community management? Then contact WSI OMS today.
by Marelise da Silva | May 25, 2017 | Community Management
Managing a social community is about so much more than simply responding to comments and questions in a timeous manner. Community management is about encouraging engagement, nurturing relationships and building a positive online reputation that extends far past the social media world. If boosting engagement is what you’re hoping to achieve, here are some helpful guidelines to follow going forward.
Now’s the time to start getting creative. If you want to increase engagement, one way to do it right is to make your efforts tangible: bring them out into the real world – preferably into your store. For example, in 2012, Sweetgreen (a food-related company in Chicago) started a social media marketing campaign which they named #sweet2012. They encouraged people to place post-it notes, stating their goals for the year ahead, onto their store windows and to obviously take a picture of it and share it on social media using the hashtag. Needless to say, something as simple yet as brilliant as this went viral pretty quickly indeed! Upon final count, they had accumulated over 2 000 post-its!
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Treat Them as Individuals
It’s easy to think of your audience as exactly that – an audience – and to forget that they are real people with unique interests, backgrounds, likes and dislikes. Do your best to nurture individual relationships with customers as opposed to trying to create a ‘bulk relationship’ with your entire following. A little bit of extra care and effort goes a long way towards improving engagement as well as brand loyalty.
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Let Them Be Content Collaborators
Having trouble achieving high click-through numbers on the posts that link back to your blogs? Try the tactic of transforming your audience into your content collaborators. If you are a community manager for a shoe store, for example, ask your audience to post a photo of themselves wearing their favourite pair and to tell you why those shoes make them feel so great… and include the best ones in an upcoming blog. Don’t forget to tag your contributors… and watch them start sharing like crazy!
If you’re looking for assistance with community management or social media marketing in general, do not hesitate to get in touch with WSI OMS. As digital marketing experts, we are here to help your business go big!
by Marelise da Silva | May 19, 2016 | Community Management, Online Marketing
It’s great to have a huge database of existing customers and a long list of potential ones, but over time, it’s the small core of loyal and consistent customers that you depend on. If these types of people have been with you a while, you are clearly doing something right, but you can work on deepening these relationships, to increase the size of your core group.
To connect with your customers, you need to learn about them, share your knowledge with them, listen to what they have to say and make them part of a larger network. Today’s facilities make a digital marketing campaign both easy and effective, offering you a variety of ways to connect with your customers. Here are some ways to build those lasting relationships:
Ensure your communication channels are open and clear
There are many ways to stay in touch with your customers, from emails to social media, blogs and business network posts, to phone calls to old fashioned snail mail. It’s really important to make yourself as contactable as possible and to reply to enquiries as soon as you can. During a project or protracted sales negotiation, regular updates can go a long way to keep the momentum. Pre-empting problems is only possible when you and the customer are in constant communication. There is nothing quite so frustrating as trying to reach someone when you have an urgent request, to find out they are on leave for the next few weeks. All it takes is organisation and a schedule with reminders to touch base, to get your customers feeling like they’re special to you.
Share your knowledge
When a customer comes to you for a product or service, chances are your knowledge and experience with it is vastly superior to theirs. Instead of using this knowledge to maintain the upper hand, sharing it will make your customer feel included, more likely to engage with you further. Getting to know your customers and understanding their problems, gives you an opportunity to go beyond being just a service provider. This should boost your customer’s confidence and hopefully pave the way for a long and mutually beneficial relationship.
Invite them to be part of your network
It’s quite likely that your customers will be looking for other products or services than the ones you provide and you are in the position of sharing reliable and trusted contacts from your network. Doing this is most probably going to result in your customers having more respect and trust for you than before. They are also likely to reciprocate by inviting you into their networks, giving you more potential customers.
Make sure you meet your deadlines
Tardiness in business is a sure fire way to lose credibility. Whether it be a project plan with deliverables across multiple timeframes, or as simple as delivering a product when promised, time management is a reflection of the way you run your business. If you know this is a weak point for you, use diaries, calendars, reminders or software packages to help you get it right. When setting deadlines, rather overestimate the time it will take you, so you can aim to deliver early if possible. Trying to please a customer by cutting down on much needed time to deliver a quality product, will either result in an inferior product, or an unhappy customer.
None of this is rocket science, but putting in that bit more effort can be the difference between customers who interact you sporadically, when they need something, and customers who stay loyal to your business for many years.
If you want to find out more on digital marketing and building customer bases that last, contact us. We can assist with your social media, email marketing and so much more.
by Francois Muscat | May 9, 2016 | Community Management, Social Media Marketing
Thinking of hiring a community management service to manage your online engagements? Here are some of the top benefits of outsourcing this service:
They stay up to date with the latest best practices and developments
When you hire a social media manager, this person will likely be working in a silo with little input from other people in the digital and social spheres. A digital marketing company that specialises in community management services, however, is more likely to ensure that their community managers attend relevant industry conferences, stay up to date with new social media channels and that they work together to find out what works and what doesn’t.
Better reporting
An outsourced community management service will have specific goals to meet and they will have to report back to you each month. Service level agreements will ensure that there is a plan as well as measurable goals in place. If you want to make sure that your business is continuously moving closer to achieving your marketing goals, then this is the way to go.
24/7 engagement
Not all businesses can justify hiring a full-time social media expert, but few people in your company will have time to check Twitter mentions and respond to queries on Facebook throughout the day. With an outsourced community management service, you will be cutting back on costs (seeing as you won’t have to pay someone a full-time salary to manage conversations) but you will be able to benefit from a team who is always keeping a watchful eye over your online engagements.
Want to know more about hiring community managers? Then contact WSI OMS today.
