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.
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Make it Tangible
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!