How Social Media Monitoring Help Brands in Community Management

As we quote, there is no business without customers or no brand without its community.

A community is not limited to the people who buy your product; instead, it is everywhere, be it on social networking platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or question and answer websites like Quora. In simple terms, we can say a brands’ community includes consumers, target markets, website visitors, or any person who talks about your brand.

Why Is Community Management Essential?

Let’s say you have a huge fan following on social media, but you don’t listen to their conversations and respond whenever required. Don’t you think your community may start losing their faith in your brand values? Or this may upsurge their negative sentiments towards your brand? Moreover, the audience may presume that your brand’s personality is arrogant, and consequently, your brand’s organic reach can stagnate as they might not be interested in spreading your message further.

Here is the crux, community management is necessary for you due to the following reasons:

• To ensure your customers that you will always be there to listen in times of dissatisfaction
• To increase your brand awareness through your existing audience and welcome new customers onboard
• To generate recurring marketing leads from old and new community members
• To designate some local brand advocates among the top fans
• To manage the reputation of your brand that may be threatened by media

How To Do Community Management Using Social Media Monitoring Tools

Here are a few ways:

Monitor all the conversations

As you have a large community, it’s challenging to know everything about your brand without having a full-fledged team that remains present on all the possible platforms where your audience is, ranging from Facebook to Google reviews. Further, not every conversation may tag your brand name in it. That’s where social listening tools can be a reasonable investment to plan your marketing strategies.

However, not all tools may align with your goals. For instance, they may not send you alerts when a sudden increase in brand mentions due to any positive/negative reason happens, or find the top keywords in all of your mentions, or even determine what the community thinks about your competitors.

Mentionlytics AI-powered tools can help you in uncovering all these insights. Our Social Intelligence Advisor (SIA) analyses the data and provides optimal solutions, such as crucial mentions on the web and social media, posts that are working, the best time to publish on social media, activities that your competitors are performing, and many other factors that you need to consider for your brands’ growth. SIA also alerts you when there is an upsurge in the number of mentions so that you can manage a crisis on time before it goes out of control.

Build relationships with the audience to keep your brand alive

Identify opportunities to interact with your community. Listen to their complaints, be thankful for their compliments, suggest something if they need recommendations, or converse in a light-hearted manner. Moreover, create campaigns that involve them. Just like Starbucks do. Here is one instance. Starbucks launches an annual #redcupcontest for their customers and utilizes the user-generated content to boost its community by reposting some of the best pictures from customers on their social profiles. Their reward program is another strategy to keep customers connected with the brand.

Source: https://blog.smile.io/

Join the conversations in a meaningful manner

As you would receive an ample amount of conversational data through social media monitoring tools, label it into various categories based on the required action, and assign it to your team. For instance, your labels can be immediate action, happy customers, thank you, and so on. These tools also help you reduce response time by alerting you about the mentions in your inbox. All you have to do is click on the mentions and reply instantly. This way, you would stay organized, manage your brand’s reputation and identify opportunities to promote your product.

Encourage networking among community members

Starbucks has initiated a volunteer matching service to help the inside and outside members. The community members get to serve society through their reliable brand, and they get acquainted with one another.

Well, this is one example. The other ways can be to discuss some hot topic/ask for feedback about your brand/plan a virtual meet and greet session. The trolls will come and go but don’t foray in that direction.

Keep calm and avert crisis

Even if you can’t solve a customer’s problem, try your best to ensure they are heard. Even if an unhappy customer tags you in multiple tweets and tries to put your brand in lousy shape, don’t be rude to them. Explain everything you have done to resolve their issue.

If you are using a social listening tool, set alerts to know about each and every mention that comes your way.

Go live

As all the social networking platforms have provided this facility to connect with your community, why not use it to get acquainted with them. Perform a question and answers session or share your story or anything related to your brand values. For instance, how you care for your customers, how you care for the environment while making the product, from where your journey started and how your customers supported you since the beginning, and so on.

Find the top influencers among top mentioners

In your community, there would be many people posting about your brand. However, not everyone will have plenty of influencers/reasonable engagement rate/positive understanding with the audience for you to consider them in your list for collaborations. Through Mentionlytics, you will see the list of mentioners with their followers, engagement, sentiments analysis, and profile description to make an informed decision as these influencers/customers will be your designated brand advocates and caretakers for your community.

Determine metrics to analyze your community growth

Top mentions: If your brand mentions are increasing at a favorable rate, it indicates that more and more people like your brand.

Social reach: This metric is directly related to the level of awareness that your brand is accomplishing.

Social engagement: For any brand, the engagement rate is crucial more than the followers because it shows a close-knit relationship between a brand and its community. Whenever this metric shows a decline in numbers, try to find the reason behind, and plan a strategy to interact with your audience.

Sentiment analysis: Try to find out how the community perceives your brand messaging through their reactions.

The Bottom Line

Community management is strenuous to handle without a community manager or a digital agency, both of which can be expensive for a company’s budget. On the contrary, a brand can look for a social media monitoring tool that includes all the vital functions and provides excellent customer support.

Interested to know more? Read more about the four pillars of community management here.

Originally posted on Mentionlytics: https://www.mentionlytics.com/blog/social-media-monitoring-in-community-management