The 5 secret tips of effective community management on social media

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3 minutes read

So, you’ve built up a community of followers on social media. Now what?

Whatever your business, if you’re on social media in a professional capacity, effective community management is integral to building healthy customer service relationships beyond the ‘likes’.

Our social media team has the lowdown on engaging your following and keeping your brand image intact with these pro tips for gold-star community management.

1. Develop a social media strategy

Have an idea of what you want to achieve with your social media campaign. Define the types of audiences you want to engage, how much you want to spend, achievable outcomes and what platforms to use. A social media professional can help develop a tailored strategy that works for your business.

2. Invest In resources

Straight up: social media community management is not a job for the unpaid intern. Why would you trust your brand image to someone with no vested interest in your customers?

Not all social media users are the same and jokes or sarcasm often don’t translate well. You need a dedicated social media professional on your team who can navigate the tumultuous landscape of social media audiences and craft posts that engage and entertain while remaining on-brand. It’s also a good idea to develop and implement a response matrix that advises how to respond to comments, depending on the situation, keeping the process consistent and organised.

3. Implement a style guide

Media publications across the globe live and die by their style guide, which sets the standard for how content should be presented. Style guides should include spelling, grammar and punctuation conventions as well as informing appropriate content,  language, tone-of-voice and even correct emoji use. These guidelines give your brand a personality. That way, it doesn’t matter who is responding from the team  – with a playbook, everything sounds uniform.

4. Get to know your audience

Do some market research and get to know what your customers want. Understanding your audience is a vital part of social media community management and will help with the development of resources such as response matrices.

Make use of the analytics function on social media platforms to gauge audience demographics and craft your posts accordingly. Take note of frequent commenters and get a measure of how they communicate and what sort of content engages them the most to create relevant and thumb-stopping content.

5. Most importantly: be human

Obscure memes and quirky references to hit Netflix shows may get you the hipster vote, but that doesn’t equal effective community management for your brand. It may even alienate loyal followers. Communicate like a real person, albeit virtually. Use clear, concise language and let your customers know they are speaking with a human, not a robot punching out automated replies.

How Aruga can help

Social media community management is a minefield, and the adept professionals at Aruga can help you navigate the traps to keep your customers happy and engaged with your brand.

  • Social media account management – hand over the keys and take a backseat while we drive your brand to social media success.
  • Develop a response matrix – let’s explore your most frequently asked questions and have an answer prepared.
  • Create brand guidelines – ensure you connect your tone-of-voice with your responses. This is important for brand trust.
  • Crisis management – if things threaten to get ugly, we can provide a step-by-step process on how to make it pretty again.

Want to polish your social media protocol before publishing?

Aruga’s communications experts can provide you with the rules for engagement from social media strategy to community management and content planning.

Do @ us for thumb-stopping content and strategic schedules for social media success.