Skeptics have been predicting the decline of Twitter for a long time now but recent news have just proven otherwise. Twitter users have grown by 16 million in the second quarter, so marketers, hold your horses – don’t get off the Twitter bandwagon just yet. We’ve put together a list of 10 Twitter tips for community managers to stay ahead of your Twitter game and here’s a few that you should pay special attention to:
Creating Twitter Lists
We can\’t stress this enough – Twitter lists are a great way for marketers to keep abreast of updates related to you industry. Individual influencers that are active on Twitter are great people to add to your list as they constantly share the latest updates and news in your industry that are worth noting. Websites that produce great content should also be added to your lists for latest trends to take note of.
Compulsive Following
One habit that we notice across social media is the excessive “follows” that some users subject themselves to, in the hopes of garnering follows back. An individual, brand, website or business that has 40k followers and are following 40k users aren’t seen as influential or popular. Instead, it comes across as a desperate measure to increase your follower count – which isn’t what social media is about – yet we see this occurring on on Twitter and Instagram a lot.
The guys at Twitter themselves find this to be spam and has even enforced rules to prevent this happ10 Twitter Cover_Artboard 4ening. “Follow for follow\” is certainly not cool at all. So please, dont.
Give Your Employees a Voice
Many big brands use Twitter as an online source of communication for a brand and it’s customers. When there are multiple people running a Twitter account due to the high volumes of conversation, it\’s always a good practice to include the first name or initials at the back of tweets. Customers react better when they are aware that they are conversing with personalities, rather than just a brand.
Apologies for the wait! Residential deliveries are usually done by 7 pm, but can run later due to volume. SO @UPSHelp
The guys at UPS are doing a great job on social customer service!
Listening Tool
If you aren’t using your brand’s Twitter account to address customer queries, it’s always great to check in on a weekly basis using social listening tools to gather topics of discussion amongst your audiences. When you’re aware of what your audiences are talking about, tweet about things that interest them and get a conversation going. That’s the basis of social media right?
LinkedIn is often seen as a professional platform to solely increase connections to build your own personal network. Contrary to that, it’s as much of a community-building platform as Google+ or Facebook, and that’s why we’ve got 10 LinkedIn tips laid out for you. For professionals that have invested more into this platform, you would find them actively engaging in activity on the news feeds as well as in Interest groups. When it boils down to community management on LinkedIn, these are a few key areas to be taken note of:
Increase Your Connections For The Right Reasons
LinkedIn is not only a place for employees to find employers or vice versa. By connecting with the right people and influencers using your personal or brand’s profile , you will be able to create your own strong online community around an audience that matters. Take this opportunity to connect with heavy influencers in your industry and build strong relationships with them. At the same time, LinkedIn provides a great way for you to connect with potential guest bloggers for you brand’s blog. Building an online database of connections for multiple purposes was the main goal of LinkedIn anyway right?
We would also suggest to occasionally make use of LinkedIn’s premium account on a monthly basis to connect with exclusive influencers. It’s a pricey option, but it has it’s benefits.
Participate In Interest Groups
When it comes to Interest Groups, a community manager can do two things with this. The first being to find communities where you target audience is most active in and and to engage in discussion with them. By being more active in groups through constructive feedback and sharing of opinions, the more you\’ll be seen as an influencer in your industry. Interest groups are also a great way for you to increase the reach of your content. Of course, please refrain from posting your own content ever so often without any form of engagement with the other content. It would also be useless to join a community with a huge number of followers that only seem to be posting their own content without engaging with others. So pick the groups that you want to join wisely!
Optimizing SEO For Your Brand
To ensure that your LinkedIn page is SEO-friendly, all your social media links should be filled up. Now that LinkedIn has begun offering their users the ability to write and share their own content on the platform, ensure that none of the content on your blog should be blatantly repeated onto the platform without any reworking. Not doing this will affect the SEO for the original content on your blog.
While Google+ has an upcoming 3rd birthday around the corner, there has been some speculation of Google shifting their focus away from the social media platform. Despite naysayers predicting an eventual doom for the social media platform, there are over 300 million active users worldwide who frequent the platform. Before we plunge into our 10 Google+ tips for community managers, here are 4 of the most basic yet important factors of Google+ that you should take note of:
Achieving Reach on Google+
The more active your brand is, the higher your articles will rank in Google SERPs. Google authorship used to show your profile picture next to your articles on Google search, but this feature unfortunately has reached the end of its line. Many users have been crying foul about this the removal of this lately. Nonetheless, if you are actively managing your personal or brand\’s Google+ profile, you will be effectively taking advantage of Google’s ranking.
Engaging in Communitiesz
Google+ is well known for their active communities, especially those around professional industries. We at Beta21 frequently visit a bunch of social media communities to keep ourselves up to date with new campaigns and trends and these communities are always buzzing with engagement. Having your brand engage in relevant Google+ communities will help in growing your following, which will in turn give you the reach you are aspiring for. If you are in a niche industry, create your own community and share original or curated content. Eventually you will be able to attract an audience and build an online community around your business while being a thought leader or influencer in your industry.
Creating Customized Circles
While we\’re on the topic of influencers, Google+ is filled with active (sometimes overly-active) influencers in almost every industry who are always 10 steps ahead of you. Adding them to a specific circle of yours will also provide yourself with an effective means of keeping up to date with the latest changes and news in your industry.
Circles also provide you the choice of segmenting your community, which will come in handy when you\’re posting content. You can appeal to various audience groups by making the right content visible to the right target audience. This way you\’ll be able to garner greater reach, while still staying relevant to your audience.
Formatting Content
The cool thing about Google+ is the ability to format your content before posting it out. No other social media platform allows you to bold or italics your text before posting them. Check out this cheat sheat that tells you how to format your content, which is especially useful for long form text that is commonly seen on Google+. While the options are few and basic, a little formatting goes a long way.
Marketers worldwide have been crying foul about the sudden drop in organic reach on Facebook. As if marketers didn’t already have enough problems, organic reach has become yet another issue to worry about. Before we share with your 10 tips that we\’ve got for managing a Facebook page, here are 5 issues that marketers should be paying attention to on Facebook.
Facebook Reach
One of the most important things that we should be doing is to succumb to Facebook advertising because at the end of the day, a substantial reach is what we need and 2% organic reach just isn’t going to cut it. That’s the first tip and most important tip that we\’ve got for marketers who are handling Facebook pages.
Creating and Curating Content
If you don’t want to pay for reach on Facebook, you’ve got to wow your audiences with the content you produce or the content you curate. There’s nothing wrong with sharing a meme or a humorous piece of content that has been created by someone else. As long as you know your audience will enjoy and share it, give them what they want. An even better scenario would be for you to create that content yourself. Also, don\’t develop cobwebs on any of your social media platforms. These days, the first thing that consumers do to learn more about a brand is to check their website or search for their Facebook page. Schedule 3 to 5 updates a day on your page to provide your followers with the information they want.
Focus on Customer Service
Secondly, more and more consumers are turning to brands online, especially social media platforms to voice out their opinions and share their feedback. Unlike Twitter, comments that are left on Facebook can be visible to anyone that visits that particular page. This could serve as a problem if negative comments or unsatisfied customers have expressed their disdain on your Facebook page. As a result, community managers need to be more vigilant and more human on Facebook, addressing all feedback efficiently whether positive or negative.
Engagement on Facebook doesn’t only come from interaction from your posts, links, videos, or images. Get involved with Facebook campaigns such as photo or video contests where your users can participate by sharing their own photos and videos which in turn, can be used as user-generated content. Fans love contests, especially ones that have a driving factor behind them (and a great prize).
Analytics
Yes, analytics really is your hero. If you don’t know what content your audience wants to see on your Facebook page, refer to your analytics to check out which type of posts and which type of content has garnered the most engagement. Also, analyze when you should post content for increased engagement.
The World Cup has hit soccer fans really hard over the past week with all the flooding on social media, some sharing their rants and congratulatory posts and tweets. Thousands of brands all over the world have been trying to capitalize on this world sporting event and even social media giant Pinterest has joined in.
They launched a social campaign “Places To Watch The World Cup” last month prior to the event and encouraged their community to share worldwide locations of the best places to catch the matches. Be it restaurants, cafes or bars, any location that provided coverage on the World Cup would be featured.
Place Pins
This campaign was developed in line with their new feature that was introduced to Pinterest 6 months ago. Place pins are pins that provide addresses on a global map without having to leave the social platform. It was a very clever strategy to incorporate the new feature with the World Cup, a huge sporting event that would garner immense reach worldwide. In an interview with Forbes, Pinterest’s Brand Designer, Ben Chiaramonte shared that the initiative was for football fans who were unable to travel to Brazil to still be able to catch their match somewhere convenient in their city.
Close to 1,000 locations have been received so far from community members and these locations have been categorized according to their country. Currently, the campaign only features 13 boards with different countries for each board.
Clicking on each board will lead to a map that has pins, along with a range of places on the left panel where you can catch football matches.
These locations also contain custom descriptions that users have entered, leaving their personal reviews on the ambiance, quality of food and beverages, or how packed the place can get. This way is a way for them to engage with their audience, showing them that the social media platform valued their opinions.
How Pinterest Could Have Improved Their Campaign
While it was an interesting campaign that was able to connect their audiences with the World Cup, Pinterest didn’t achieve a huge amount of traction online as they could have. There was a lot of potentials and these are the ways they could have improved:
Featuring More Countries
With World Cup being a world sporting event, having only 13 countries featured on their campaign was not an appealing option for users that were from other countries. European countries were mostly featured and South Korea was the only Asian country that had a board on their page. Over here in Singapore, tons of football fans flock to bars and cafes that broadcast football matches. It would have been a great guide to have for us as well. Having only slightly more than 10 countries, compared to a total of 196 countries in the world is barely covering 10% of audiences.
Increasing Visibility
The visibility of their campaign was not anywhere near as high as it could have been. Being a popular social media platform, the brand could have increased the campaign\’s visibility by sharing them more often on other social media platforms such as Facebook. They could have even targeted football fans using Facebook advertising to increase their reach. They could have also created organic traction by coming with creative means of sharing this campaign.
Overall, “Places To Watch The World Cup” is a great way for football fans to check out various locations to catch the World Cup matches. But for big companies like Pinterest, we would have expected a more intricate and well-thought-out campaign as it had the potential to go completely bonkers online, which would have in turn increased engagement with current users and even get a huge number of new users.
