How to be efficient in community management support – tips&tricks
Community management is somewhat a basic step or a ground level for digital marketing. If you ask your colleagues about CM support, you will hardly find anybody that likes doing it but it is something that more often than not, has to be done.
Well, why don’t do it efficiently if you are already doing it? This is a short guide on how to be as much productive as possible while doing CM support so you could dedicate your time to more productive and creative things.
Bookmarks, bookmarks, bookmarks
Digital marketers spend the most of their day in an internet browser. Not only do they constantly publish something and inform themselves about digital novelties, they are always communicating in between themselves.
In order to be much more productive, you should organize your preferred internet browser. In order to do that, you have to bookmark the pages you visit on a daily basis. The number of your bookmarks will grow by the day. This is why you can’t afford to hold all of them on the bookmark bar. The solution to this problem the organizing folders. If you are using your private PC or laptop for work, one of your folders should contain the links you are using in your free time. If you are working on an office computer, even better. But even then, all of your needed bookmarks probably won’t fit on the bookmarks bar. A good way to group bookmarks is by the frequency of using them. The more you are using an individual bookmark, the easier will it be for you to find it.
Another great way to group your bookmarks is by their purpose. For example, 1.) Communication/Collaborative tools 2.) Publishing tools 3.) CM Tools 4.) Free stock photos sources 5.) Dictionaries. You might not need all of these groups but this is a mere example. It is best to leave some bookmarks you are using constantly out of folder but then, a great idea is to shorten their names so they could fit on your bookmarks bar.
When providing the support you might also need the help of your colleagues and/or your client’s websites, FAQ etc. In this moment, your bookmarks will be a lifesaver.
You can read a lot more about organization in the article: 7 Simple tips for every community manager out there
Support the hell out of it!
First of all, we have to explain what is considered as the support in digital marketing. Every digital agency strives to have as much quality clients as possible and more importantly, to keep the clients satisfied with the work of the agency. In order to do this, the first, basic step is good community management support. Your clients simply don’t have the time to deal with all of the information flow on social media. Comments, tags, likes, inquires, content publishing and so on. And this is where you, as a digital marketer, step in. Among other things, of course. How to do it in three easy steps:
#1 Know your client
Your CM support will be that much easier the better you know your client. Its targeted audience and consumers. It’s a form of buyer persona but a bit simpler. Why is this important? When you answer the comments and write anything in your client’s name, you constantly have to bear in mind the image of the brand you are representing. Are you serious and professional, are you moderate, or are you playful and youthful? You can “impersonate” the brand you are representing that much easier if you know it well. Don’t base your knowledge only on the things your client tells you, research the audience and their opinions and stances on the brand you are representing.
#2 Efficiency
Speaking from personal experience, the best way to do support is by constructing a list of your clients in business manager, marking those in the need of support as your favorites. Social networks never sleep. There isn’t any program ending on Instagram or Facebook as there is on TV. The good news is that a lot of content could be published on a schedule, but you can never schedule the answers on the comments on social networks. Especially because people like to know they are talking to people and no robot can be a human (not yet at least). In Kontra, we offer CM support throughout the whole day, from 8 a.m. until 10 p.m. All comments posted after 10 p.m. are answered first thing in the morning of the day after. The person providing support opens all of the pages that she or he is providing the support on and then attends to them one by one. This is the best way of doing it and sometimes it takes only a couple of minutes, while sometimes you can spend up to a half hour on it. Based on the engagement on the pages, of course.
#3 Don’t let yourself get seduced
The previous paragraph explains how does an average support moment looks like but here is the tricky part. If you bear in mind that you know your client and want to be efficient, this doesn’t mean you can be reckless. The hardest part of providing the CM support is that it looks simple so you can easily slip and make a mistake. By making a mistake, you will make your agency look bad, and more importantly, your client won’t be satisfied with the basic level of your work. Those mistakes can be divided into few types. First of all, you can overlook a comment or some other action that requires a reaction on social networks. This is the reason you shouldn’t provide CM support two or three times a day but every couple of hours. Social networks can produce a lot of engagement and it might be hard to scan all of it if you have it coming in droves. Second mistake type is answering with a wrong type of image in your head because, when you provide support, it can be hard to switch if you are not concentrated. The third mistake is a technical one. It applies to the moment when you answer in a separate comment. You can’t expect your client’s audience to search for the answers through dozens of comments. They came for the service and it’s up to you to provide it.
Conclusion
This short guide on how to provide a good CM support concentrates on three things. It is important that you know the client you are representing well, that you provide support Efficiently but not hastily and that you Don’t get seduced by the simplicity of the task. Another thing worth mentioning is the platform you are providing CM Support on. All of this, as well as other work, will be greatly simplified and eased with good organization of your bookmarks. The last support in the day should be through a PC and not through the phone. The reason for this is that Pages Manager app is simply not synaptic enough and you can overlook something important that happened on your client’s channels that day. Instead of browsing the final support sequence of the day through your phone, do it on a computer and review everything that happened that day.
