In 2020, 3.6 billion people were using social media worldwide; this depicts that a brand’s audience is most likely to be online. Having a tried and tested social media community management strategy in place is key for brands.

A social media management community is all about building and maintaining strong relationships with the company’s following online. Therefore, brands need to keep a close eye on engagements on their social media posts in order to react appropriately.

Social media community management pertains to ‘bringing the brand to life’. At its core, it aims to reveal the human side of a brand.

This gives an indication to followers that the brand is human-made, and this encourages a more loyal following and increased support from its audiences. We covered this topic with our friends at media update when we looked at Five ways to be more human on social media.

Why is social media management important?

According to the amaSocial team, “A well-defined community plan can make the difference between the success and failure of your undertaking.”

Should brands choose to implement social media management, they will see increased insights into their audience perception, trends in their industries, as well as cultural shifts that will subsequently affect their offerings.

Having this understanding will better equip brands to construct strategies and methods to position their offerings for best practices and successful business ventures.

Here are the five best practices to build a social media brand community with the assistance of amaSocial:

1. Make use of React & Respond

This off-platform email alert notification service, which falls under the content management section, will alert the designated person every time a social media post is allocated. The goal of this is to assist the brand in speeding up its response time and safeguarding the brand’s reputation.

It works by creating word bins on the amaSocial platform, which then uses AI to pick up any of the identified words or phrases mentioned on social media.

Knowing when a consumer is using a specific word or phrase to describe your brand’s service or product is vital. This is because that phrase or word might just ruin your brand’s reputation.

Being aware of what is being said online will allow you to always be on top of things, so to speak. This means that you don’t have to constantly refresh your social media pages in worry that someone will say something bad. Instead, amaSocial will be there ready to notify you of anything that needs your brand’s response immediately.

2. Use Content Verification

There are four types of content on social media. These are paid, owned, earned and chatter. Content verification tracks a brand’s social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube. This is to ensure that the team is posting the correct content at the right times.

Content Verification tracks the content that the user has scheduled and published on their owned pages. This can be a shared environment for stakeholders to see how many conversations were started and continued.

This service allows a brand to keep track of content being posted by its community manager or digital agency, allowing them to evaluate whether it is meeting the requirements of the brand’s content strategy.

With countless people making use of social media, it can be easy to miss an important conversation that is surrounding your brand or industry. Brands need to be aware of who says what and whether your brand’s social media content is received well in order to see success in their life cycles.

3. Use a Workflow function

This is a project management tool that sets and tracks progress in the workspace. A user creates tickets to action, which are then marked, moved or progressed according to the tasks’ fulfillments. This function can be applied across multiple teams such as content creators, sales and development teams.

Using the workflow application allows for a streamlined process — from content creation right through to approval. Having a clear structure in place for a community manager helps to keep track, manage and finalise allocated responsibilities.

This is a good way to ensure that your team can keep up with what, when and where things need to be done. Having an all-in-one function will also allow your team to discuss important matters, such as what is going on with the brand on social media. Allowing everyone the opportunity to communicate concerns that they have will help build a stronger social media community.

4. Use Engagement Metrics

This tool is a service that measures the performance of a client’s posts by summarising the engagements over a period of time. The results are then visually depicted in a graph.

It tracks the number of likes, comments and shares/retweets on a selected social media post. Just posting content onto social media and not knowing how it was received by the public will not benefit any brand.

Measuring the Engagement Metrics of your consumers’ individual posts on an ongoing basis allows for valuable insights into a brand’s perception.

Having a feature that shows a brand how well a post performed will allow them to better focus on content that they send onto social media going forward.

Social media is a two-way street; brands need to be aware of how the public looks at their content and responds to it. This is an essential step in building a strong social media community surrounding your brand.

5. Keep a close eye on Auto-Sentiment

Auto-Sentiment gives insight into how a brand is perceived. It does this by taking a look at what exactly consumers mean when talking about your brand online.

amaSocial uses Artificial Intelligence to determine the sentiment on posts. They are identified as either positive, negative, or neutral.

Knowing how a consumer feels about your brand and its products or services will allow a brand to place more focus on areas where there can be an improvement.

For more information, visit www.amasocial.co.za. You can also follow amaSocial on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

*Image courtesy of Pexels