Whether your business is B2B or B2C, community management is an essential marketing weapon to generate leads, convert followers, and retain customers. All this can be achieved by social media conversion and happens when a user acts on a call to action. The rate depends on how many conversions come from that specific platform, and creating an online community has proven to be one of the best tools.
Klarna exemplifies well how conversions are increased by community engagement on a global scale using Sprout social, and the online community of Colombian Nequi is also a good example. But as long as only 22% of businesses are satisfied with their social media conversions, we will look at how community management is useful for increasing the rate. The fact that the dissatisfaction percentage is as high as 78% can speak to the lack of focus on SEO, lack of convenience and optimization across units, and a site’s loading time.
Whether it is to increase sales, strengthen customer loyalty, improve the customer experience or get more followers, the key will always be people-first social media marketing.
These are our best community management practices for social media conversions.
Table Of Content
- How an online community drives social media conversions
- Our best practices for community management
- Creating community engagement as a community manager
- The three A’s: Active, accountable, and autonomous social media marketing
- Final thought
How an online community drives social media conversions
Managing your business’ social media interactions with your audience builds engagement with your brand and drives conversions. The conversion rate is the number of visitors actually taking action on a page versus that page’s total number of visitors. The rate is the number of comments received for a specific time span divided by the gross number of followers multiplied by 100. The metric indicates the effectiveness of social engagement, which an online community contributes to significantly.
The level of the conversion rate refers to the value of the content. Shares, likes, and comments are all engagement metrics determined by how the content is received. Is the information creative and compelling enough, does the product deliver and have relevance? Delivering on these questions determines how good your online community is at improving the conversion rate. Before we go more in-depth on community management, remember that our social media marketing guide could also be useful in this sense.
“Social media is a community effort, everyone is an asset,” says Social Media Specialist Susan Cooper at BuzzEdition. The more action-based the community management approach is, the focus will be more on company platforms and affiliated accounts such as influencer accounts or partner-related landing pages. To get there, you first need to understand and identify community needs, map a strategy for creating an online community, and continuously cultivate the relationships with your audience. The more original your community gets, the more it will stand out from others, and the more specific your target audience becomes. At the same time, it will gradually require more effort retaining viewers and their interest.
We all like to be treated as someone special, and user-generated content (UGC) generates that feeling. Establishing trust with viewers and followers by testing a new product is one way; it creates a unique user experience that optimizes a product at the same time as building a social community. Other examples of creating valuable content can be promotions, contests, giveaways, gamification, hashtag campaigns, and the use of niche-specific influencers to drive conversions. Did you know social contests have a 34 % conversion rate and a 3.7% higher conversion rate than CTAs?
There are also two sides of the coin here as user-generated reviews (UGR) have the same impact as user-generated content — as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts become a two-way channel between the marketer and user. Direct engagement will give your brand and your customer group a voice at the same time of interacting with them. Now that you know the perks of social communities and what they can do for your conversions, let’s have a look at the specific practices for community management.
Our best practices for community management are:
- Establish community rules and guidelines
- Follow-up continuously with community members
- Respond, communicate and listen to your audience
- Use a set tone of voice in all channels
- Create creative content to maintain interest and (customer) retention
This blog includes the prime example of an external engagement strategy for community management, as do our post on how social media can be the most effective marketing channel.
Creating community engagement as a community manager
To fully understand how you do community management best, it can help understand the difference between the marketer and the community manager role. In short, the community manager aims to engage the target audience by advocating for the product that is being promoted. Responding and conversing with users could happen both offline and online to establish customer loyalty, increase retention and reduce churn.
As 80% of customers state that instant responses would increase their brand loyalty, the importance of ongoing interaction with followers is to create a community-feel of familiarizing with the product and the brand’s content more. Managing response time is a central part of that as response time can improve the conversion rate by 30%.
Social media communities are also just as much about tracking comments and finding out what goes on in the community to better cater to the audience’s needs. Community behaviors, purchasing patterns, and communication style are all valuable metrics to track and what you should base your community management on. A good tip is always to follow back and to step over the threshold of having one-to-one dialogues. The direct messaging function is also for community managers to uphold connectivity as much as possible.
A continuous focus on recruiting more community members and maintaining the retention rate goes without saying. But the bottom line is that a long term action-based community approach helps find that needed tone of voice and consistent content production that should transfer to all communication outlets.
The three A’s: Active, accountable, and autonomous social media marketing
The focus on more social communities grew from the idea that traffic was not enough, nor focusing on one platform or account at a time would grow a brand. The social media marketer has become more proactive and operative in line with community management tools.
Suitable tools that track engagement and satisfaction and that we recommend are Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Semrush, and Sociality.io. You can now even use Discord for community management. Almost operating as a virtual chatbot across platforms, these tools will help any community manager address requests and participate in user dialogue at a higher volume than before.
Community management can even help with SEO as a trick is to incorporate keywords in all online (and offline) dialogues. There is so much you can do, and undoubtedly, every platform will establish a better link between your business brand and potential customers in the form of an online community.
Final thought
Community management helps significantly with making a brand and the people behind it more accountable to its promises and services. As the community management role is more autonomous than the average social media marketer, it’s easier to uphold consistency and authenticity on company accounts. The link here being: As the brand relationship gets stronger, so will the social media conversion rate.
