Tools to Make Community Management Easier

El community manager debe ser la voz de la empresa desde fuera y la voz del cliente desde dentro. Esta frase de Connie Lund, directora de marketing de empresas tecnológicas, nos da la clave del rol de los community managers en las empresas actuales. Una estrategia de redes sociales es fundamental para generar conciencia de marca sobre productos y servicios , ganar relevancia y reconocimiento en diferentes plataformas, y captar seguidores con quienes interactuar y generar engagement.

El engagement es un término clave en la gestión de comunidades. La interacción que recibes en tus redes sociales (en forma de “me gusta”, seguidores, contenido compartido, comentarios, clics y retuits) define en gran medida el éxito de tus campañas y proporciona métricas que nos guían para evaluar nuestro rendimiento. El objetivo final de estar presente en redes sociales es participar en la conversación , comunicarte con otros y sentirte motivado. Además, los algoritmos de cada plataforma estudian y analizan nuestro engagement y lo utilizan para darnos mayor visibilidad ante posibles nuevos seguidores. Es un círculo virtuoso en el que debes cuidar al máximo tu contenido y adaptarlo a tu audiencia para crecer orgánicamente.

¿Qué hace un community manager?

Los servicios de un community manager en una empresa son amplios y variados, si alguna vez te has preguntado qué hace un community manager y aún no lo tienes muy claro, esta lista te ayudará.

Escuchar

Un community manager debe monitorear no solo las publicaciones de la empresa, sino también lo que otros dicen sobre ella. Escuchar las redes sociales significa rastrear todas las menciones que tu marca , servicio o producto recibe de otros usuarios. También significa revisar la conversación sobre la competencia y los temas de conversación o interés de tu público objetivo. Toda esta información te permitirá tomar mejores decisiones al planificar tus próximos pasos.

Implementar

Aunque el community manager realiza numerosas tareas por su cuenta, no está separado del resto de la empresa. Al contrario, su trabajo debe estar perfectamente alineado con las líneas estratégicas y comunicativas definidas por el estratega de redes sociales . Un buen community manager debe implementar la estrategia diseñada por el especialista de la empresa y adaptarse al tono, formato y red elegidos de la forma más eficaz posible. Las responsabilidades del CM son dobles: por un lado, debe velar por los intereses de la marca en redes sociales y, al mismo tiempo, escuchar las demandas de la comunidad y tenerlas en cuenta para mejorar la comunicación.

Narración de historias

Redactar todo tipo de textos para redes sociales forma parte del trabajo del CM. Al fin y al cabo, un community manager es un narrador : debe transformar el mensaje que quiere transmitir (sobre los beneficios de una marca o producto, por ejemplo) en una historia atractiva que destaque entre las demás publicaciones. Las palabras son sus aliadas , pero tenga cuidado: un paso en falso o un término mal utilizado pueden dañar su imagen. Establezca un tono y un lenguaje coherentes y elabore una lista de palabras clave y de nombres o temas que debe evitar para ayudarle a planificar sus textos.

Gestión de crisis

Customer service through social media is essential to improving engagement. Many users use social networks to complain about a product or service and as CM, you must be prepared to respond to these situations, de-escalate tensions, and offer solutions. Other users use the profiles on social media as a way to resolve doubts; align yourself with your company’s customer service support and agree on a protocol for action in these cases. You may have to carry out crisis management when the time comes; be equally proactive and plan an action guide for possible controversies and blunders on social media. Social Studio is a very good platform for managing customer service and extracting analytics to measure the success of campaigns.

Measure

We need to measure the performance of our actions on social media to assess the success of our proposals. Defining goals & metrics and preparing reports with follow-up actions and their results is a key task of the CM. A good analysis allows you to correct actions for the future: know what are the best times to publish, the type of content that works best, the most viral content, and the content that doesn’t work with your audience. Studying the behavior of users will give you tips that are useful beyond social media and can serve as a guide for marketing and sales teams.

That said, it is necessary to learn how to use the different community manager tools that are at our disposal to facilitate the task. Business technology gives us planning programs, content assistants, and monitors that streamline tasks and automate day-to-day actions.

The best tools for community managers

Work planning

• Google Calendar: a very efficient and intuitive calendar for community managers. Use it as your assistant and it will help you manage your time and prevent tasks from overlapping or being forgotten. You can share your Google Calendar with other departments, colleagues, and clients, create events, receive notifications before or after a publication, and in short, plan your work schedule in detail.
• Trello: one of the most popular planning tools for usability; it is very visual and intuitive and facilitates the management and monitoring of different project tasks, which you can classify by level of importance or progress.
• IFTTT: the best example of process automation. It allows you to create plans and configure customized alerts for the actions you prefer: new followers in networks, comments, direct messages, etc. It connects well with all types of networks, from the most popular to the most niche.

Content aggregators

• Medium: a website that serves as a platform for storing blogs and publications of all kinds, created by the founders of Twitter. It is one of the most widely used systems, especially in the United States, where content can be voted on by the public to improve the experience.
• Feedly: a very useful tool to order all the content that may be of interest for your publications. Configure it according to the blogs or websites you are interested in following by topic, etc. It doesn’t just let you look at it; it also allows you to share content on social networks. It’s free but has a paid version with some improvements.
• Ready4Social: allows you to curate content and schedule it on the main social networks, even on some that other tools cannot access. It is a multi-account tool that you can use for different clients or projects.

Social Media management

• Hootsuite: one of the most complete applications for managing social networks. With an app version for mobile and desktop, it allows you to manage social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram, and more from a single control panel. The free version allows you to manage up to 3 social profiles and has its own link shortener, Ow.ly, to adapt messages to networks that limit characters It also allows you to analyze results with Google Analytics.
• Postcron: defined as “the easiest way to schedule posts” on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and Pinterest. It schedules hundreds of images at once, handles multiple accounts, avoids notifications and reminders if you don’t need them, and automates up to 1,000 posts, pins, or tweets in one go by importing from Excel.
• Buffer: share posts with Buffer on Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest (among many others) at different times. It allows your publications to be continuous over time and generate more interest among your followers. It also provides the option of analyzing publications through the reach, mentions, retweets, and much more collected data.
• Social Studio: integrated within the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Social Studio is a network management tool that goes far beyond the scheduling of posts. It allows you to actively listen to what users are saying about your brand, find out what topics are trending on each network, and the most important conversations. Connect this application to other marketing and sales management applications to unify data and get a global view of the relationship with your customers.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=295brS23_4I

Images

• Canva: create graphic elements with ease: documents, charts, infographics, posters. You can upload images, add text, and customize your templates. With Canva, you can create dynamic IG Stories, a very useful tool for managing Instagram. It’s free with the possibility of a premium service (paid).
• PicMonkey: this is an online tool with which you can edit photos, make collages, add effects; it stands out for being very intuitive and practical.
• Thinglink: create interactive images and videos with your own links that redirect to your website. It’s very easy to use and has an extensive free version.
• TinyJPG: sometimes we need to reduce the size of our images to fit the loading limits of a platform. Tiny JPG helps us to do it without losing quality.

Infographics and video

• Piktochart: it offers free, high-quality templates that you can customize.
• Infogram: an application that allows you to create high-quality infographics. The free version is a bit limited, but you can expand its functions with the paid version.
• Wideo: create animated videos, perfect for product demos, service explanation, moving infographics, or training. There are more than 30 different free templates (with a watermark that you can remove with the paid version). You can also insert objects, text, and even sound.
• Powtoon: animated presentations or videos with very good results. It’s free and creates the videos quickly.

Monitoring

• Rignite: it’s a paid tool, but highly recommended if you need a more exhaustive analysis than what other free tools offer.
• Google Analytics: one of the basic tools for community managers. It’s free and available to everyone; it allows you to monitor visits to your site, conversions, and much more information. With Google Analytics, you can measure the traffic that social media generates on your website. We can trace the links that we share on networks and observe their success in referring the public to our site.
• Google Alerts: a personalized alert service based on the content that Google indexes. You can include tags with the topics you want to receive alerts about and the tool will send you emails with new publications on the network that match your alerts.
• Social Mention : una herramienta de búsqueda que recopila contenido generado por usuarios de múltiples plataformas y lo reúne en una sola. Con ella, puedes monitorear lo que se dice sobre tu marca en redes sociales en tiempo real. Social Mention es muy útil para escuchar las conversaciones en línea sobre ti.

Estos son solo algunos ejemplos de herramientas de gestión de comunidades para medir con fiabilidad el ROI de tu estrategia de redes sociales. A partir de ahí, podrás crear un informe completo que demuestre el éxito de tu plan de redes sociales, el valor de tu interacción con la comunidad, la fidelización de tus seguidores, la creación de una experiencia satisfactoria para el cliente y la mejora de la reputación de tu marca.