Ok, so you’re a community manager and the company has high hopes for what you can potentially do for the company. You share those high hopes and then realize just how much can really go into you achieving all those goals.
Community management is a dynamic role and can change daily. In essence, however, it involves familiar behavior just applied to new platforms (aka, social media). As humans, we’re constantly facilitating conversations, attempting to build and maintain connections with others and sharing information. Hmm, that sounds oddly similar to my job description… The challenge though is to do all these things with people that care about your brand (or your industry) consistently and well enough to build some traction.
If you’re finding yourself feeling overwhelmed or just kind of “stuck,” here are some things I’ve done to keep myself on track and moving forward in my efforts here at Viralheat:
Start by actually writing out what your overall social media goals are (with or without the management team at this point, but make sure you’re all in agreement before moving on to step two!) When you’re developing these, make them specific, realistic and actionable — and give yourself a deadline. Measurable goals are key to helping you stay on track.- Once the team is on board with the community management/social media goals, develop specific tactics you and your team can execute to achieve them. These can range from campaign ideas and blog topics to the smallest details like targeting specific influencers and tweeting/posting XX times per week.
- Finally, for each goal, come up with metrics you can use to measure your efforts and monitor your progress.
At Viralheat we have both short and long-term goals that we’re working toward and some are making progress faster than others. It’s important though to constantly refer back to this outline to stay on track and remind yourself of the ultimate goal(s) for your company. That’s the big picture, after all!
While community management efforts are specific to each company or organization, here are some general community manager goals that your list may include:
- Increase followers/fans of the brand, company, product, etc.
- Develop/manage a collection of guest bloggers and contributed posts (ex: case studies, Q&As, industry expert advice…) to diversify your blog content
- Using social media and the social Web as an efficient extension of your customer support efforts. In other words, streamline customer support efforts between social media/online queries and the traditional customer support department by developing clear protocol for handling the various contact channels your organization may have
- Increasing awareness of your brand or product via social media channels
And here’s an example of one of those community manager goals and what you can do to meet it…
Goal: Increase followers/fans in number and engagement by 20% in 3 months
Tactics:
- Figure out the best days and times to post on your various social media channels for engagement and schedule them accordingly
- Look at what types of posts generate the most traffic and engagement from your audience and make sure to repeat those regularly, providing consistency for followers (that way they know what they can expect from you!)
- Post interesting content that people care about
- Be a constant, reliable and knowledgable presence on the social Web (make users feel confident that you know what you’re talking about, you hear them and will provide responses as necessary)
Metrics:
- Make note of your initial follower/fan numbers and keep track of changes regularly over your time frame, leading up to your deadline (which hopefully means you’ve met your goal)
- Pay attention to engagement levels — as you increase your content creation and online presence, your traffic/RT/comment/Like/etc.-counts should also be increasing
Do you have any other tips for creating and achieving goals as a community manager? What goals are you working on achieving/have achieved successfully?
