So you’ve built a massive Facebook community – what next?
“Look at them – they’re all here because of me” – hirsute community manager, 1910
I’ve always been impressed by those sorts of people who know everyone at a conference or a function and not only remember their names, but also their interests, hobbies and background – little details that may have dropped out in past conversations.
It makes the conversations just that little bit more genuine.
Not simply, ”How’s heading up the new Marketing department at Vodafone”, but – “How’s the car that you were thinking of buying last time we spoke?” or “Did the house move go well?”.
It’s that kind of interest and attention to detail and insight I’d love to see community managers have for those within their own brand community.
From community oversight to individual appreciation
If you have built or have oversight of a large FB fanbase, then well done – that’ s no mean feat.
There is massive commercial value in building a large community of switched-on brand advocates on Facebook but here is what a million Facebook likes won’t do:
- It won’t tell you who they are
- It won’t tell you why they liked your page
- You won’t know which other fan pages they are active on
- You won’t know the other social platforms they use
- You won’t see which people have shared your content on another social site
…Ad nauseum.
Sure, you can interrogate your community with a status update that encourages responses of sorts - ”Why do you like us? Where are you all from?” - but it’s impossible to manage, track and categorise every individual (if they even bother to reply) at scale and concurrently.
The same problems are apparent for other major platforms such as Twitter and LinkedIn. The community might be there, and increasing daily, but the useful profile data at an individual level is lacking.
Therefore, I (respectfully) suggest that the next step for any Community Manager or Social Media Manager is:
GET YOUR FANS TO AUTHENTICATE THEIR PROFILE
You know, like this:
How you migrate your social community community to a brand property with social sign-in it is up to you. But do it.
In the case of Guinness’ 1759 Magazine, Diageo employed a multi-channel content marketing strategy – content published to the Facebook site* would drive visitors to the main Guinness site where the opportunity to receive a personalised web and newsletter was offered to them, upon sign-in with a social account.
*You can read more on the benefits of content marketing for activating Facebook communities here.
Social sign-in – A simple way to gain customer insight and improve customer experience
In the early days of Idio – when we were but a mere music magazine – we were amongst the first wave of sites encouraging visitors to the site to authenticate their Last.fm, Pandora and iLike accounts so that we could understand their musical tastes and better serve them with relevant music news. The relevance of the content meant site visitors would stay longer, share more and return frequently.
Since then, the options to integrate with social profiles are ever expanding:
All this could be yours if you get your community to authenticate their profiles
This has meant that two things;
- The opportunities to capture useful data from each member of your brand community have increased
- The opportunities to provide a better, more tailored experience that improves customer customer acquisition and retention have increased
Imagine if - rather than seeing your brand community as a sum of total likes that can occasionally be stimulated to provide you with insight – you could begin to understand the likes, dislikes and evolving journey of each of your followers/advocates/[insert *de rigeur* CRM phrase here] as well.
The opportunities to foster a close and more intelligent relationship with each of your fans would become increasingly realisable and you could begin to develop a more integrated digital experience across all your brand channels.
#BrandManager #HeadofInsight #CRM #Win
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Idio’s platform applies content curation, real-time decisioning and predictive analytics to enable brands to do content marketing that is trackable, scalable and measurable, and understands each customer’s evolving social and behavioural context.
Idio helps major brands grow, track and convert their social media communities through intelligent content marketing solutions. If you’re not sure where to start with content marketing for your social media brands, do get in touch.
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