In an agency, as we all know, there is a client servicing team (always coordinating, and almost always on phone calls), a creative team (busy thinkers of ideas), designers (carefree and yet sometimes overworked), and then there is the social media team. Usually, the most over-worked and with almost-constant stress on their face as the community managers. It’s not easy to do community management. This job requires a combination of skills such as:
Identifying amazing content that would work the best for your social communities
Making sure that you meet all the brand guidelines and social media guidelines
Be vigilant about online reputation management i.e. make sure all comments are responded to, especially if they are negative
Discipline your schedule, so that you can manage multiple communities at the same time and, also multiple platforms for the same brand
It’s a vicious circle of writing content, approvals and analysis that every community manager would relate to. As a solution here is a list of 5 most basic social media management tools for community managers – guaranteed to make your life much easier.
1. Feedly: Best Source For Content
So while, a lot of tools are available that aggregate content, I frequently find myself checking out Feedly. It is a content aggregator website. You can easily select the magazines, blogs or websites you want the content from. You can see which articles are trending, which articles are the latest and also individual feeds of articles for individual websites.
As a community manager, I’ve often resorted to Feedly to find content. Within Feedly, my favourite sites I usually check out content from depend on the brand I’m working for. However, I like to see Mashable, Tech Crunch, Wired, Digital Blog Buzz and more to keep myself updated regarding what’s trending on the web.
2. Buffer: Always Update On Time
Once you’ve identified the content and got them approved by your clients, schedule your posts on social media in advance so that you can use your time wisely for other tasks. A tool that I’ve frequently used for scheduling tweets and FB posts is Buffer. If there is a same ‘post’ or ‘tweet’ that you would like to update on various pages and accounts at the same time – you can do that too.
Schedule your posts across as many social media accounts as you wish. Buffer offers 3 different plans for your personal or business needs.
Buffer also provides analytics that help you to assess the performance of your posts and helps to prepare reports for the same. It’s a pretty useful tool, available as free and paid versions, however I’ve preferred the paid version (which obviously works better for an agency), unless you’re a freelancer (even then, a paid version would just make your life easier). To show you much the folks at Beta21 loves Buffer, check out this post.
3. Canva: Create Visuals In A Jiffy
It has been observed time and again, that Facebook posts with attractive images ensure higher engagement with it. Simply put, plain text posts do not work as well as the posts with images do and you need good images to support your post. But, the designer in your team is probably overloaded with work, and your client is not going to pay for every creative created for social media updates. So, what do you do?
Canva is a highly recommended tool to design images. It is customisable, and with a great repository of images (mostly free and, some are paid). It’s got a great user interface, easy to use and works well for social media updates.
4. Facebook Apps: Run Engaging Contests On Your Page
It is not an easy task to keep your fans and followers engaged in activities. Interesting conversation is not enough. Sometimes, you need to pep up your audience with different activities. Some of the apps they have are:
Business locator – if you’ve got multiple branches, you can use this app to help your customers find you.
Slogan contest – it’s like a caption contest! Simple and one of the best options for a contest you can use.
Quiz – Run a quiz for your Facebook Fans. Keep the questions MCQ or Objective, it’s upto you.
Sweepstakes – Run a sweepstakes for your Fans and they’ll love it.
… and many more cool apps.
These apps are easy to configure and with intuitive designs. It’s easy for the community manager and for the Facebook Fan to use these apps. Both back-end and front-end are great.
5. HootSuite: Social Media Analytics
While there are multiple tools to assess data for independent platforms for example – Facebook Insights for Facebook, Alterian SM2 to get a gauge on online sentiment about the brand, Twitonomy for twitter data, Hootsuite is one tool which can give you a detailed report on all platforms together. It’s quite user friendly to generate a report as well. You can also use Sysomos for Online Reputation Management, especially for twitter. It gives quite detailed data by analysing your online presence.
Share with us the tools that you have been using to make community management more effective!
Tencent’s Weixin, internationally popular as WeChat, is the upcoming mobile messaging app. WeChat was launched in January 2011 and has its largest market in China and is steadily expanding in Asia – Malaysia, Thailand, India and Hong Kong.
Source: WeChat.com
For those who haven’t had a rendezvous with WeChat yet some consumers would call it a combination of Whatsapp, LINE and Viber. In simple words – the app (like many others) can be used to send free instant message, voice, videos, stickers and more.
Being originally a Chinese app, they have reached a customer base of 600 million users. And, if you intend to target the audience which is brand loyal and has the purchasing power to spend on international luxurious products then having a presence on WeChat is pretty much a must for you.
What is WeChat?
As mentioned above, WeChat is an instant messaging app with focuses on personal interaction. Search Engine Journal article states that China’s young, affluent and urban population makes up the majority of WeChat users. It’s a mobile app that most of the Chinese teenagers have and apparently are engaged enough to check it once every 6 minutes on an average! WeChat has upgraded itself to WeChat version 5.1 on 16th January 2014, which includes features like:
Live Chat
Group Chat
Video Call
Moments
Voice Chat
Web WeChat
Emotions
Look Around
Drift a bottle
Social Gaming
It is also available in over 15 international languages including French, Hindi, Malay, Traditional and Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Portuguese and more.
Growth of WeChat to 300 million users (Source: China Daily)
Why WeChat?
While IM (instant messaging) is not a key factor to opt for WeChat, it has started to offer more and that is e-commerce, gaming and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.
1. WeChat Payment
WeChat has added an interesting feature called WeChat Payment. An article by Jing Daily informs that this feature is completely integrated with the platform. The app allows them to link their bank card, receive benefits and in gist, are reducing the number of clicks (steps) to lead to a purchase. This feature will encourage impulse shopping from users! However, this feature is currently available only in China, but you can soon expect it to become global. What’s interesting is that WeChat is becoming a strong contender for PayPal in China, i.e. the app is not being used for just chat, it’s being used as a mobile wallet or storefront.
2. WeChat Gaming
On January 16th, WeChat introduced its version 5.1 in which it added 4 social gaming apps. The four games are: ‘GunZ Dash’, ‘2Day’s Match’, ‘Craz3 Match’ & ‘Pencil Pilot’. Users can download the app from app store, share their scores and achievements as well.
3. WeChat CRM
WeChat has official accounts for brands to engage with their customers. The platform encourages them to have more personal conversations or exchange of messages/information. An article on Clickz talks about the two accounts. There are two kinds of accounts that any brand can have (and you’re pretty much forced to chose one of them), they are:
Service Account – This account allows brands to broadcast personalised messages to their friends once a month. Brands can create a micro-site under the navigation bar, to serve all of its content to the user – available to them when they decide to visit your account. They can also chat with the customer directly from a private chat window. It appears the brands use the Store Locator feature most commonly wherein a customer can share their location and the brand replies with the closes stores available to the location shared. WeChat is also used for extensive Customer Relationship Management (CRM) by such accounts. For eg: Louis Vuitton has a LIVE customer relationship personnel who answers all the queries of the customers.
Subscription Account – This is an option that will be mostly preferred by customers as they can control if they wish to be notified every time you wish to communicate with them. Customers can always opt-out of receiving your notifications. Subscription Account is displayed as the Official account, and the user will have to open a subfolder of the subscription account to access the content of any particular brand. Most of the personalities are using this account. What’s interesting is that brands who offer coupons or offers on their account don’t miss out on much as the customers are already in the habit of checking these accounts for the latest deals.
WeChat for Marketers
Multiple international brands like Louis Vuitton, McDonalds, Southern China Airlines, Uniqlo and more are using WeChat for extensive marketing in China. Chinese market with social networking users is rising exponentially. What is interesting to notice is that WeChat is the leading mobile networking app in China.
Social Networking in China in 2013 (Source: GoGlobe.com)
Before you get started on marketing tips it is important for you to understand as a community manager that where do you want your brand to be positioned? In the Services account or the Subscription account. Also, you need to plan how WeChat fits in your digital marketing ecosystem. Jumping into WeChat without a plan may not be a good idea, and so discuss the objective of using this platform with your client.
When a brand signs up for an official account they will receive a QR Code which the user has to scan to follow the brand on WeChat. Here are a few suggestions for an effective marketing inside and outside China.
1. One-to-one communication
WeChat discourages broadcasting of messages, enough to disturb a user. And so, your strategy on WeChat should be of one-to-one conversation. Use the platform for meaningful interaction that would be worth the user’s time to check your message. Because, you can be assured that the customer will read your message in most cases. You can inform them about your brand’s offers, give them coupons, update them about your new stickers that they can buy, answer their queries like a customer care, or use it in absolutely any creative way that would make them want to be with you.
2. Exclusive Communities
People like to feel special, so create groups with certain brand loyalists who can be engaged in sample testing, special offers, exclusive members of your club, VIPs, group discussions about your brand and more. Create communities that would allow them to know that they belong to an elite group, add value to their membership and provide them with features, offers to make them feel special as well.
3. Sell on WeChat
With WeChat Payment as an existing feature in China and an upcoming feature in other parts of the world, it is of extreme use to have an online store where you can direct your WeChat users with exclusive WeChat offers or coupons. These will ensure instant purchase. With exclusive coupons, or links you can also track the number of sales you’ve generated via the platform. Also, you can get stickers created for your brand or personality and share the download link with your fans. These stickers can be priced at a minimal cost.
4. Customer Care
An important way to use WeChat is by providing customer care services by privately replying to the customer and answering their queries. Telecom companies and other big brands can especially use such a feature. But as a company – you need to have extra resources and a team to be prepared to spend some time on it as this can be quite a labor-intensive job.
5. Games on WeChat
WeChat is an upcoming social gaming platform as well. Brands can develop custom games to engage their customers. For eg: Soon to be released movies can come up with games to engage the audience.
6. Campaigns on WeChat
One of the most interesting campaigns was done by Starbucks – songs for your mood. In this campaign, Starbucks asked users to share a smiley that depicted their mood and in return, Starbucks shared a song that reflected their mood. This campaign lead them to gain 130,000 members in a matter of few months, which was quite incredible.
What you as a marketer have to be careful of is that the campaign is personal and talks to the target audience at a one-to-one level. Whether you’re asking them for their favorite recipe, choice of destination, their mood, or simply if they would want to buy your latest collection of apparel, the messaging has to be simple, to the point and crisp. Get creative with your campaign but keep it simple so that without wasting their time they can start to chat with your brand.
If LINE was a person then he/she would be cute and expressive (with stickers), smart (with the app design), simple (with features), good communication skills (with chats, voice calls and video calls), popular (with Professional accounts) and a great buddy to have (native mobile app). No wonder, it got 100 million friends in 19 months. It took Facebook 54 months and twitter in 49 months to respectively to reach that milestone!
[follow id=”BetaTwentyOne”]
LINE has moved the market with its tremendous growth in countries outside Japan, especially Spain, and is now looking to capture UK and USA as their market. “80% of our traffic is from outside Japan,” said Sunny Kim, Senior VP and Head of Business Development for Line Euro- Americas in an interview with The Guardian. Before we get into analyzing how marketers can use LINE here’s a brief overview of the application.
What is LINE?
As an introduction to LINE, it is more than an instant messaging app, it has been called the “closed social media platform” which attempts to make communication simple, uncomplicated and expressive. It’s features are very basic which a user would definitely use. LINE attempts to make communication simpler, and it also gives importance to the privacy of the user. It keeps playing with its features, if a particular feature does not receive good response during its testing, it is pulled out and shelved. LINE intends to keep only those features available to users which they will actually use. It also doesn’t add people as contacts automatically.
You can shake your phones to add each other as contacts, or use a QR code. Basic features available are a Timeline, Chats (including Voice and Video), Stickers, Notes, Official accounts, Games, Apps and Notices.
The most popular feature however, of LINE has been the stickers. It’s got its own characters, emojis, complete with a cute bunny and an adorable brown bear.
Who uses LINE?
LINE was born in Japan in 2011. It was developed by the employees of NHN Japan (Naver Corporation) as a response to the disastrous Tohuku earthquake in March 2011. It was released to the public in June 2011. LINE is used by especially by the age group below 30+ in over 230 countries. It has recently got 300 million users, which is a truly remarkable number. LINE is growing extensively in Spain and South Americas, however, it is still attempting to break into the UK and U.S. market.
[follow id=”BetaTwentyOne”]
Jeanie Han, U.S. CEO said in an interview with techcrunch said, “In Spain it just kind of grew organically… I think it had something to do with the fact that the Spanish people are very passionate, and they’re very expressive and they really loved using our stickers to communicate with each other so it just took off.”
Brands on LINE?
LINE has a feature called Official Accounts, celebrities like Paul McCartney, Katrina Kaif, Snoop Dog, and many more across the globe have joined LINE and created their Official Accounts. Brands like Mc. Donalds, SONY, have joined, even sports personalities like Rafael Nadal and football club – FC Barcelona have an official account on LINE.
This is the first message you get when you follow FC Barcelona. Every Official Account has this feature of automated responses. A lot of brands ensure to convey that they are not sending the message personally, and these are automatic response. They also mention (sometimes) the method to switch of notifications for such messages. Brands are using Official Accounts to giveaway Coupons. They are also using (Like FC Barcelona) to create and share their custom stickers.
LINE for Marketers
I’m sure by now, you have realized that LINE has a great potential for advertising. We’ve shared some great ways to use LINE for marketing.
Stickers on LINE
LINE makes about “$10 million a month in revenue” on stickers alone. They give away a pack of 40 stickers for about $1.70. Stickers are hot in the app market. Viber, Facebook messenger have introduced stickers in their apps. LINE made Facebook reconsider their strategy on simple smileys. In an interview with New York Times, Neha Dharia (analyst at Ovum) said, “If any app can make a giant like Facebook rethink their strategy, then that is the surest sign of the potential power of these services.”
Tip: FC Barcelona recently launched their pack of stickers for their fans. Stickers are a great way to generate revenue for the brand and at the same time engage the fan personally in something fun with a potential to go viral.
FC Barcelona Stickers on LINE
Games on LINE
Games are a popular app on most of the networking or messenger platforms. Similarly, according to an interview in New York Times, LINE games account for about $25 million a month in sales. Their games LINE pop and LINE bubble were amongst the top 10 games on Google Play and iStore. Sunny Kim, senior VP and head of business development for LINE Euro-Americas said in an interview with The Guardian, “there are now more than 36 games on Line, which have collectively generated more than 190m downloads.”
Tip: Brands can come up with interesting LINE games which are free to install and play but require the user to do in-game (environment) shopping to continue to play or grow in the game. Studies have shown that users tend to spend on in-game shopping and is a great way to monetize the games in apps.
line bubble
LINE Bubble Game
Music on LINE
Music is expected to play a major role in LINE’s future. They will be soon launching a service called LINE Music. The idea is to capitalize on more interactive content. As Kim says, “Our proposal to celebrities, especially musicians, is that we are operating in a smartphone and 3G or 4G environment, so you should try to push more interactive and video content, not just a text.” Also, from the official account it can be seen that how many LINE users have watched the video on real-time basis and for how long the video was played. Kim goes ahead to say that “For famous singers, they can easily have a million subscribers on Line. That’s the minimum, actually!”
Tip: Any celebrity or musician or even a brand with a new music jingle can share it with the fans who have opted to receive the message on LINE from their official account. It’s a great way to bring your content to a select audience for their reviews, feedback or even a contest.
Music on LINE
Coupons on LINE
LINE has developed itself as a great B2C co-marketing platform. By introducing its official accounts, brands are able to use the account to reach the customers directly, and have one-to-one communication right on their phone, like a chat with a friend (almost). LINE is “giving brands and celebrities their own marketing channel to talk to and sell directly to Line users who have opted in to receive their messages,” said Han in an interview with techcrunch. Ogilvy’s analysis of the platform also suggests that it can be a big player in the field of e-commerce space with continued partnerships with brands.
McDonald’s used LINE to giveaway coupons and other promotional offers. Also Ogilvy’s report suggested that Rakuten Online Shopping is looking to encourage mobile shopping. So, as brands it would be a great idea to giveaway special coupons to your LINE fans and ask them to bring it along to your offline store or enter the coupon code on your online store.
Either way – a specific audience can be targeted using coupons. Multiple promotional offers can be run as well using the simple app. Messages can be sent to the Fans to redirect them to the mobile store of the brand where they can use the coupon codes and shop.
As a parting note, while Ogilvy’s report suggests that it might be too soon to predict the impact of LINE on US market, but if it gets picked up in the continent of US then it has the potential to be “one of the top social networks for under 30s,” and this is the perfect target audience for most brands.
LINE claims to have some advanced marketing tools which can be really useful for us marketers while planning and analyzing our strategy for the app. So, are you going to go on LINE?
The brand you get to do social media for, is not always your choice. Some of you are lucky to get interesting fashion or lifestyle brands, whereas there are others who have to strategise for ‘boring’ brands like financial or consultancy brands. One of the many woes of a community manager is to come up with interesting content for a not-so-exciting brand. And, this can be a task.
However, General Electronics (GE) teaches us how to make a ‘boring’ brand an interesting social media maverick. GE is into highly regulated businesses like healthcare, energy and financial services. GE’s success across social media platforms shows that at the end of the day it’s all about how you bring out the best of your brand values.
One of the key aspects that distinctly differentiates their successful social media marketing strategy is their alignment with real-time marketing across various social media platforms.
Linda Boff, executive director of global brand marketing, GE said, “Real-time marketing is the ability in near real time to produce a response through content, experiences or service to a live event or customer event that delights your audience or customer into engaging with your brand around a shared moment.”
Lessons from GE:
1. Interesting content buckets
They’ve split their content under various categories. For eg: Mind Blown or Lessons in science. What’s more interesting is the way they make science seem fun across all age groups. They’ve stated in their ‘About’ section of Facebook Page (which has 1million likes): We love science, technology, innovation and hearing from you! So, say hello.
Well they definitely combine their content with great visuals and call to actions to ensure that fans do engage with their posts.
New Year Post from GE – it’s simple and interesting:
2. Capitalize on brand-specific events
They’ve done some great campaigns on twitter and Facebook. One of their interesting campaigns was on Feb 11, 2013 which was the Inventor’s Day and also the birthday of Thomas Edison. They asked the tweeps to tweet about what they would like to invent using #IWantToInvent. GE selected the best of the tweets (about 70 of them) and converted them into graphic images and shared the images with the people who had tweeted. It was an absolutely interesting and a fun way to engage the followers with the brand.
Boff also said in her interview with Digiday, “We’re fans of real-time marketing around brand-specific events.” What we as community managers should learn from this is that every brand can capitalize on the events that are related to the brand’s category. So we should identify and plan the content in advance to take maximum advantage of these events.
3. Experiment with various Social Media platforms
i) GE has got its presence on Facebook – with 1 million Fans
Their Facebook posts are planned, designed beautifully, and also keep the tonality full of interest for the fans. Being a highly regulated business legal aspect of sharing content, especially about GE reports and more is a matter of legal issue, and so – their Social Media team consists of a strategist, producer, designer and lawyer to be able to take efficient and faster decisions regarding what is suitable to be shared on social media platforms.
ii) GE has got an account on twitter – with 177,613 followers
They share the same content (images) on twitter, as on Facebook. However, the style of tweet changes.
iii) GE on Pinterest – with 13,981 followers and 332 Pins
Their presence on Pinterest is interesting as they’ve understood the value of sharing brilliant and interesting images from the industry. Below is a great example:
iv) GE on Instagram has – 158,185 followers
GE is also available on Instagram, sharing all the amazing photographs. They often run contests on Instagram as well to keep the conversation fun.
It’s kind of great that GE has also integrated Vine in their social media marketing strategy. Their Vines comprise of short, simple to the point storytelling about machines or any event their having.
As a community manager, we can learn from GE that it is important to try out various platform along with the right content strategy and see which platforms works better for the brand. You might not have a colourful brand, but every brand has a story to tell. It depends on your strategy, the way you wish to approach the brand and ensure the consumers relate to the brand – you can make a brand fun or boring.
Twitter is one of the most popular platforms in social media marketing. Some of the most creative campaigns are twitter campaigns. It is quite interesting to see how brands have adapted to twitter to generate brand awareness and online buzz about their products or services. One of the most interesting twitter strategy has been followed by @AdidasUK, which appears to have mastered the art of Live tweeting.
@AdidasUK tweets about Live football events, as they unfold on the field. If a player scores a goal wearing an Adidas shoe or product, then it turns into an instant tweet with a picture (of the shoe)! This is a brilliant way to engage the followers with real-time tweets of events that have a huge impact on the match. Goals, reactions, responses and more are converted into tweets with images. Photographs travel faster on internet than anything else, and so has a higher chances of going viral.
Advantages of Real-Time Tweets
1. Engages followers who are following Live tweets – works especially well for sports, fashion shows, events, music concerts and performances.
2. Tweets bring products to forefront. Showcasing the products along with the activity in real-time setting has a higher impact on the followers than a stand-alone image of the product.
3. Image combination used by AdidasUK has 2 benefits:
i. it displays the brand product used
ii. it displays the product was used by which famous personality
The combination of such an image along with an interesting and hard-hitting tweet is a perfect combination of viral content
4. #allin
Adidas has a key proposition which is crisp and symbolises brand value perfectly – #allin fits well in social media with all platforms as well. It has a passionate feel which resonates with the target audience.
5. Freshness
The timing of tweets is perfect, as the event is fresh in everyone\’s mind. Everyone can relate to them and feel the passion for the sport and the brand. Live-tweeting intensifies the positive emotion towards the brand and the products.
Lessons to Learn From AdidasUK
1. Engaging tweets
Brazilian magic! Well played @fernaoficial. Man of the match in a classic!
— adidas UK (@adidasUK)
2. Timely tweets
Time for the Youngs brothers to go #allin for @ercrugby! RT if you’re watching! adidas UK (@adidasUK)
3. Visually influential tweets
Luis Suarez is flying! 35 minute hat-trick. That’s how to go
— adidas UK (@adidasUK)
4. Use of brand value hashtag – #allin in every tweet with various combinations. For eg: in the tweet below it is #allinformurray
Every tweet receives a massive response and spread the word about the product. Fan followers get influenced by the products used on field by their sports idols and an over-all impact is the positive brand awareness on the twitter following.
Recommendation
We would suggest to take this a real-time visual marketing a step ahead, and integrate it on other visual platforms like Vine and Instagram as well. Create Vine videos of these shots where players wearing the products do exceptionally well and share that content. Instagram videos can also be created and shared.
Something more from Adidas?
Adidas has launched a new global brand strategy before FIFA 2014 – with @brazuca – in the name of the official 2014 FIFA World Cup ball. This twitter account will cover the ball\’s journey through the 2014 FIFA World Cup. Currently they are following the ball\’s journey on twitter. What\’s your opinion on this marketing strategy for 2014 FIFA World Cup?
I’m @brazuca, match ball of the 2014 FIFA #WorldCup. Yes I’m a ball. Yes I’m tweeting. Join me on my journey!
Schedule your posts across as many social media accounts as you wish. Buffer offers 3 different plans for your personal or business needs.
Music on LINE
