At SHARE, we believe there are 4 essential pillars to a successful people-powered Community Management strategy.
Our signature C.O.P.A 🏆 framework is designed to deliver ongoing community support, growth, visibility, reactivity and proactivity.
It’s currently being deployed across 6 of our global clients, some of which are bigger in size than McDonalds and Facebook combined!
The 4 Pillars
Community
This is the traditional role function pillar, delivering always-on community support, comment responses, scheduling, UGC and crisis management.
Comment Responses
We produce in-depth banks of comment replies that clients can sign off for us to deploy at will. Once the relationship develops and the trust builds, we’ll then recommend ad hoc replies, only seeking sign-off for more complex or sensitive community questions.
Scheduling
We’re flexible to adapt to a client’s preferred scheduling tool, because we have experience using a multitude of them. At present, for example, we’re using Sprinklr (our preferred partner), Sprout Social and Falcon, to help our clients manage their content output.
User Generated Content to Community-Powered Content
We don’t just share UGC via Instagram Stories (that’s lazy), we also integrate community shares into genuine engaging concepts. We’ve found that people-powered content always ends up in our best performer reporting come the end of each month / quarter.
Here’s an example from our INEOS Grenadier 4X4 client. We helped Paul decide which vehicle configuration he should opt for, by asking our community to vote for their favourite.
Crisis Management
While a lot of community management is responding to positive moments, negativity can sometimes snowball if not addressed correctly and efficiently, so we have internal strategies in place to deal with all instances. In most situations we use this approach:
- Attempt to take the conversation to DM.
- Get to the root of the problem, to understand where they are coming from and how we can solve the issue.
- If it’s more niche, political or sensitive, we escalate to the client with a bespoke reply or action to sign off.
Outreach
This pillar is essential for organic growth. Outreach is essentially all of the activity that takes place as a CM outside of our owned channels. Lots of agencies and brands deploy unethical growth hacking techniques to increase community size, but our approach is simple and beneficial to all parties in a community.
Our trademark outreach strategy divides the community into 3 distinct segments, based on how close they are to the brand.
The outcome of this is a huge list of channels for Community Managers to outreach to daily with ‘actions’ aka comments, emojis, likes, shares and DMs. For the segment furthest away from the brand aka not following us, but tagging us or using similar hashtags to us, the regular engagement is more essential, because we’d love for them to follow us.
It’s amazing the visibility this gives a brand, even on a channel very close to it, like a parent…
But more importantly, this daily engagement helps to increase the visibility of our followers’ content, according to platform algorithms.
So it’s a win-win ethical strategy for driving followers and engagement, moving away from the unethical dark days of the follow and unfollow strategy (we can still see lots of you doing it).
Proactivity
This pillar is all about planning ahead. Every year we build out annual proactive calendars that are bespoke to each of our clients.
We tend to shy away from national or international days unless they’re laser focused on the brand in question. For a 4X4 brand it’s a no-brainer that we consider a mini-CM campaign for the week of ‘International Off-Road Day’, for example.
We do however use our annual planning to help progress more universal international days that might not have been given the airtime they deserve in the past.
Auditing
We don’t forget the ‘non-traditional’ channels or the channels where we’re not producing content for our clients. Conversations are constantly taking place in these locations.
So this final pillar is all about auditing as many channels as possible, beyond owned, to stay on top of the communities sentiment towards the business.
These types of channels are often neglected if brands aren’t delivering content there:
They’re a powerful resource for both community and content strategy. For example, we’ve started scanning these channels for common community questions that we can answer via our content strategy – acknowledging that we’re always watching outside of our immediate wheelhouse.
Feel free to contact me via LinkedIn if you’d like to discuss how we can level up your Community Management strategy.