This week, social media came into the spotlight with a series of events throughout London and major cities around the world. It has been a week of highlighting the impact, improvement and importance of social media within business and the emerging markets.  During the course of the last seven days, there have been several engaging and diverse events ranging from workshops to in-depth seminars and presentations; all with the aim of providing a platform for social media professionals (and enthusiasts) to discuss ideas, share success stories and of course network.

One of the events was Build Communities Not Campaigns hosted by Comufy. Organised in a lovely restaurant, in-between Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Circus, Build Communities Not Campaigns was a panel event which included top professional speakers from leading PR and social media agencies.  Taking centre stage was Ying Wong, Head of Digital at RLM Finsbury, Blaise Grim Viort, Head of Community & Social Media at EModeration, Neil Hallmark, Head of Digital at Kaizo and Rob Horsfield, Managing Partner at Brass Agency.

As the name suggests, the aim of the panel was to highlight the importance of brand communities over campaigns; how to build communities (with your brand advocates), and how to sustain engagement and interest within a community.  In the hour long event, each speaker took turns to share their social media wisdom and answer questions from the event mediator, as well as the audience. Below are some of the key points from each professional:

Ying Wong

Part of the preparation is focusing on knowing who the influential people are – make them feel special and they will be your advocates when negative comments are posted

• Seed content and get people talking to one another – talking to community members offline will get them talking more online
• Getting a select number of people who comment and engage within the community is just as important as a million people who ‘like’ a page and bounce off
• Facebook ‘Likes’ don’t always mean a lot
• ROI is not that simple when measuring sentiment – look at share price and how much positive/ negative coverage over a period of time

Blaise Grim Viort

Focus on people’s sense of belonging and influence, as well as monitoring if their needs are being met. From a community perspective,  engagement is essential, then you should look at engagement between members

• Keep things simple by asking communities for their feedback on products out now, not in the future
• Work with the 3 P’s – People talking about the brand – get a relationship going, make sure they are Passionate and then build a Process around them
• Make it clear to people that certain discussions will not be appropriate – alternatively, run a live social media crisis situation with fake social account, imagine a dispute and go through the steps of how to deal with the problem
• ROI depends on client objectives – is it to build and create engagement or is it to click through and buy

Neil Hallmark

Communities are a group of people with shared influence (brand advocates) – the community will direct where the conversations go

• Within a community you can drive campaigns, but how can you start a community without a campaign
• Asked Unilever communities about the brands they love to give incentives e.g. designing packaging or giving a sneak peek of a new product – people love the fact that Unilever is listening to them
• Used Facebook for a Unilever campaign as this is where half the UK population is
• It’s all about content – what activities will you be doing with the community once you have them on board

Rob Horsfield

Use campaigns to produce a readymade community – alternatively, use word of mouth (tell community members to ask their friends), mailing lists, customer database

• Set out expectations with terms and conditions to inform community members,  however, communities do tend to police themselves – don’t underestimate the power communities have to sniff out a disgruntled comment
• It’s not always about creating communities – there are lots of forums that already exist – it’s about finding them, accessing them and extracting the information you’re looking for
• How do we keep members interested – respect, good content and cash incentives
• If communication members fall out, find new member to replace them – sometimes people who join communities aren’t advocates

Key Findings 

The main conclusion to take away from the event was that the needs of the community members must always be met. Whatever the community, its members should always be respected, listened to and thought of first when planning, implementing and analysing community and campaign strategies. The other major point was that engagement is must successful through great content. For community members to participate and spread a brand name, engaging content has to be seeded to get people responding and talking to one another. This can be achieved by offering good incentives for communication such as sneak peeks, designing upcoming product packaging and cash prices.

Anthony Ngaithe

Anthony Ngaithe is a Social Community Executive at Caliber Interactive overseeing client’s social media accounts and providing reputation management. Prior to joining Caliber, he was the assistant head of Marketing at a fashion event company responsible for promoting fashion campaigns and acquiring sponsorship for company events. Aside from work, Anthony loves to write and read poetry, socialise with friends, play video games whenever he can and immerse himself in all things digital media and technology.

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If you are a Social Media Community Manager (like me) you’ll already know that there are hundreds of add-on tools available to help us manage our Twitter accounts more efficiently. However, with new tools and apps being launched every week, it can often be difficult to stay up-to-date with the tools that enable you to get the most out of your account.

The objective of this series of posts is to share some of my favourite Twitter tools; the ones I use on a daily basis and that really make a difference when I need to track and analyse account activity, measure sentiment and manage friends and followers to help improve Social Media strategies.

Oh, and the good news is that these are completely free tools – although most offer upgraded plans if you wish to use advanced features. Why not experiment with all of them to decide which you like best and which are most helpful for you and your community management team?

Let’s face it, sometimes Twitter accounts need a good clean up! Quite often, people will stop following you, decide not to follow you back, or simply start posting content that is not relevant to you, so you’re left to decide whether it’s worth continuing to follow them.  In order to maintain a healthy community and to help you decide who to follow or unfollow, my favourite tools to use are Tweepi, ManageFlitter and FollowerWonk

Here is a useful breakdown for you to enjoy, use and abuse.

Tweepi 

As it auto-describes, it’s a “geekier, faster way to bulk add quality followers”.  The dashboard shows a quick overview of your Twitter account. It allows you to check the people who are not following you back (and “Flush” them if you like) as well as identifying the followers who you’re not following  so you can “Reciprocate”– which is quite good for your network. You can also identify inactive users and analyse their bio and influence (much like Klout) which is helpful during your “Cleanup”. Nevertheless, my favourite thing about Tweepi is the ‘Geeky follow function’(see image bellow), which allows you to follow user’s followers and add people with the same interests as you, or find and follow user’s friends just by entering the username. You can also follow Twitter list members or even copy and paste a list of users that you want to follow. Quite impressive, don’t you think?

ManageFlitter

This account management tool makes unfollowing quick and easy.  ManageFlitter gives you the ability to find out who isn’t following you back as well as allowing you to  identify how inactive, talkative or quiet the users that you follow are (see image bellow).

One advantage that ManageFlitter has over Tweepi is the fact that you can easily check, without having to open a new window, a user’s bio and activity before you decide if you want to stop following them or not.  You can also search inside your Twitter stream for people that mention specific keywords on their bio or latest tweets.

FlollowerWonk

At the moment, Follower Wonk is probably on the top of my list of useful Twitter tools. I’ve talked about tools that can help you identify people to unfollow, making your account a bit lighter. The main reason for doing this is so that you can remove all  inactive and non-following users and start following people who interest you more,  without creating a big gap on the my friends/followers ratio.

Follower Wonk helps you find interesting new tweeps to follow like no other tool out there right now. It has a specialised Twitter search allowing you to find individuals based on any profile data – bio, location, name or URL – as well as allowing you to filter this information by relevance, friends, followers and tweets. Finally, all you need to do is define how influential you want your new friends to be and then follow them directly on Follower Wonk’s list of results.  More information on Follower Wonk will be provided in the second part of this series.

These are just 3 of my favourite Twitter tools; the ones that I use frequently and recommend to my social media colleagues to help manage communities and make strategic decisions. The important thing is to keep trying new tools and use the generated data to work to your benefit.

I hope you have enjoyed my first post in the Simplifying Community Management – Social Media Tool Battle series. Watch this space for the next posts with a new selection of helpful social tools and tips.

Now tell us what do you think; do you already use any of these tools? What’s your favourite? Are there any other tools that you highly recommend?

Please feel free to share your opinion!

Karine Nascimento

Karine Nascimento works as Social Media Manager and is responsible for community, reputation management, creative strategies and reporting. She is Brazilian, an online marketing specialist, and has been working in the industry since 2004 when she co-founded a digital agency. Passionate about travel and different cultures, in her spare time Karine also enjoys watching films with her husband while eating tons of popcorn, as well as pinning, liking, commenting and generally using social media (not just for stalking)!