I have been reading a ton of interesting articles about how fast the world is changing and how companies should adapt. One of the most interesting was “Adapting Customer Experience in the time of Coronavirus” by McKinsey &Co. In it, they give 4 actions that brands should take to prepare for the world that is coming. Three of them really stood out to me as opportunities for communities to play a bigger role in the future:
- Focus on care and concern.
- Meet your customers where they are
- Build agile capabilities for fluid times
Communities are naturally good at delivering care and concern, and they are probably the most agile resource a company can have, but they can sometimes be hidden from where most customers can find them. Most customers ARE active on some social networks though, so it is a perfect time for brands to think about how they can connect with this broader audience. With this in mind, we wrote a quick guide to be more agile and meet customers where they are by using social listening in tandem with their community.
The Outline
First, there are many ways to combine a social listening platform like Intelligence and Community to achieve higher engagement. In general, they follow this outline. We will provide a couple of examples in a moment:
Discover
Understand what is current and relevant to your audience by using Intelligence to discover the trending social conversations people are having today. This is where you use the Intelligence product - will show you examples below.
Engage
Foster engagement on your community by creating content or discussions around the relevant topics discovered.
Promote
Publish your community content back to your social media audiences in the same areas you researched earlier to increase community engagement. For this it would be ideal to use the Khoros Marketing Experiences product, but regular social posting can work as well.
Example 1: Expert Event
You may already have a community of active experts, but do you have all the key players in your space? In a time of crisis, and in the future, key conversations on topics you care about could be happening anywhere.
In order to join in an authentic way, you should first know who is saying what. For this example, we looked at financial services.
- Discover Influencers: First, you need to find your key audience. As a bonus, you can leverage filters such as Author Bio, and Max # of Followers
a. Twitter Search > Use preferred terms (ex. “Shelter in place”) and search for the word “Community” in their twitter Bio.
Leverage Share of Voice to identify topics influencers are interested in learning more about
Most active influencers
b. Next, search within those results for your brand name or specific mentions/topics
2. Engage Influencers: Enlist influencers to assist in launching a dedicated group focused or a specific Event in the community.
- Promote to attract New Members: Promote the event within your community, through various marketing channels, and with the influencers to drive new registration and traffic to community.
- Promote the outcomes of the event as well
- Improve SEO Results: The real-time nature of the event improves SEO results and boosts organic traffic to community
- Curate New Content: Post-event, you now own the content which can be used to form TKB articles or blog articles that permanently raise SEO results and help further the conversation.
- Close the loop - cultivate superusers: These influencers feel recognized and empowered by the brand. The influencers get a closer relationship with a new audience to them, and the brand gets a stronger tie to a thought leader in the space. This is also a great first step in engaging them to become superusers and more involved community members.
Example 2: Level up your blogging
Blogs are great tools for sharing ideas, thought leadership, use cases, and best practices, but nobody gets value from them if nobody can find them.
- Post Blog Content: Post your most current blog article on your community. These blog posts then have easy buttons to share on social - so you should, and encourage your community to do so as well. You could even incentivize social sharing through recognition and gamification.
- Track social sharing of the blog: Using Intelligence, you can track the URLs of your blog posts being reposted on social. Not only can you get an idea for the impressions your blog may be getting from social re-share, but you can also gauge the sentiment and reception of your blog content via the messages users write along with the blog link. Here is an example using a blog from Amazon about COVID-19.
3. Use social reception to inform future Blog posts: Based on the sentiment/reception you are seeing on your blog, you can use that information to inform future blog content. You can also leverage tips from above to build a network of social influencers who follow and share your blog content, scan their profile or posts for data that could further enhance your future blogs.
Conclusion
Hopefully, you can see how useful it is to combine Khoros Intelligence with your community. Connecting your dedicated brand community with the broader online social networks is a great way not only to engage new people but to expand the ways that you can inform and help a bigger part of the world.
What are some of the ways that you are combining your brand community with broader social network communities?
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