INBOX INSIGHTS, August 31, 2022: Community Management, Members Only Social Media - Trust Insights Marketing Analytics Consulting

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Lessons From an Accidental Community Manager

I’m not great at social media. I’m pretty terrible at it. I’m terrible at the parts where I have to promote myself and create marketing jargon. (I feel like) I tend to come across as a used car salesperson.

But social media is also about connecting, networking, and fostering relationships. This is where building a community can be useful. A few different Analytics for Marketers members asked what it takes to run a community so I figured it was time to put my thoughts together.

Here is what I’ve learned so far – hopefully, some of this helps you if you’re new to community management or just want a different perspective.

Lesson 1: Have an intention – and stick with it

This might be where a lot of communities go wrong. If you’re building a community with the sole intention to sell your stuff, say that upfront. Before you start building anything, start with some basic questions:

Why does your brand need a community?
What will you get out of it?
What will community members get out of it?

That last question is the most important one. If you can’t give people a reason to show up, they won’t. Make sure you have a clear intention and that you’re transparent about it.

Lesson 2: Set expectations

Just like knowing your intention, define what is and is not allowed. Create some guidelines and be willing to enforce them. In the 4+ years that we’ve been running Analytics for Marketers, I’ve only had to remove one member for violating our guidelines. When a new member joins we give them a set of rules so that no one can say, “I didn’t know”. Removing someone isn’t fun – but if you’re not living up to your own expectations you can’t expect members to do the same.

Lesson 3: Active listening

Don’t just wait for your turn to talk. If someone posts something in your community, unless it is addressed specifically to you, take a moment to pause. Breathe. You don’t have to jump all over the poster with a response. Let the rest of the community chime in before you stomp all over it.

Lesson 4: Be authentic to your brand

My personal brand is me. So naturally so is the brand persona of Trust Insights. Well, it’s half me, half Chris, with a dash of John. What that means is that I speak and react in the community the same way I do in real life. I’m sarcastic. I’m hilarious (I swear, it’s true). I can admit when I’m wrong and I’m not afraid to tell people what I don’t know. When you start posting on behalf of your company (or yourself) decide who you want to be. What are you known for? What is your voice? Does the culture need to be buttoned up or can it be more casual? There is no right answer except the ones that work for you.

Lesson 5: Not every post will hit the mark

This is still tough for me some days. Since the majority of our posts get some kind of engagement it’s hard when a post doesn’t. But it’s ok. As your community grows, what they respond to will change. If you find that you’re getting less and less engagement over time, you may want to revisit your intention and the kinds of content you’re posting. When in doubt, ask people what they want and give it to them.

Lesson 6: You’re not alone

This might be one of the best things about having a community. You’re not the only one there. You can ask for help and support. You can ask for guest moderators and user-generated content. You can ask questions you don’t know the answers to.

Lesson 7: Know where your audience wants to spend their time.

If you create a community on Slack but your members want to be over on Discord you have a mismatch and you’ll have a hard time growing. When we originally started Analytics for Marketers it was a Facebook group. A couple of months in we realized that Slack made much more sense for the kinds of people we wanted to be able to connect with. We recently talked with the community about moving to Discord and learned that, at least for us, that’s not something we need to consider any time soon.

Keep in mind that there are lots of great community managers out there who focus solely on this function. These are the lessons that I have personally learned through trial and error. I hope you find one or more of my lessons helpful!

Are you running a community and have your own lessons you’ve learned?

Come tell me about it in our free Slack group, Analytics for Marketers »

– Katie Robbert, CEO

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In this week’s In-Ear Insights, Katie and Chris discuss content strategy for social media, especially the difference between performative and conversational social media content. Learn what the differences are, why they matter, and how you might want to approach your own social media content strategy. Tune in to learn more!

Watch/listen to this episode of In-Ear Insights here »

Last week on So What? The Marketing Analytics and Insights Live show, we looked at what problems AI can and can’t solve. Catch the replay here »

This Thursday at 1 PM Eastern, we’re going to take a tour through Discord to help marketers familiarize themselves with the software. Are you following our YouTube channel? If not, click/tap here to follow us!

Here’s some of our content from recent days that you might have missed. If you read something and enjoy it, please share it with a friend or colleague!

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In this week’s Data Diaries, let’s expand on what Katie talked about with community management. When it comes to any kind of community, one of the things you want to know is how you’re doing. For Analytics for Marketers, since we own the Slack channel, we can export the raw data for any public channel (we cannot export anyone’s private messages, which is a good thing!) for further analysis.

Let’s first take a look at something easy and obvious: community activity. How active is the community? One of the advantages of exporting data is you can do some filtering on it – for an activity report, you’ll want to filter yourself out. After all, if you’re doing all the talking and no one else is, your community isn’t really thriving.

Excluding ourselves, this is what the last 4 years of our Slack community has looked like. Note the BIG change in volume in the last 4 months? We changed some tactics about how we manage our community to very good effect.

Next, let’s see what people are talking about:

Again, excluding ourselves, we see that marketing analytics is the biggest topic, followed by Google Analytics, Google Data Studio, and social media. These are the things people are discussing in aggregate. Doing pulse checks like this helps ensure that you’re stimulating discussions on the topics your community cares about the most.

Finally, what about the people themselves?

For privacy reasons, we’ve obscured the different participants. However, what we clearly see – because we’ve excluded ourselves – is that there are a couple of people who are HUGE participants, and then the rest of the population in our community. What would you do with information like this? If you’re thinking about asking volunteers to help moderate or be community ambassadors, your list of top users is a great place to start. People who are already invested in your community are more likely to want to help make it grow.

Private social media communities you own aren’t without analytics, and with their required data exports for compliance, you can take your data and thoroughly understand your community.

This is a roundup of the best content you and others have written and shared in the last week.

SEO, Google, and Paid Media

Content Marketing

Data Science and AI

Are you a member of our free Slack group, Analytics for Marketers? Join 2400+ like-minded marketers who care about data and measuring their success. Membership is free – join today. Members also receive sneak peeks of upcoming data, credible third-party studies we find and like, and much more. Join today!

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We heard you, and we’ve got you covered. The new Trust Insights Google Analytics 4 For Marketers Course is the comprehensive training solution that will get you up to speed thoroughly in Google Analytics 4.

What makes this different than other training courses?

You’ll learn how Google Tag Manager and Google Data Studio form the essential companion pieces to Google Analytics 4, and how to use them all together
You’ll learn how marketers specifically should use Google Analytics 4, including the new Explore Hub with real world applications and use cases
You’ll learn how to determine if a migration was done correctly, and especially what things are likely to go wrong
You’ll even learn how to hire (or be hired) for Google Analytics 4 talent specifically, not just general Google Analytics
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Content Marketing World, September 2022, Cleveland, OH, USA
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