Challenge for Social Media Marketers: Adjusting to Community Conversation Dynamics
Posted by Vaibhav Kalamdani on June 29, 2011
How often do you come across Brands that speak the community’s language and tone? The basic mantra of social media marketing is to understand who your members are, what tone do they speak in, where they are from, and what is their want. Another important component to identify is what environment these members are conversing in. For example, a set of members at a seminar would react and communicate differently compared to Facebook.
Brand Pages are typically classified into:
Customer Service Pages: These include the typical customer service voice that tries to address queries, provide latest information, etc. Their main intention is to protect the Brand’s online reputation, irrespective of the number of fans and interactions they generate. You would mainly find service-related or technology-related Brands taking this route.
Community Pages: These Pages are dynamic in nature. They include a mix of communication tones to best suit the community’s characteristics. You can expect lots of conceptualization, innovations, flexibility and transparency in the way they manage the community members. They speak the tone that their members speak to make them comprehend the information better, create opportunities for interaction and build value over a long time.
Typical Promotional Pages: Generally, all that these Pages care about are numbers, mostly in terms of fans. They sometimes go to the extent in believing that having 10,000 BASIC fans and an average post interaction of 30 is better than having 2,000 QUALITY fans and an average post interaction of 35. A general perception that they carry is higher number of fans means higher impressions, which means more chances of getting clicks and reach of their promotions. But what they fail to consider is how many active users they have on the Page.
Community Members Rule:
Irrespective of which genre your Page is, what matters at the end of the day is that your community members must find a reason to join and stay glued to your Page. For this, you have to closely observe what they say, how they say and when they say, and chalk out a communication tactic around it.
Your community members need to be felt special, important, respected, and friendly in order to create an environment of trust, transparency and fun, where they are comfortable to talk to the Brand. Hence, think before you upload that next post on your Facebook Page!
