Social media has forever changed the consumer journey. An inseparable part of our daily lives, social platforms and online communities influence our choices, opinions, and interactions. For brand marketers, leveraging social media for paid performance marketing is no longer enough — organic social efforts and audience-centric community management are essential elements of a social-first brand.
Social media community management is the key to driving sustainable growth, long-term loyalty, advocacy, and retention. To help you master this space and foster meaningful connections with audiences, here are the most effective strategies and must-know insights for community management best practices.
1. Establish a Social-First Persona
Your brand voice — the consistent tone and style used across channels — lays the foundation for how your audience perceives and connects with you. A “social-first” persona refines this voice by taking the core ethos of brand voice and adapting it to fit the unique and dynamic environment of social media.
Your brand’s social persona must be both consistent with the core of brand ethos and platform-specific. The key to a successful social-first brand voice is to be endemic to each social platform the brand is on, while ensuring the overall tone of voice and identity remains consistent.
To build a relatable persona, brands must start by deeply understanding their target audience: who they are, what they value, and where they spend their time online. Relatability fosters connections that feel natural and authentic, driving meaningful engagement. Equally critical is maintaining authenticity. Today’s audiences are quick to recognize inauthentic content, with 68% saying it prompts them to unfollow brands. By aligning content with core brand values and cultural awareness, you can foster trust and loyalty.
Pro Tip: Avoid both rigid guidelines that stifle creativity as well as regular trend-chasing. Instead, embrace a balanced and agile approach that allows your brand to tap into trending moments on the fly while maintaining a consistent identity.
2. Build a Community-Driven Feedback Loop
Engaging with your audience isn’t just about responding — it’s about creating a self-sustaining cycle of listening, iterating, and acting. Viral Nation’s community management team underlines the importance of feeding audience desires, pain-points, and values into your brand’s interactions across social channels. A community-driven feedback loop ensures that your strategies remain relevant and resonate deeply with your audience.
- Social Listening: Use tools to monitor sentiment and trends within your audience.
- Audience-Centric Strategy: Base your content and engagement tactics on real-time insights from your community.
- Measure and Iterate: Continuously refine your approach using analytics to track the performance of your content and interactions.
Impact: Brands adopting a community-driven feedback loop into their social-first strategies are 8x more likely to exceed revenue goals by 25% or more. For more insights and a comprehensive breakdown of the social-first strategy behind community management, consider downloading The Building Blocks of Social First Growth: How Community-Centric Strategies Drive Engagement and ROI.
3. Leverage Proactive and Reactive Community Management
Effective community management hinges on building relationships through both proactive and reactive strategies:
Reactive engagement is centered on one-to-one engagement on owned channels. This could include timely responses to customer inquiries, comments, and complaints. It’s about addressing immediate needs while creating a positive experience that strengthens trust. On the other hand, proactive engagement involves actively searching and identifying opportunities to join relevant conversations and cultural moments in earned spaces to connect with new audiences. By participating authentically in conversations happening both on and off your owned channels, you broaden your brand’s reach and resonance, ensuring you remain top of mind while enhancing your relevance and deepening bonds in real time.
Viral Nation’s community management experts have found success employing both approaches: Agile teams that adapt to real-time opportunities maximize these benefits.
4. Incentivize Participation with Contests and Gifting
Surprise and delight strategies continue to be among the most effective ways to grow brand sentiment and engage your audience on social media — this could be anything from contests, surprise promotions, and gifting campaigns.
Hosting creative contests or giveaways encourages followers to interact with your brand, whether by liking, commenting, or sharing your posts, not only fostering positive affinity but also broadening reach. Surprise and delight campaigns can also be amplified by creator partnerships, driving humanized engagement and enabling both parties to reach new audiences.
The Building Blocks of Social-First Growth
Learn how community-centric strategies drive engagement and ROI
5. Amplify Paid Boosting Strategically
When paired with organic social content and a robust community management initiative, paid performance marketing can accelerate growth by targeting audiences most likely to follow and engage. Community management best practices ensure your content reaches the right people, not just more people. When optimized for follower growth and engagement, paid campaigns can reach target demographics that are primed to convert, significantly outperforming ad campaigns executed without organic and community components.
6. Harness the Power of Social-Experiential Marketing
Social-first experiential marketing creates a throughline from in-person activations to social commerce to deepen connections and amplify social ROI. By creating memorable experiences that are sharable and strategically linked back to social media before, during, and after the event, brands not only foster emotional connections for higher loyalty and advocacy, but they also drive higher ROI and social commerce. Here are a few ways Viral Nation’s social-experiential marketing experts have found success with in-person events wrapped in a social media halo:
- Cultural Moments: Partner with creators and influencers to democratize brand activations, making them accessible and shareable.
- Emotional Engagement: Use creative and community-centric strategies around in-person experiences to evoke strong emotional responses that enhance brand recall.
- Data-Driven Strategy: Collect qualitative insights from events to refine future campaigns and improve community alignment.
Impact: 91% of customers feel more optimistic about a brand after participating in an experiential activation.
7. Monitor and Learn from Your Communities
Understanding your audience’s preferences, behaviors, and sentiments is key to fostering long-term loyalty. Social listening is a core aspect of social media community management: social media monitoring tools like Viral Nation Secure™ enable brands to track sentiment and find opportunities to engage by identifying organic brand mentions across text, image, video, audio, and OCR data. Additionally, monitoring branded and industry-specific hashtags helps uncover opportunities for engagement and user-generated content, while benchmarking against competitors ensures your strategy remains cutting-edge.
By integrating social listening tools and practices into your community management efforts, you can enhance brand safety, optimize brand fit for creator campaigns, and cultivate a deeply engaged audience that drives sustainable growth.
Social Media Community Management that Drives ROI
Social media community management is both an art and a science. By adopting a social-first persona, incorporating a community-driven feedback loop into your strategy, engaging both proactively and reactively, and harnessing audience-centric strategies — such as surprise and delight, social experiential, and paid boosting wrapped in organic creator content — to drive social commerce, you can amplify ROI for your brand.
Community management is a long-term commitment, but the rewards — from loyal brand advocates to long-term brand building — are well worth the effort. Start implementing these community management best practices today and transform your social media presence into a growth engine for your business.
