How to Grow Your Online Following with Dash Hudson’s Community Manager

[Originally published on the Dash Hudson blog.]

For businesses that operate online — especially those with ecommerce capabilities — the need for an engaged social community is greater than ever. More eyes are tuning into digital spaces right now, but the competition for those eyes is heating up. Here’s how you can set yourself apart, grow your online following, and convert customers through social media with Dash Hudson’s Community Manager tool:

• Sort and respond to comments by recency so you never miss a communication.
• Search for specific terms to find potential new customers or opportunities to boost brand reputation.
• Broaden the scope of influencer partnerships by focusing attention on their unique responses to your content.
• Win over the algorithm by increasing interactions and deepening follower relationships.

Build and Maintain Consumer Relationships

When it comes down to it, the physical and digital business spaces are really one and the same. On social channels, posts are the window displays, followers are the foot traffic, and live streams are the in-store activations. And then there’s the comments section — your community. It’s your fan club, word-of-mouth referral system, and customer service hub rolled into one. For ecommerce-enabled brands, leaving comments without responses is akin to leaving customers in an empty store: the shelves are stocked, but nobody is there to offer assistance, answer questions, or make recommendations. It tells them you don’t care about what they have to say, and everyone wants to feel important.

With Community Manager, you can get a bird’s eye view of all your comments in one place. This means no more scrolling through your profile or activity tab to find and respond to them — you can stay on top of your community without ever leaving the Dash Hudson platform. Each thumbnail on the main page indicates how many comments the post received and how many are left to check. This makes it easy to track what you still need to address and mark what’s been resolved. Organize your posts by recently published or recently commented to keep up with what users are saying across your feed in real time.

But it isn’t just about the volume of comments you’re responding to — the content of the comments can play a major role in your brand’s reputation on social. A simple search for “do you ship to” or “where can I buy” means you can create more sales opportunities by directing potential customers to the right place. Furthermore, a search for comments including terms like “where is,” “not arrived,” or “shipping date” can quickly turn a negative experience into a positive one, saving potential lost time and revenue in the process. Making this search process a part of your daily routine ensures these questions are addressed within 24 hours.

Strengthen Influencer Partnerships

Influencer partnerships are a key component of social marketing. These are business relationships that involve trust and a keen understanding of goals. Maintaining a strong connection with the influencers you’re working with is crucial to the outcome of every campaign. Your audience and the influencer’s audience can see right through phony interactions. They don’t want to feel like you sponsored someone just to reach their fans — they want to know that person genuinely cares about the product they’re sharing and that you support them 100%. Authenticity is the crux of a solid partnership on any social channel.

Taking advantage of Community Manager is a great way to find influencers to work with in the first place. Users who are already commenting on your posts and loving your products are the best people to reach out to for partnerships. Once you’re connected, you can tap Relationship IQ to track influencer metrics and posts — and give them VIP treatment by checking off the “Influencers’ comments only” box in Community Manager. This allows you to filter comments exclusively from your influencers and take extra time to provide them with a thoughtful response.

Create a Shared Community Space

It’s no secret that the Instagram algorithm favors engagement. The more engaged your audience is with your posts, the more Instagram boosts those posts to an even larger crowd. So, how do you foster engagement? It starts with generating interest, of course. Share posts that your followers actually care about. Next, give them a call to action to encourage interactivity. Savvy marketers are using this time to ask their followers questions in the captions of posts. This is a great way to ramp up your comment count, but it also opens the door for meaningful two-way conversations — and that’s a much more valuable way to build a community.

Whether you’re looking to maintain the status quo of online operations or keep up with and build upon a sudden influx in sales or customers, consistency with your presence, replies, and reactions is important. Regular conversations between brands and followers tells the algorithm you care about each other and, the closer you are, the more likely it is that your post will be prioritized in their feed. Essentially all you have to do is spread more love on social and watch your business get it back in droves.

Header image: @ohmynessa

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