10 tools to make you a better community manager
In my last post, I delved into the role of community marketing manager and revealed what it’s like to work at a fast-growing SaaS startup.
Essentially, both involve wearing many different hats: customer support officer, social media manager, content marketer, data analyst and copywriter, just to name a few.
Having to juggle all of these responsibilities at once is made possible by having the right tools at my disposal. So in this post, I’m going to share the secret weapons that every community manager should have in their arsenal.
Staying focused ⚡️
Like most type-A personalities, I am a massive fan of lists. They help me tackle all of life’s problems, from what I’m going to eat for dinner this week, to working through existential crises (e.g. which designer staples will my wardrobe consist of when I’m rich and famous?).
While nothing beats putting pen to paper, my daily output of lists isn’t fair on the trees, so I use Evernote instead. Each morning, I’ll create a note of my to-dos for the day, and cross them out as I go. It’s also great for drafting copy, writing up strategies and jotting down ideas, which I can easily share with my teammates at Quuu. I like the way you can organise your ramblings into different ‘notebooks’.
Keeping in touch 💬
Part of my role at Quuu is dealing with support queries from our 60K users, and we use customer engagement platform Intercom to communicate with them every step of the way.
However, Intercom is much more than a live chat app: it combines sales, marketing and customer service, all under one roof. The Respond feature is what we use to have conversations with leads and customers in real-time, but the Engage feature is most useful to me as a community marketing manager. I use it for pretty much all of our email marketing; it’s super easy to segment your audience, format content and manage responses.
As a remote team, Quuu wouldn’t exist without Slack.
Slack is our virtual office. People often ask me if I get lonely working remotely, but the honest answer is that I don’t because I’m talking to my teammates all day! The first thing I do when I start work in the morning is open Slack and say hello to everyone, just like I would do if we worked together in a physical office (or maybe spending all day cooped up with the same people actually makes you not want to talk to them? 🤔).
I’ll stay chatting to the team throughout the day, keeping in touch about work and updating them on other random thoughts/food cravings that pop into my mind.
However, Slack isn’t just for internal communications. Slack groups are becoming an increasingly popular platform on which to build online communities. As they’re invite-only, they’re the equivalent of private members clubs on the social media landscape. At Quuu, I manage a Slack group for our crew of Quuurators (high-profile brand ambassadors), and I’m also part of a few others to stay connected with people in my industry.
Getting social 📱
The Quuu app is integrated with Buffer, which has always been my favourite social media scheduler. I’m a sucker for design and Buffer is one of the slickest platforms on the market. They’re also genius at branding; take, for example, their customer support team, dubbed ‘Happiness Heroes’, who will probably be the nicest people you ever talk to online (they could legitimately double as therapists).
I use Buffer to schedule Quuu’s social content across Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. This includes automated suggestions from Quuu, as well as our own content, which I manually schedule.
Instagram is one of the hottest social platforms right now — and don’t be fooled into thinking it’s just for hipster coffee shops and fashion bloggers.
Despite not having a physical product to take pictures of, Instagram is proving to be a fantastic channel for growing brand awareness at Quuu. Over the past couple of months, we’ve been building a community there by posting content about remote working and digital nomadism.
Instagram scheduling tool Grum has made it much easier for me to manage posts for this channel. I usually schedule a couple of posts each morning, then that’s one thing taken care of for the day. What I really like about Grum is that you can include the first comment for each post you schedule. I fill these up with relevant hashtags to attract more eyeballs (choose 10 small, 10 mid-size and 10 big hashtags for each post).
OK, so I might be a little biased here, but if you’re in charge of populating your brand’s social feeds with content and you’re not using Quuu — well, start right now.
We all know that sharing relevant, helpful content is a surefire way to engage your social followings. The problem is finding the time to source that content, especially if, like me, you’re amassing a large collection of hats. You might find a service that automates that for you, but you’re not quite comfortable leaving your company’s brand reputation in the hands of an algorithm.
That’s where Quuu comes in. All of our content has been hand-curated by real people (like me, a real, live human being 🙋) to make sure it’s the kind of thing you’ll be happy sharing. Quuu saves me the headache of worrying about what to post on our social feeds each day, giving me more time to focus on creating and promoting our own content.
Even better, we’ll soon be releasing our own scheduler, so you can manage all your social activity from one place. I won’t spoil the surprise for you any further, so keep an eye on our Twitter for updates!
Speaking of promoting our own content, Quuu Promote is the first and most valuable step in my promotion strategy for every blog post I need to amplify.
You simply submit the URL of your post, create an accompanying share text for social, and it will be shared by real people in your niche across Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+.
It’s a failsafe way to increase social engagement, drive blog traffic and up your search engine rankings. If you include your Twitter handle in the share text, you’ll be notified every time someone tweets your post (prepare yourself for a lot of notifications).
I’d really recommend liking these tweets, and starting conversations when you can — it’s great for making new connections.
Arts and crafts 🎨
I’m no graphic designer, but social media platforms are increasingly favouring visual content — after all, you need to stand out in such a saturated space.
Canva is your golden ticket to polished graphics, even when you have zero knowledge of design.
Let’s say I’m posting in Quuu’s Facebook group and want to ensure our members see it. I’ll whip up a quick design in Canva and add the image to my post.
Recently, Canva have added a new animation feature that lets you download your graphics as GIFs, as well as static images. We’ve experimented with this tool at Quuu when repurposing our blog posts across social, with good results.
On the subject of eye-catching visuals, a funny GIF never goes amiss! I use them in conversations, social posts, emails and more at Quuu.
GIPHY has been integrated into most social networks and messaging apps, but I’d really recommend downloading the app for mobile too. I find it especially useful for posting directly to Instagram, either as a post on your feed or in a story.
And the fun doesn’t stop there! To make your own GIFs and fool everyone into thinking you’re an animation whizz, download GIPHY Capture. In addition to creating amusing memes, it’s a seriously handy way to share moving screengrabs with your team and customers (like the one of my Twitter notifications above 👆).
You’ve got mail 📬
Last, but not least, Revue is one of the coolest tools I’ve seen in the marketing space over the past couple of years.
Revue is a no-fuss way to create weekly newsletters and ‘get your thoughts into people’s inboxes’. It’s particularly good for curating content digests, which is what we use it for at Quuu: every Friday, we send out a roundup of our favourite submissions in Quuu Promote that week.
All your newsletters as saved as issues on a custom profile page, where people can sign up to receive your emails. You can schedule your issues ahead of time and — best of all — share them on social media to keep that subscriber count growing.
So now you know my secrets! I hope you’ve discovered some new tools from reading this post, and let me know which ones you can’t live without in the comments 🙂
