1. Community managers (and their agencies) live and breathe social media

If your job is not living and breathing social media 24/7,  chances are you are not able to keep up with what’s happening on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, etc.  While adding the odd tweet and keeping an eye on Facebook comments might be manageable, you might not have time to do a great deal more.

Creating content calendars that ensure that every post is optimized to create the maximum impact and ensuring that your Twitter account follows all the key influentials in your market may be enough to fill your day.

Also ask yourself if you are keeping up with the latest Facebook competition rules? Or working out how the Twitter API changes could impact your brand’s output? And what about other platforms – should you be focusing on Google+ this year or Pinterest?

Community managers will be up-to-date on all platforms, what they can offer and how they can potentially work best for your brand. It is their job after all. Why not let the experts worry about the finer details?

2. Community managers can offer a fresh perspective

Sometimes working on one specific thing or brand can make things jaded after a while. Outsourcing your social media efforts will invite a fresh perspective to the table and stimulate discussion around the brand and how to make it stand out in the fast-changing social media sphere.

Your community manager will have worked on or read about other branded online campaigns. They know what has worked in the past, what could work in the future, and what could potentially be a social media disaster.

They will also be able to advise on and devise the social media strategy that is essential to ensure your brand flourishes online and offline.

3. Community managers are enthusiastic about what they do and will be backed up by a team

If you divide the community management duties between individuals in your company, chances are the actual management of the online entities end up falling through the cracks as other tasks take precedence.

Also, unless proper guidelines are set, your brand’s social voice and tone could end up being fragmented across the social media entities.

An agency can provide the important neutrality good community management requires and will have a team set to ensure your community management is kept consistent regardless of summer holidays or staff turnover. They have also actively pursued this career, so will be eager to do it well.

Finally let’s not forget one very important thing. If you outsource your community management then you can be assured that your Facebook pages will always be updated and that someone is responding to questions on Twitter and other social networks in a timely and coordinated manner.

Your brand won’t be joining the thousands of others whose Facebook and Twitter accounts lay dormant and are an embarrassment to the company and the staff that were supposed to populate them.

1. Attract  your be st suspects (potential clients)…

Research shows that nowadays especially because of social media, customer relies heavily on information from peers, rather than traditional media sources or from the brand or seller, itself. This means that in order to attract quality suspects, you, as the business owner, must find ways to spread positive word-of-mouth through existing customers and supporters and turn them into advocates or evangelists of your products.  Three key elements drive this process: simple ideas, word-of-mouth friendliness, and tools that facilitate online customer conversations such as social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, etc.
2. Convert your prospects…
A key challenge facing any business owner is how to find high-value prospects and nurture them into customers. Lowering sales costs and increasing closing rates are paramount to winning the loyalty game. However, to weed out high-potential prospects from so-so suspects, it is critical that a company’s online search campaign be as spot-on as possible in addressing three areas: who to target, how to position products and services, and how to effectively qualify prospects.  An excellent way is to do landing pages.  There are some helpful sites that facilitate the creation of landing pages.  One of them is unbounce.com – a landing page platform.
3. Perform well for first-time customers…
Loyalty research has consistently confirmed the importance of a seller’s accuracy, reliability and responsiveness in transacting with first time customers.  This is important because first time customers are “trying” out a new product and their perception of the value they receive from  their first purchase will drive their repeat purchase decisions.  And with the ubiquitousness of social media, customer feedback ( be it positive and/or negative) is a sure way to get the message out there instantly.   However, as much as possible, you would not want negative feedback/problems to be ahead of you.  The payoffs for damage control can be too high.
4. Anchor your repeat customers…
Repeat customers expect to be known and their preferences remembered. Truly empowering the front line with this capability is an often arduous, on-going challenge in many businesses.  So digital social loyalty could serve as a very helpful and advantageous tool to create a “wow” customer experience and make repeat customers happy and loyal.
5. Maximise your existing clients…
Clients are buyers who feel a real commitment to buy from you and proves it by buying every product or service of yours they can reasonably use. If a customer is buying something from a competitor that they could be buying from you, consider that buyer a repeat customer rather than a client. So how can you consistently earn maximum share of wallet and turn a repeat customer into a client? One way is to continually educate your clients about your full breadth of products and services and convert them into your evangelists.  That is one of the most effective strategies of a successful digital social loyalty program.
6. Make good use of your advocates/evangelists…
There’s an important difference between a client and an advocate.  In simple terms, advocates do more than simply buy from you. Advocates are engaged customers who demonstrate their vendor loyalty through such activities as spreading positive word-of- mouth, recruiting new potential clients/customers and helping their vendors improve. So, how can a business build stronger advocacy today? One very effective way is to create a secure environment in which customers can be listened to and engaged over a finite period of time. And by far, the digital social loyalty program is the best and most cost effective strategy and tool to listen, engage, and give  your customers a very satisfying and WOW experience.