When you’re done replying to all comments on your page, what’s left to do?
At Hearts, we love to take this time to perform outbound community management.
What is outbound community management?
Outbound community management is the practice of proactively engaging with other brands and trending topics on social media related to your brand. It’s an essential part of any community management strategy because not only does it connect you with new customers and like-minded brands, it also helps you reach your marketing goals such as brand visibility.
Here are some outbound community management tactics we use:
- Leaving a comment on another brand’s post and contributing something substantial to the conversation
- Leaving a comment on a trending post that’s relevant to your brand
- Reaching out to like-minded accounts using or following similar hashtags you use on your feed
- Commenting and liking a few of their recent posts
- Reacting or responding to their Instagram Stories
- Reaching out to influencers which you think may be a fit for your brand for future collaboration opportunities
Remember to only join conversations that you can meaningfully contribute to. For example, if you’re a funeral director, we probably don’t need you to weigh in on the new McDonald’s ice cream flavour (unless it looks like death, then by all means, comment as you please.)
Why should your brand care about outbound community management?
Often, many self-serving brands don’t get the engagement they deserve. This is because they aren’t playing an active part in their audience’s community and aren’t reaching out to the right people. By extending the conversation outside of your profiles, we can initiate comments from outside your existing customer base, generating more buzz around your brand.
Outbound community management helps you:
- Gain exposure and drive people to your social media profiles
- Tap into another brand’s audience which looks similar to yours
- Show the human side of your brand
- Add your 2 cents in a conversation your brand has significant knowledge over, to be seen as a thought leader in the industry
- Introduce yourself to new brands which can form potential partnerships i.e. tonic brands can reach out to bars, pet food brands can reach out to owners with pets etc.
You can take this tweet by GEICO for example:
GEICO replied to this tweet by Lindsay about her neighbour playing the Pink Panther theme song. Though GEICO has nothing to do with the Pink Panther, they saw an opportunity to connect with their potential audience. This tweet was talked about on the American Life Podcast and the author of the tweet even gave GEICO a shoutout for replying to her. Now that’s the closest thing you can get to free marketing. The ROI on this tweet is exponential at this stage and it comes from social listening and knowing when to engage.
Looking to expand your visibility on social media?
We’ll do all the social listening and proactive outreach so you don’t have to. We’ve developed unique outbound strategies which have proven to be effective and successful in acquiring new customers.
We’re ready to chat whenever you are. Start a conversation with us here.