Category Archives: Community Management

Hootsuite vs Sproutsocial – which best to monitor your social campaigns?

I’ve been using Hootsuite for about a year now, prior to that I was using Spredfast and Tweetdeck. So what made me decide to change?

Reporting in SproutSocial

The level of reporting is stunning – and that’s one of the key reasons why I moved over. I run a number of campaigns for clients and reporting is important for measuring the ROI for the social campaigns.

Walking the talk is important for me as well – and for one of the other businesses I run, On Landscape, I wanted to measure the reach of our campaigns more efficiently.

Understanding the demographics of the followers and fans is imperative, so you can see that you are targeting your audience. More importantly you can then respond to the information about your followers e.g. On Landscape we realised quite a lot of our subscribers and followers / fans are international so are now targeting more international content.

Feeds

Pulling in RSS feeds is great, so you don’t have to dive off into Google Reader. More importantly the lists can be managed and viewed here.

Smart Inbox

Being able to move tweets that you’ve responded to into the archive is an efficient way of managing Twitter & Facebook. The ability to see a track of the conversations with users and add notes is useful. Certainly for our business On Landscape we can marry this up with users on the site which makes it more of a social CRM in that aspect.

Hootsuite doesn’t alert you to when you have a RT nor a new follower, which is a key thing when building an audience and community. SproutSocial does both, which is a great feature.

Any downsides to SproutSocial?

Sprout Social doesn’t support Google+ which is a bit of an annoyance having to manage that separately. It does cost more than Hootsuite, but Hootsuite has a lot of hidden costs, as you add users and extra credits for reporting, it soon adds up.

Conclusion

Sproutsocial has made me more focused on the campaign managment as I get more reporting on the types of content, so I can evaluate what content generates more engagement, which in turn drives more fans and followers.

Think Visibility: Building Communities on WordPress

I presented at Think Visibility 8 talking on Building Online Communities using WordPress.

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IzziWizziKids Interview: Using Social Media for Customer Research

We caught up with Alison Boxall Gordon, founder of IzziWizziKids based in Wakefield, Yorkshire. In this interview we hear from Alison on how she’s used social media to grow IzziWizziKids, an online interactive play forum. Using videos, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, the online community of parents talking and sharing know-how of kids play has been a great success.

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Launching a Membership Site on WordPress: Plugins Review

Using WordPress, there are many plugins which will enable you to expand the functionality of the website to grow a community & membership. We have looked and reviewed a few plugins.

Membership Plugins on WordPress

Enabling different level of membership on a site to enable only subscribed members to rad certain content is a great way to build a community. Having some free content is key to hook people in and to convert browsers -> members.

When choosing which plugins to use, a key area to research is the support they provide. There’s always going to be some glitches (it’s software after all!) but how companies respond and manage their support is key. This plugin is fundamental to your members, and if there are problems, you don’t want to annoy your members!

Upgrading to the paid for plugins is also recommended and if these are fundamental to your business, perhaps looking at the support contracts as well. (more…)

Community Management – gardeners or managers?

I’ve recently been having a discussion with some friends at the RSA Digital Engagement team about how to moderate a community. The main thrust of the discussions have been around cultivating or managing.

Cultivating a community
Cultivating a community should be about building knowledge and experience within the community, so it builds as a knowledge community. The word ‘manager’ creates the sense that as an organisation you are building the community on your terms, not the advocated and enthusiasts. It should formulaic, rigid, and flexible. (more…)

Vision for Leeds 2030 – Have your Say

You are invited to take part in a conversation inquiring into people’s dreams for the future possibilities of Leeds.
This event, for people working in the business sector, is one of a series of small events playing around the edges of the official Vision for Leeds 2030 process – stimulated by it, contributing to it… and challenging it! (more…)