SCMD 140: Growing an Online Community

1. Understanding Your Audience

In SCMD 140: Growing an Online Community, youll learn the fundamentals of growing your online community. HootSuites VP of Community, Dave Olson, guides you through lessons and case studies from years on the job. In the rst of four lessons, youll learn where community ts into your existing organization, how to get to know your audience, and where to amplify your message. Have a question as youre going through the course? No problem! Tag your tweets with#SCMD140 to hear from fellow students and @HootSuite_U. Dont forget to say hello to our speaker @daveohoots!

Community & Your Company

Community means a lot of different things for different organizations - so where does it t within your company? In this video, learn how you can dene community and create one with your existing customers.

What You Will Learn

How to amplify your customer stories to help your brand How your customers can contribute to your company Why community is important for keeping company culture alive

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How do you dene community? How do you think an online community can help your organization?

You can also tweet us your answer using the class hashtag, #SCMD140

SCMD 140: Growing an Online Community

Understanding Your Companys Challenges

Youve already learned how community touches every department, so nows the time to see how you can become the problem solvers in your organization. In this video, learn how social media can help community managers overcome company-wide challenges.

What You Will Learn

How to utilize different social networks to address specic problems How to set and measure your baseline for success Why its important to x one problem at a time

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What do you think the main difference is between Facebook and Twitter? Is one more valuable to your business than the other?

SCMD 140: Growing an Online Community

Identifying Your Companys Goals

Avoid becoming the miscellaneous department and take charge of your community role. In this video you will learn how to develop a scalable process to grow different departments in your organization into self-sufcient communities.

What You Will Learn

Why identifying internal stakeholders is vital to your companys success What you should cover in meetings with different departments How to create and measure the success of an editorial calendar

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How can you empower different people or departments in your company using social media? What new communities could you create for more engagement?

SCMD 140: Growing an Online Community

Researching & Understanding Your Audience

Whats the best way to build your community? Taking time to get to know them! In this video youll learn how Dave gets up close and personal with HootSuite fans.

What You Will Learn

How to easily research each member of your community How to learn what your customers are talking about Why the Insight tab in the HootSuite dashboard is a hidden weapon

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How many members of your community are you familiar with? Where is the greatest opportunity to get to know them on a more personal basis?

SCMD 140: Growing an Online Community

The Power of Inuencers

As you start to get to know your audience, youll begin to see recurring faces. In this video you will learn to leverage inuencers for your brand, whether theyre helping with support, sharing opinions, or raising their hands.

What You Will Learn

How to dene what an inuencer is for your company (hint: its not all followers and Klout scores!) How you can retain inuencers through early access and other perks Why nding people who care about your brand makes your job easier - and more fun!

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Do you know who your inuential customers are? How can you seek them out?

SCMD 140: Growing an Online Community

Creating a Unique Messaging Plan

Now its time to start working on your messaging plan - what are you trying to say, and who are the people who care to hear it? Learn how to write your messaging specically for each social channel.

What You Will Learn

Why nding out where your audience lives online is important for your messaging How to respect the nuances of different social networks to remain authentic How to tailor your messaging lengths and multimedia

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Do you create your messaging for different channels? Does it affect your customer engagement?

SCMD 140: Growing an Online Community

Nurturing Your Social Channels

Youve got the social media basics down, and youre thinking about expanding your social media presences to further amplify your content. Dave uses personal HootSuite case studies to show you how you can leverage different networks for different purposes in a scalable way.

What You Will Learn

Why you need to have the resources to scale before you plant new seeds How to scale your social media accounts with intention and purpose How you can utilize HootSuites App Directory to manage all your networks in one place

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What are you trying to accomplish with each social network? Go through your proles and write down your target audience and objectives for each network.

Great work! Now that you have a grasp on how to get started building your online community, its time to become a messaging expert in our next lesson: Strategies for Communication. 7

SCMD 140: Growing an Online Community

2. Strategies for Communication

Now that youve seen how social media can help you solve problems, its time to dive into how you can best communicate with your customers on social media. Dave walks you through what it takes to handle social media security, team collaboration, negative sentiment, and email marketing within your organization.

Creating Secure Company Proles

In this video, youll learn how to ensure that your social media proles are accurately reecting your organization, by maintaining control and avoiding embarrassing social media blunders.

What You Will Learn

Why social proles should be treated as intellectual property Why having current proles is integral to your brand How to manage your social media teams secure passwords

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How many people do you think should have password access to your social media accounts? How often should you be changing your passwords?

Bonus! Using a program like LastPass can allow you to share log-in credentials for your blog, newsletter client, and more without compromising your security You can also tweet us your answer using the class hashtag, #SCMD140 8

SCMD 140: Growing an Online Community

Increasing Efficiency Through Collaboration

Your community is the centre of your organization, and often times responding to inquiries and messages can be an overwhelming experience. In this video, youll learn how to reduce confusion and increase efciency on social media.

What You Will Learn

How to acknowledge, thank, and then hand off social messaging to the best resources Why you should jump into online conversations and how you can assign tweets How to coordinate your social media responses with your team

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What is the best way to create clear communication with your other departments to hand off social media requests? What do you need to know in order to achieve success?

SCMD 140: Growing an Online Community

Dealing With Negative Sentiment

Despite your marketing, what really matters to your search results and reputation is what your audience is saying. Learn from Daves personal experience dealing with negative sentiment, and how he coordinated with HootSuites support team to deliver customer happiness.

What You Will Learn

How to acknowledge customers and steer conversations towards the positive Why you should monitor more than just social media messaging online How to prepare messaging in advance and why feedback channels are important

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Do you have a social media crisis plan in place? What do you think should be included in it?

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SCMD 140: Growing an Online Community

Using Email in Addition to Your Social Channels

Learn how email can act as the glue that ties your social media together. Keep track of those lost conversations and see how email complements your social media activity

What You Will Learn

How to repurpose newsletter content into social media posts Why social share buttons and links are crucial to your email marketing How you can leverage your email signature to promote your social channels

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What else can you do to improve your email marketing and align it with your social media channels?

Awesome job, youre now halfway through the course! Keep learning in our next lesson: Monitoring & Filtering.

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SCMD 140: Growing an Online Community

3. Monitoring & Filtering

Get the most out of what your audience is saying! In this lesson you will learn how to effectively listen to your community while also ltering your content to get the right information at the right time. Dave Olson leads you through strategies for monitoring social chatter across multiple channels, networks, lists, and hashtags.

The Value of Online Monitoring

In this video, youll learn tactical tips and tricks for setting up your online monitoring. Dont forget to track variations of your brand name and misspellings!

What You Will Learn

Why tracking keywords associated with your brand is important Why geo-locating your search can help with events & community building Why sharing streams with your team can help with responses

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What keywords should you be tracking in addition to your company name? Is there an opportunity to geo-locate your tweets?

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SCMD 140: Growing an Online Community

The Power of Twitter Lists

Learn how to keep track of all the conversations you want while ltering out the noise. As Dave explains, lists are becoming more and more popular. In this video, learn how to take advantage of Twitter lists and how to organize them to make sense for your company.

What You Will Learn

Why lists are integral to your social media success How you can organize your lists by vertical, industry, or event How you can utilize private lists to track your competitors

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What kind of lists could you create for your account? Who are the people or companies that you should be paying close attention to?

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SCMD 140: Growing an Online Community

Utilizing Hashtags
Find out how you can use hashtags for your business and for your social media campaigns. A #hashtag is a powerful tool for ltering conversations on Twitter to get more of what you want as it denotes context within tweets.

What You Will Learn

What a hashtag is and how you can utilize them for your business What types of content hashtags are centered around How to use hashtags for your social media campaigns

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What hashtags do you currently use? What are others you could be creating or following?

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SCMD 140: Growing an Online Community

Optimizing Your Vocabulary

Now that youve learned how to use lists, hashtags, and searches, youll begin to start gathering valuable information on marketing and positioning. In this video, see how you can use unique, popular words to talk about what your company is building.

What You Will Learn

How to nd out what vocabulary your customers are using to describe your company How to gather information from your community and experiment with your messaging How to create valuable resources out of archived tweets

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What are some unique words or phrases that your customers use to describe your organization? How do they differ from your branding?

Keep it up! Just one more lesson to go until youve completed the course. Learn how to make it count in the next lesson: Measuring Success. 15

SCMD 140: Growing an Online Community

4. Measuring Success
Now that you have applied Daves tips and tricks for growing your community, its time to learn to measure what matters. How can your company dene the impact of your online community? In the last of four lessons, youll see how to look at the bigger picture and how social media can play a role in creating customer happiness.

What Denes Success?

In this video, learn the difference between measuring charts and graphs vs. measuring what your community has done for you. Youll see how to recognize what channels sparked growth and what audiences your messaging resonated with.

What You Will Learn

How to measure your success against your original goals What you should look at beyond the retweets and likes How you can combine analytics from social campaigns, company goals, and Google Analytics

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How has your company stacked up against its original goals? How can you improve how you track your success?

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SCMD 140: Growing an Online Community

The Happiness Barometer

Learn the key to measuring customer happiness as Dave explains how to track online sentiment about your company. In this video, hell talk about his experience dealing with a social media crisis and how they were able to turn sentiment around.

What You Will Learn

Why sentiment is important How to handle a crisis and turn it around The most important thing you can track to determine your success

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Set up a stream to track sentiment for your company - is it mainly positive or negative? What can you do to foster more happiness within your community?

Hoot Hoot, youre all done! Congratulations on finishing this course. Dont forget to keep all your owls in a row and take the exam for Growing Your Online Community. Excited as we are about #SCMD140? Tweet us at @HootSuite_U to let us know that youve finished this course and let us know your thoughts! 17