Content Planning for Community Managers

By Julia Bass and Brian Kotlyar

Published December 4, 2013

CONTENT PLANNING FOR COMMUNITY MANAGERS | December 4, 2013

©2013 Dachis Group | 515 Congress Ave., #2650 Austin, TX 78701 USA | T: +1 512-275-7825 | www.dachisgroup.com 2

Community managers are one of the only parts of an organization that are truly front-facing to

customers, prospects, advocates, and influencers. They are responsible for utilizing their deep

understanding of a brand’s audience to build brand affinity and loyalty through engagement.

These skills position community managers perfectly to lead their organizations into the brave new

world of relevant, timely marketing - also known as real-time marketing. Community managers

must learn to find trends relevant to their audiences and respond in creative ways in near real

time. Acquiring this new skill won’t always be easy, but it’s critical for the future of brand

marketing.

T h e C a s e f o r T i m e l y a n d R e l e v a n t C o n t e n t

Content is the primary tool in most community manager toolkits. Whether it’s an erudite blog

post or a hyper-relevant Tweet, content is a powerful way for brand marketers to connect with

audiences. According to Forbes, an estimated 60 percent of companies now employ some sort

of inbound content creation in their marketing strategies. But simply creating content isn’t

enough – audiences eventually tire of the same old product shots, cat photos, and holiday posts.

Timely and relevant content is the best way to ensure consistent engagement in any community.

Two great examples of this are Mini Cooper and Starbucks UK.

Mini Cooper

When was the last time a piece of social content your brand produced yielded more than 1

million social actions and hundreds of millions of impressions? Timely and relevant content has

the power to drive massive, unexpected returns on a simple fixed investment. You’re making

content anyway - why not make it good enough to go viral?

In February 2013 Mini Cooper did jus that when they hopped on the UK horsemeat scandal

with a clever, time-sensitive graphic. They successfully positioned their company as a witty,

commentator on a broad national discussion, and received a massive brand benefit as a result.

The outcome? Interactions with the brand topped 1 million in a matter of days.

The path to timely, real-time contentEffective content moderation and community management is the foundation of successful social marketing. It’s no surprise then that it is also a key element in developing an effective real-time marketing capability. Social media has created an opportunity for companies to directly communicate with consumers, and community managers are uniquely placed to facilitate these powerful interactions in real time.

MINI Cooper demonstrated their real-time marketing capabilities in February, with a

campaign about horse meat.

Starbucks UK’s “royal baby tweet” yielded a 3,300% increase in retweets, compared to the brand’s typical tweets.

CONTENT PLANNING FOR COMMUNITY MANAGERS | December 4, 2013

©2013 Dachis Group | 515 Congress Ave., #2650 Austin, TX 78701 USA | T: +1 512-275-7825 | www.dachisgroup.com 3

Starbucks UK

Even timely content that is not even all that well conceived can be powerful. One example is

Starbucks UK’s participation in online conversation surrounding the birth of the royal baby. The

brand joined the conversation with a humorous, but not particularly inspired piece of content that

was timely and appropriate to the whirlwind of social activity. The result was impressive. While a

typical Starbucks UK tweet generates 10 to 40 retweets and 20 to 50 favorites, Starbucks UK’s

royal baby tweet yielded an increase of more than 3,300% in retweets and 2,000% in favorites.

Even if social content isn’t perfectly crafted or clever, it can deliver results.

The opportunity for brands is significant

Brands typically publish at least one piece of social content per day (and oftentimes more). At a

minimum of one post per day to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Google+, LinkedIn,

Pintrest, and YouTube each, that adds up to about 240 posts per month. That’s a lot of content

—and it’s not even including extra posts that engage with consumers and advocates.

Community managers brainstorm, plan, and map out upcoming events as part of their daily

routines; but how can managers ensure that they are creating timely, trend-sensitive material that

appeals specifically to users and advocates in the brand’s

audience?

Here we will outline the best ways to perform community

management for timely content, and how community managers

can contribute to the real-time marketing engine of their

organization.

H e r e a r e 6 S t e p s t o T i m e l y C o n t e n t

M a n a g e m e n t

1. Plan for real-time flexibility

In almost every organization, community managers maintain active content calendars, with

designated slots for regular communications and pre-determined posts. Community managers

are now beginning to carve out time specifically for publishing trending content and participating

in timely conversations. There are two emerging practices that help brands become timelier.

A) Designate slots for timely content in your calendar—reactive and proactive posts—where

your team and content approvers are notified and prepared to move quickly to join a

trend. Stay tuned to trending topics throughout the day by using tools like the Brand Trend

Dashboard. Start with just one day per week in this mode, but as your organization

becomes more accustomed to timely activity, you can increase the frequency.

B) Introduce a daily pulse or idea report that arrives each morning. This report should

consist of ideas and trends that can easily be transformed into timely and relevant content

6 Steps to Timely Content Management

1. Plan for real-time flexibility

2. Organize your tools and system

3. Know your audience

4. Know your platform

5. Focus on creativity, speed, and the right tools

6. Just do it.

CONTENT PLANNING FOR COMMUNITY MANAGERS | December 4, 2013

©2013 Dachis Group | 515 Congress Ave., #2650 Austin, TX 78701 USA | T: +1 512-275-7825 | www.dachisgroup.com 4

for release into the community. This report can be produced every day, but only a subset

of the ideas should be put into production. If the timely idea doesn’t receive a green light,

then the brand should revert to its normal content calendar—evergreen posts—for that

day’s activities.

Eventually, timely content will occupy a larger and larger percentage of the brand’s content

calendar. The calendar will take on a more fluid, open style, focused on following and spotting

trends and responding to them in a brand-appropriate way as quickly as possible. As you plan

your content process, it is important to think ahead in terms of this change in the real-time

marketing landscape.

2. Organize your tools and system

There are other ways that community managers should be planning ahead, specifically in terms

of tools they use and process required to create real-time marketing campaigns efficiently.

Community managers should identify reliable sources for the manual curation of audience-

appropriate trends (e.g., Reddit forums, Buzzfeed etc.), or activate one of Dachis Group’s

audience-targeted Brand Trend Dashboards to find the conversations in which their audiences,

advocates and consumers are participating.

Once an idea is identified and approved, it must be created. This task is usually done through an

agency with two key qualities: a strong digital content creation capability and speed. Real-time

marketing is most effective when the content is both rich and relevant to your target audience.

With a content idea ready to go, community managers will usually also act as the facilitator for

internal review. The goal should be to create and approve a great piece of content before the

relevancy window for that piece of content closes. This typically requires an abbreviated version

of the usual content approvals, but nonetheless this step cannot be overlooked.

With the right trend identification, strong content, and targeted audience efforts, real-time

marketing is an effective branding tactic. Audience members will come for the content and stay

for the conversation.

3. Know your audience

Not only should you be searching for trends directly applicable to your audience and advocates,

but you should be aware of your audience makeup when creating content and placing it.

Community managers should be constantly analyzing how social-savvy their audience members

are, and putting out trending content before audiences have had the chance to see it elsewhere.

Successful community managers use tools like Feely and specific RSS feeds that supply content

relevant to the audiences they are managing. Many even subscribe to the Twitter accounts of

community members. These methods allow community managers to stay current with the trends

specific to their audience, and provide daily insights into user habits, tastes and interests.

Community managers also benefit from collecting data on their community members. By

Content Moderation/Community

Management is a key step in your real-

time marketing campaign strategy.

CONTENT PLANNING FOR COMMUNITY MANAGERS | December 4, 2013

©2013 Dachis Group | 515 Congress Ave., #2650 Austin, TX 78701 USA | T: +1 512-275-7825 | www.dachisgroup.com 5

familiarizing themselves with the demographics, psychographics and platform usages of

individual members, community managers will have an easier time connecting with and

engaging the audience.

Producing content that is not only timely, but relevant to the audience, is an essential cog in the

real-time marketing machine.

4. Know your platform

Social trends are platform agnostic: finding great trends on Twitter does not mean you can only

share and reproduce them on Twitter. Community managers can easily

repackage trending topics for other social platforms and get mileage out

of it from several communities.

For example, just in time for the flurry of 2013 Cyber Monday shopping

Amazon executed a textbook example of proactive content marketing.

Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos, described to the press a new capability the

company was testing for drone delivery of Amazon packages. The

comment was paired with a viral video demonstrating the idea’s

feasibility. The Internet went crazy over the idea and the conversation quickly took on a life of its

own in nearly every social platform. This tactic effectively put Amazon at the forefront of the

digital conversation just in time for the peak online shopping day of the year.

Brand marketers, industry analysts, and social media managers tapped into this trending topic

by re-posting the video to Facebook communities and sharing blog posts on the topic via

LinkedIn. With this in mind, it’s important for managers to familiarize themselves with the

attributes that make each platform different. This includes the speediness of Twitter in contrast

to Facebook, or the conversational style of closed communities that respond better to questions

rather than straight content.

5. Focus on creativity, speed, and the right tools

Some of the essential skills for community management include copy writing, image editing and

an understanding of web analytics. Community management teams must be experts in using

how multimedia works on a variety of social networks - Tumblr behaves very differently from

Instagram - and possess the improvisational skills to help create compelling content in a flash.

When brand marketers make the investment in trend-identification software, community

managers can focus their efforts on creating great, timely content instead of the onerous task of

daily trend research. When trends are automatically surfaced via software, then community

managers can focus on what they do best: finding ways to engage their community.

6. Just do it.

Try it out and learn from it. It’s not that hard or expensive. Let’s break down what this community

management production cycle looks like.

As the prominence of timely, on-

the-fly content creation grows, the

community manager role is going

to expand.

CONTENT PLANNING FOR COMMUNITY MANAGERS | December 4, 2013

©2013 Dachis Group | 515 Congress Ave., #2650 Austin, TX 78701 USA | T: +1 512-275-7825 | www.dachisgroup.com 6

A day in the life of a timely-content-focused community management team:

I N A D V A N C E Develop a content calendar filled with pre-planned evergreen material: posts that can be

used at any time, regardless of trends or news. This calendar should also include

upcoming (relevant) events that can be the basis for proactive content, directly related to

the event.

E A R L Y M O R N I N G The community manager sifts through trending content, using a Brand Trend Dashboard

or another trend-identification software platform. She develops a list of the morning’s

trending content that is relevant to her brand’s audience: the daily pulse or idea report.

M O R N I N GShe shares the list of trends with her creative team, who develop content proposals for

each trend. The team has the option to produce 1 of 3 post-types: reactive, proactive, or

evergreen. This creative process could entail proposals for short videos, witty copy,

infographic mockups, or an outline for a blog post.

M I D - M O R N I N GThe community management team shares these proposals with the decision-makers

(marketing managers, brand directors, etc.), who either approve or reject the reactive or

proactive posts. If the proposals are green-lighted, the community management team will

finish producing content, decide on the best times to publish, and post.

N O O N & A F T E R N O O NProduction and posting.

Key Terms for Timely

Content Management: Daily Pulse or Idea Report: early-

morning, curated list of trending

topics relevant to your brand’s

audience, used to develop the day’s

timely content

Reactive posts: hyper-relevant,

direct responses to trending topics

Proactive posts are trend-sensitive,

pre-developed posts in response to

planned events

Evergreen posts: content written in

advance; can be used as backup

content when timely posts aren‘t the

best fit.

Conclusion

Content planning and community management doesn’t have to be hard: you already create

content calendars, plan your marketing efforts in advance and try to keep up-to-date with

relevant events and trends. Just take your practices to the next level, by keeping the real-time

habits of your audience and consumers in mind and implementing concrete systems for staying

relevant.

About Dachis Group Dachis Group’s data-driven social marketing software and solutions enable

the world’s biggest brands to engage at scale with their customers, prospects,

advocates, and influencers.