Mike Delgado

You can’t lead an online community without listening to them.

The trouble is that we struggle to make time to listen – and don’t always have the best tools to help us listen smarter. Besides, we have content to produce, social posts to schedule, blogs to write, meetings to attend, campaigns to work on, and reports to run.

However, If we want to be better community builders, then we need to be intentional about listening.

Why We Struggle to Listen to Our Communities

Here are a few reasons why we struggle with listening:

The trouble with listening is that there is no immediate ROI.
One reason why we have trouble listening to our communities is that we have nothing to show for it when we’re done. Listening is passive – and we’ve produced nothing at the end. If you spend a full day listening to your community, you have nothing to show for it. Well, you could produce a canned “social mention” report with word clouds, social mention counts, and sentiment analysis – but that’s just an automated report that anyone can run. Those automated reports only help you with listening, they don’t listen for you.

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My favorite part of the week is when I get a chance to host and join our weekly tweetchats.

Tweetchats are great because it allows you the opportunity to meet and engage with dozens and dozens of people in real-time. I’m always learning something new and meeting amazing people in these chats.

In the last year, I’ve launched a weekly #CreditChat and #MarketingChat and want to share with you my process in case you’re interested in hosting your own at some point.

This is my process …

Research Phase

Find out about dates and times of any tweetchats that have similar topics as yours.
Before launching your own tweetchat, make sure to find out if there are any tweetchats that already exist on a similar topic. Simply do a Google search for “topic + tweetchat” to see what appears.

When I was getting ready to launch #MarketingChat, I found out about many different digital marketing chats that already existed. I also discovered this crowdsourced tweetchat schedule on Google Docs that archives all known tweetchats along with date, time, topic, and who moderates.

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As a community manager, I’m always studying my company’s tweets to see what content drives more engagement than others.  And this can help me decide on what type of content we need to be developing more of.

Researchers at the Palo Alto Research Center studied 74 million tweets through the Twitter API to discover common attributes of tweets that get retweeted.

They wanted to find out what elements in a tweet helped increase the retweet rate (e.g. URL, hashtag, mentions) and what about tweet authors drove more retweets (e.g. follower count, followee count, age of account, number of favorites by user, etc.).

Here is what they discovered:
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A big part of my job as a community builder is to encourage community members to engage with each other and the brands I work with.

One way that I’ve been building engagement with my communities is through live events (e.g. chats on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+). There’s nothing like live online events to build rapport with community members – and improve relationships.

When hosting live events (e.g. tweetchats), it’s important to know what sorts of questions you want to ask to encourage conversation.

Let me share with you some tips to writing engaging questions …

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Do you want to increase your company’s visibility on LinkedIn?

Over the last year, I’ve been spending a lot of time on LinkedIn trying to figure out ways to grow my company’s reach, engagement and followers.

I can’t share our stats or dashboards from our LinkedIn analytics – but I can share ways that I’ve learned to dramatically increase our follower count and engagement.

Here are some ways to help you boost your company’s reach on LinkedIn:

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