Tarsila Kruse's Community Management Strategy

My Final Project: Tarsila Kruse's Community Management Strategy

Here's my step-by-step guide to how I created the Final Project for my Domestika Course: Community Management Fundamentals.

1. Discuss and Assess the Current State

My first step to create a strategy for Tarsila is to find out from Tarsila what her goals are. Whether you work with a client or you're creating a strategy for yourself, it's important to asses the current state of the resources you have: the tools and platforms you use, the people who manage the platforms and how much time they have and how well trained they are, and what are your budgets.

Simply look at your business/brand and ask yourself: What would make the biggest difference for your social media accounts, especially in terms of your community? This is a challenging question and there's not one right answer. But remember, it's not about "winning" the strategy and meeting your goals; it's about taking the steps, implementing them, getting better, and then finding out what worked and what didn't. And them moving on from there.

How to asses your current state:
A. If you're starting on social media and have no followers (community), your goal is to create or grow one e.i to raise brand awareness.
B. If you have already built some community but it's not active, your goal is engagement.
C. And if you already have a community that's engaged, your goal is to create more conversions (sales).
D. And if the sales are flowing but you want to have a community that talks about you, recommends you, talks about you, posts on social media for you – then your goal is the post-purchase experience/customer experience.
(Note: sometimes the tasks you have for your engagement and post-purchase experience/customer experience can be very similar or even the same.)

Tarsila's Current State of Community Management
As I found out from Tarsila (and also from her social media analytics – see steps below), she has already had an audience but she wanted to broaden it (brand awareness) make it more engaged and interested in her illustrating business by creating brand advocates (engagement).

2. Choose the Right Platforms

Tarsila is currently present on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. She uses Instagram mainly to connect with people who buy her books (B2C); Twitter to connect with other illustrators and writers (B2B); she has a Facebook Page but she doesn't really use it – she only automates her Instagram content to it and checks for messages from time to time.

Knowing that, we decided to pick Instagram and Twitter as the two platforms to work on her community management.

3. Choose the Metrics

Tarsila's two goals we chose were: brand awareness and engagement. Knowing Tarsila's goals, it was easy to choose the right metrics. (Don't forget – you will a "cheat sheet" with how to choose your metrics based on your goals in the Additional Materials section of your course.)

Tarsila's Metrics
Brand awareness: Number of Followers, Reach (of Tarsila's posts)
Engagement: Number of Advocates, Number of Retweets

4. Look at Audience Insights

The next step was to go to Tarsila’s Audience Insights on Instagram, and find out more about her followers. This would indicate slightly in what direction her content and strategy would go. Here’s what we found out about her audience:

• 78% women, 22% men
• Most audience is 25-34 and 35-44 years old

Tarsila would agree that this would describe her audience quite well. Especially the mums who buy the book from her and follow her on Instagram.

(Note: Twitter doesn’t provide audience insights.)

5. Do the Audience Research

So that Tarsila could understand her audience better, she decided to follow with the audience research on Illustrators and Writers. She used one of the templates I provided and together we created Interview Questions tailored to her audience. (Don't forget – some general questions along with Tarsila’s questions for her audience are in the Additional Materials section of your course.)

Tarsila found out the following about one of her audiences, the writers that she’d normally find on Twitter:

• Typically women around 35-45 years old.
• Have children, live in Ireland or the UK.
• Has a part-time job besides writing books.
• Writing books at irregular schedule.
• Most writers on the market are self-published, some are published traditionally.
• Use Twitter and sometimes Instagram to create a network and follow other writers.

This information would help her target her content better and communicate with her audience with more empathy.

Additionally, because she was looking for brand advocates – people who would talk about her and mention her, ideally recommend her for more jobs – she had looked up a few people who she would identify as “fans”.

6. Ask Tarsila about Her Online Communication

Another task I had given Tarsila was to show me some communication between her and her audience. She showed me some examples of how she would respond to feedback of all kinds – positive feedback, negative feedback. We also drafted an idea of a response for a complaint (which she hasn’t got to date but if she did, she would be ready for it).

Additionally, we created a Welcome Message for new followers, a message she would send if she followed somebody, and other relevant messages that would be helpful to managing Tarsila’s community.

7. Look What Tasks Will Tarsila Take on

Now, to the most important part – in this step, I would look at what are the steps that Tarsila needs to take in order to reach her goals. These must be simple steps that will have a direct impact on Tarsila’s goals and help her achieve them, in a way that is measurable.

Some of the actions that I determined would help Tarsila are:
Doing Instagram Live (to raise awareness of what Tarsila does and to reach a new audience)
Send a welcome message to those who started following her
Writing a list of followers she could turn into brand advocates

Putting It All Together

Once I gathered all the information listed above, I use the information for the six points that a Community Management Strategy consists of:

1. Goals and Metrics
2. Audience
3. Communication and Messaging
4. Platforms and Resources
5. Execution Plan
6. Evaluation

That's it! I hope you found this useful and I hope this will help you and inspire you to create your final project of my course: Community Management Fundamentals.