As you grow your Facebook community and experience the success of attentive fans as a result posting interesting and enticing content, a growing number of these fans will be ready to engage further. Company Facebook pages are rapidly becoming a forum of choice where the community looks for answers. This is an excellent opportunity to strengthen your brand and over time, engage with customers and reduce customer service costs while improving customer sentiment. Here are some tips and reminders about how to nurture and strengthen your community.

1. Join the conversation: Make a customer service pledge to respond to your community's questions, comments, and feedback though some of it may be negative. And, let them know that this is your commitment by posting a bold statement such as a stated goal of responding or contributing to posts within four hours. You can post this pledge on the Info page.
2. Identify yourself: Since you'll be using your company profile picture let them know who you are when you enter the conversation by signing your first name at the end of your post to build a more personal connection.
3. Enlist your experts: Just because you're the social media manager doesn't mean you have to answer every post and be an expert on everything. Identify the subject mater experts across your company and incorporate them into your customer response strategy. Their insights and time shouldn't have to be a personal favor. Set a cap on how much time they'll be asked to contribute and ensure that they're recognized for their contribution. Your weekly, monthly and quarterly reports are a great place for providing that recognition.
4. Build a knowledge-base: Capture the responses from your subject matter experts to build a knowledge-base. Even if you don't expose it directly on your Facebook page, you'll be able re-purpose the responses and save time. In addition, as you bring more resources to engage with your customers on the Facebook page, this knowledge-base serves as a great on-ramp.
5. Show genuine appreciation: Recognize the active contributors in your community who are taking the initiative to provide their own helpful insights and comments to their community, YOUR customers. These are people who you want to keep and nurture stronger relationships. There could be various ways to go beyond a Thank You, but is the first step.
6. Keep it public: For every active customer there are another 50 or more passive customers who are there listening and benefiting from your response, so share the knowledge and post to the conversation rather than converting your response to a one to one channel such as phone or email.
7. Give great conversations a home: Select key conversations that you want to highlight as customer "micro-stories" and post them; so useful conversations don't get buried and forgotten.
8. Have clear business objectives: Determine what you expect to gain by investing the time and resources necessary to add a service angle to your Facebook page. You will certainly strengthen your brand, but add some concrete goals such as improving sentiment scores, reducing calls or emails on specific topics to the contact center and improving first contact resolution.
9. Measure: Have a clear set of key performance indicators (KPIs) to identify any changes and ensure that you are progressing toward your business objective.
10. You don't need to get overwhelmed: If you have more posts than you can read because there's too much noise or your audience has simply gotten too large (we estimate that on average 60% to 75% of all posts are noise) there are natural language processing (NLP) based tools available to identify which posts require action and which post are noise.

Regards,

Matt Kresch

Follow me on Twitter: @matt_kresch

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