Top Tips For Reputation Management

Community management can be a real minefield, whether you’re managing in-house or with even the best restaurant marketing agency, take the time to nail your tone of voice and build a successful strategy. Start having fun with your copy and using community management as a tool to create meaningful conversations with your customers – it can give a real insight into what floats their boat, what they respond best to and will help to inform your content strategy moving forward.  

Here are top tips from a restaurant marketing agency for effective community management:  

• Speed is key: Respond to all comments as quickly as possible, ideal within one hour. The quicker you can respond, the more likely you are to engage in conversation with positive interactions and placate the not so positive!  If your channels are only manned at certain hours, make sure you include in your bio. 

• Be human: Your brand tone of voice needs to remain consistent. If you’re upbeat and casual in your social copy, don’t suddenly adopt a corporate tone in your community management. Innocent Smoothie have long been the masters of tone of voice, they’re built an incredible social presence through a carefully curated brand vision and unwavering use of company tone of voice
   
• Every action deserves a reaction: If a customer complained in a restaurant, you’d never dream of walking away without resolving the issue, digital channels must be treated the same way. Whether it’s a tagged post, direct message or comment on a piece of content, every interaction much be recognised and engaged with. Social media is just that, social. The more you engage with your audience that the more you please the social algorithms and the more likely you are to be discovered. Find out more about how the Instagram algorithm works in 2020 with Hootesuite.  
   
• Be active in your community: Extend your reach beyond your own channel by following customer profiles, commenting on influencer and relevant posts and tagging people into your posts. The more active you aware, the more people your brand is exposed to 
   
• Take trolls seriously: Don’t delete controversial comments about your brand, take them offline as quickly as possible, but respond publicly. If people are using hate speech, breaching guidelines, or trolling each other do delete the comments but add a comment of your own saying that hate speech won’t be tolerated on your channels and please respect each other.
   
• Have fun with it! Social is a great place to build meaningful relationships with your customers and adopting a fun, conversational tone can really help to cement these connections. Any restaurant marketing agency will look to brands like KFC, Wendys or Lidl for inspiration on how to build a successful voice on social. For more on this, the Social Minds podcast is a great listen! Finding Your Funny Bone: Why KFC’s Social Media Marketing Always Hits Headlines | John Hutchings – KFC UK&IRE