Community Managers are a bit of an enigma; we spend a lot of time with our heads down, peeking out things on our laptops and phones, talking and listening to our communities, and keeping track of all of the latest trends and topics. We can get a little too focused on the communities we manage and forget to peek our heads up. Enter the OCTribe Meetup.
This San Francisco-based Meetup group is hosted by my good friend and community superstar Susan Tenby and meets every month to share tips, talk about industry trends, social media tools, strategies, and just commiserate about all things online community.
January’s meetup was focused on metrics and also included a series of Lightning talks online tools for community managers with a series of lightning talks by you all, offering pro-tips to get the most of some of the more popular tools #OCTribe members use. Here are the highlights:
—Commun.it – Twitter dashboard that helps you identify and focus on key influencers, one of the few tools out there that helps you manager your follow list.
—Social Bro – Tons of features (analytics, engagement, monetization) to help manager your Twitter presence.
—Mention – Monitor keywords across the web (social networks, news sites, blogs, forums, any website) and unlike Google Alerts, allows you to “train it” so you only get relevant results.
—HootSuite – manage (and schedule) all of your social networks from one place, community managers also love the ‘list” functionality that allows you to tap into specific conversations and groups of people.
—BundlePost – content curation tool that allows you to aggregate content and schedule your social media channels.
Note that most of these tools offer some sort of “try before you buy” trials so you can find the perfect thing for your social strategy.
