An online analytics school is on social media everywhere: Instagram ads, a Telegram channel with posts about enrolment, and a cohort chat where students and tutors talk. Asked who is in charge of all that, the owner names the marketer. On Monday morning a student writes in the cohort chat: "Where is the recording of yesterday's lesson?", and within an hour three more people have added "+1". The marketer is busy editing an announcement for the next intake and has not opened the chat. The school's numbers in this lesson are illustrative.
Three jobs under the word "social media"
After sorting it out, the school split the work like this:
| Job | Where at the school | Who owns it | What to count |
|---|---|---|---|
| Social media ads | Instagram and Facebook, 120,000 ₸ a week | Contract media buyer | Leads and payments tagged paid_social |
| SMM: the school's own accounts | The school's Telegram channel | Marketer | Clicks and leads tagged utm_source=telegram, utm_medium=social |
| Community management | The cohort chat | Tutors | Time from question to fix, and questions that keep coming back |
Ads buy impressions among people who do not know the school yet, following the rules of Meta ads. The school's own channel publishes what the school wants to tell subscribers: announcements, checklists, walkthroughs. In a week with tagged links the channel produced 9 leads without an ad budget, next to 40 leads from ads on Instagram and Facebook. Community management owns the conversation: in the chat, in comments, in direct messages. Here the school is not selling; it is keeping the people who have already paid.
In the ecosystem the three jobs sit in different places. Ads and the channel are acquisition channels, compared in one report through UTM tags. The cohort chat is closer to retention: a student who could not find the recording and fell behind is unlikely to buy the next course or recommend the school to a colleague. Content for all three comes from one source, the questions students and buyers ask, as in content as an asset.
Community management: question, fix, check
A question about a lesson recording looks minor, but four people in an hour suggests the whole cohort is without the recording. A tutor takes a question like that all the way in five steps:
- Replies in the chat straight away, even without an answer yet: "Checking, I'll be back by 12:00."
- Finds the cause: the recording was not uploaded, the cohort has no access, or the link sits somewhere other than where people look.
- Fixes it at the source: adds the link to the student portal instead of sending the file to everyone by DM.
- Posts in the chat what was fixed and where the recording is now, and pins the message.
- Asks the first person who wrote whether the recording opened. If not, goes back to step two.
After step 5 the tutor adds the question to a log. If "where is the recording" comes up with every cohort, it is the process that needs fixing: who uploads the recording and by what time. The school's tutors counted questions about preparing for the first lesson the same way, 41 in the first week of the October cohort, and the count showed that the checklist had to be delivered where people look for it.
Chat rules
The rules are written before the first conflict and pinned in the chat. Five points are enough for a cohort chat:
- Tutors reply on weekdays from 10:00 to 19:00; messages sent at the weekend are answered on Monday morning.
- Ads, spam and links to other people's courses are removed.
- Other people's phone numbers, emails and screenshots of private messages posted without consent are removed, even if they were posted "for a good reason".
- Questions about payment and refunds go to direct messages only. Nobody asks for or posts card numbers or payment details in the chat.
- Criticism of the school stays. Insults and threats are removed, and the tutor says which rule applied.
The last point matters most. If complaints disappear from the chat, students notice and stop writing there at all, and the school loses the place where a problem shows up before it turns into a review on 2GIS. A complaint that has already gone public in comments is answered under the rules of a social media crisis.
What comes next in the module
- The goal for social media is set in money. For the coffee shop it is second orders, not followers, and SMM strategy starts by turning that goal into tenge.
- Instagram, TikTok and YouTube show a post to people the system estimates will find it interesting, while a Telegram channel sends every post to all its subscribers: that is how social media algorithms work.
- A platform is chosen by where the customer decides and how many hours the team has, and audience figures are taken with a date, as in choosing a social network in Kazakhstan.
- ER without a stated denominator compares nothing, and a post is measured against its job: those are SMM metrics.
- A chat where students help each other needs separate work with its most active members.
Exercise: a social media map for your project
Take your own project or a client business.
An empty "who owns it" cell next to the chat or the comments is easy to explain: someone sets up the ads because they cost money, and the conversation goes to whoever has a spare minute. When one person holds everything, like the school's marketer, the chat rules state the hours when they open the chat.
The recurring question is the most useful thing the exercise gives you. One more reply in the chat treats a symptom; a fix at the source looks different: a link in the student portal, a line on the course page, an item in the email sent after payment.
Video and further reading
What an SMM specialist does day to day. On how a brand builds a community around a product, using Harley-Davidson as the example: Fournier and Lee, Getting Brand Communities Right, Harvard Business Review, 2009. And customers who recommend a brand on their own, with no deal, are brand evangelists.