The reality is that the digital world is where more people are spending time nowadays. Even though that is case, customers still feel disconnected. How ironic, right? Perhaps the concept of community management as it relates to a business is fairly new. However, it is burgeoning as businesses realize how important it is to their brand.
Frankly, people feel the same way when they’re online scrolling through a social media app. Some days you really feel like you’re connecting with friends or people, while others you don’t.
A community is where people feel connected for various reasons. For example, people might gravitate towards beautifying a certain part of the city. Blight, overgrown brush, dilapidated houses are a site sore. And clearing them will make the community more inviting to it’s people and outsiders alike. Anyway, an online community forum can allow people to express themselves.
Sometimes there are needs to update the site design, remove products, improve the user experience, or improve customer service. With an online forum, community engagement can move towards connecting workers, customers, and interested parties.
So, what is Community Management? The process of building an authentic community with customers, employees and partners via interaction is Community Management. Whether the community is offline or online, brands use interaction to share, connect, and grow the brand.
What is the purpose of Community Management?
More and more businesses are adopting Community Management for various reasons.
Business owners and stakeholders see it as important aspect of the business strategy. Why should your business adopt it ? Let’s explore reasons why community management is critical to your brand’s success.
The benefits of community management as follows:
- Obtain feedback from customers through real conversations
- Provide value to customers beyond the service and products
- Learn about what customers want, their expectations, and needs regarding – support, services, products, and content
- Build relationships between you and the customers and audience members
- Increase brand awareness among the target audience
- Give support to audience members and customers when they need it.
Note: Community Management is a broad term that is used by different industries.
There are many forms of community management. Which forms/types should you focus on? We’ll go over them in the forthcoming paragraphs.
Managing a community
It can seem daunting when you approach community management. So to make it easier to understand, here is a breakdown.
Monitoring: Essentially, tracking conversations that relate to your brand
Engaging: Keeping conversations going, and actively engaging with customers, influencers, and prospects.
Moderating: Eliminate comments and conversations that don’t add value and troubleshoot customer complaints.
Measuring: Analyze how your brand is perceived, and get unfiltered feedback.
Monitoring: Keep track of conversations and listen
The foundation of community management is social listening. Working in concert, an app and people monitor conversations about the brand on the internet. There are numerous conversations taking place on various platforms. And every so often, a customer will provide constructive feedback- which might be an opportunity to improve.
Who knows, if your response is well-received, it might go viral and generate more attention for the brand. Customers will mention your brand in various ways on social media. Sometimes they will mention you in misspellings, by product, or in blogs comments, or forums which hard to find.
To track mentions, set up Google Alerts or mentions to track of mentions related to your brand. Take time to search other social media networks for popular keywords that mention your brand on public posts. They will reveal the interest in your product that you might want to act on.
Engaging: Actively engaging with customers
Any content that is created online lives in the digital space. Whether that be a video, banner, pop-up, and customers will interact with that content every so often. Comments might be neutral, critical or positive depending on what was posted. Of course, the more positive the comments, the better. Most importantly, the company’s brand will be much stronger as a result of favorable comments. Social media algorithms use comments to determine what to show on the feed.
Tempted to automate engagement with bots? Well, this is terrible idea because it will do more harm than good. Instead, a team member should actively engage customers as time permits. Being personable will separate you from other companies who solely relying on bots.
Be proactive by thanking customers, resolving complaints, and engage with people who gravitate towards your products. Also, be creative with your responses to questions or comments posed by customers.
Perhaps there is a platform that is generating a lot chatter. In this case, take time to engage with customers because the end result is building a community. Ultimately, this will cascade into increased brand awareness, perhaps sales, and more constructive feed back.
Show appreciation. Swag, for example, mugs or hats can be dolled out to customers and influencers. If they take pictures with it them – your brand stands to gain from the exposure.
Moderate: Defend your company’s reputation
There’s another aspect to community management, it is moderating content on your platforms. What’s the focus? Negative comments if left unaddressed cannot snowball into the publicity nightmare. So, if there is negative comment, respond to it swiftly and professional.
Meanwhile, spam is nuisance but has to be kept at bay to maintain a nice, professional website. Hide spam to enable your o customers to focus on good, quality comments. Plus, customers might not leave comments if the ….comment section filled with spam.
Measuring: Track & monitor brand perception
Your team has been doing a splendid job monitoring, engaging, and moderating on social media. What’s left? You need to measure how people/customers perceive your brand in order to improve.
No doubt, it is difficult figuring what to measure in regard to communication, especially since it is new industry. There are many ways to gauge progress.
You can measure brand sentiment, social mentions, or review engagement. Engagement varies from one social media platform to another, so it is hard to track. Instead, focus on measuring shares, comments, replies – these are fairly standard metrics.
Conclusion
Community Management in the social media realm is a new concept- no question. It would behoove any business not to adopt it or incorporate it in their business strategy. Building a credible community with customers, partners, and employees via interaction is goal. How does an org go about doing so? There are four overarching guidelines to manage a community: monitoring, engaging, moderating, and measuring. If a business follows these guidelines, they will be able to improve customer satisfaction, get constructive feedback, and increase brand awareness.