Strong customer relationships can help your business succeed, retain customers, and help in building an emotional connection between the customers and the business. One of the most efficient ways to build and nurture these connections is to create an online community. The online community becomes a platform for interaction with customers regularly. With the growth of this community, the business, its leads, and referrals grow too. However, effort need to be focussed on monitoring conversations, organizing data, and having metrics to measure, run, and grow a successful community and humanizing the brand at the same time.

What is Community Management?

Community management refers to an active effort to build an authentic community among a business’s customers, employees, and partners while encouraging conversations with the brand’s social media presence. This gives an opportunity to the people interested in the brand, to put their point across and have questions answered online. The key to community management is to directly engage in conversations with social media users and at the same time highlight those who advocate your brand.

Why is it important to have Community management?

The popularity of community management has grown and is now recognized by all types of businesses. Proper management of the community is important to the success of a brand and allows any business to:

• Get feedback and ideas from the customers through real conversations.
• Provide support when needed by the customers, fans, and prospective customers
• Increase brand awareness among the target audience
• Build relationships with the audience and the brand.
• Learn about the needs, wants, and expectations of the customers with regard to product, services, support and content.
• Boost conversion, sales, and customer interactions.
• Provide value addition to customers beyond a product or service.

There are many steps involved in building effective community management for social media. There are different tools and requirements available for each of the social media platforms. Let us look at how to build a community management strategy.

1. Choose a primary community channel – Different social media platforms are preferred by different demographics. Getting an understanding of where the target audience is spending time online will help you reap the most from community management efforts. Each platform has its unique best practices and user expectations. Understanding each platform is essential for the growth and success of community management.
2. Identify your audience – Once you have selected the social media channel, the next important thing is to identify the audience on that social media platform. By doing so, you can gain insights into the kind of content the audience is interacting with, what are their likes and expectations from similar brands, and who they engage with. This information can help in devising the content for your target audience and the platform chosen.
3. Ask the target audience what type of content are they looking for – It is not only important to identify the target audience but also know what is the content they are looking for so to create that content. This will help reach the target audience through the content they seek. Regularly asking for feedback and suggestions show that you care about their opinions and what they have to say. This helps in enhancing brand loyalty and advocacy and creating interaction within the community.
4. Identify the parameters for success – It is important to define the parameters for success. These are based on your business and what matters most to it. For example, you might want to focus on the increase in followers or the amount of content shared/like by the followers or simply increase brand awareness.
5. Goal setting – It is important to set attainable goals to achieve the different objectives of the business and measure success. Try doing a trial run in case if you have never set goals for social media community management and measure your success. Based on the results obtained during the trial run, you can make adjustments to the goals and begin collecting data for analysis.
6. Post regularly and engage with the audience – To be successful on social media, one needs to be consistent with the posts and engagement. A clear plan for posting on various social media platforms should be laid out for the audience to know when to expect content and they begin to start trusting your brand. Social media offers a great opportunity to develop relationships with your brand with the audience. It is important to let the audience know that they matter and the company values their opinions, comments, and concerns and is happy to address any questions or queries that they may have. Whichever way you choose to interact with your audience, make sure to address each person as an individual and be authentic. It not only adds a human element to the interaction but also makes the brand trustworthy to its community members.
7. Use images and content wisely – Images can be emotional and elicit a response in the community. Choose images wisely to avoid sending out the wrong message about community values.
8. Measure the results – Measuring results on social media should not just be about quantitative data as numbers don’t always reflect the impact of the efforts. These results are rarely immediate. Hence, you should decide on the method that works best for your business goals. Some of the common ways of measuring results are social listening which involves monitoring all social media accounts to look for and track all mentions, keywords, customer feedback, and discussion related to the brand, its product, and services. A deeper look at these can help analyze and give insight into what is working for the customers and followers and what activities need to be modified

Having considered the important steps in creating a community management strategy, let us gain some insight into the top 10 tips for social media community management.

1. Set community rules and guideline – Having community guidelines for all members and contributors are important to keep the conversation positive and effective and have an accurate portrayal of the brand. Having basics like being respectful to everyone, not sharing private information on the platform, not having discriminatory or derogatory comments. Creating a page with the guidelines makes it easier for any new member to access this information. The FAQ document can also provide this information.
2. Check the community regularly – It is important to check on the community members, the content being shared by your brand and its customers. Whether it is related to your forum, community website, or the brand ambassador program, it is the job of the company to ensure smooth running with people receiving the support they need, their queries are attended to and there is a sense of community.
3. Be original – There needs to be originality in the way the community is managed. The voice and branding should make you stand out to your fans, followers, and your customers who come to your community. Being genuine and human in the interactions is the key to making your community members feel valued.
4. Listen – Listening is crucial to community management as it requires thoughtful interactions with its members. This could be social listening, responding to online feedback, reviewing FAQ pages and forum regularly, listening is how the community can be improved and built. It also shows your members and audience that they are valued and that you care about their experiences within the community.
5. Appreciate – A major part of successful community management is about appreciation for the members. This helps in building trust and brand loyalty between the brand and its members. Some important tips to show appreciation are by interacting with new community members and asking them how you can make their experience a good one. Another way is by paying attention to the biggest contributors to the community and appreciating them from time to time by sending them messages.
6. Share user-generated content – Online community management is not only about your audience sharing the branded content. User-generated content such as reviews and stories can help increase the genuineness of the brand for the prospective audience
7. Ensure that you maintain your brand voice at all times – Maintaining the brand voice is critical to community management. It is what makes the community unique and stands out to its members and audience. It is important for all people working on maintaining the community to understand the brand voices through all interactions, content, and engagement.
8. Discover new ways to engage – Always discover new ways to engage members of your community. Learning why members engage in your community, their wants will help you explore new ways to interact with them.
9. Examine how your audience engages with your competition – The company can learn more about its audience by understanding how they engage and react to your competition. This will help you as a brand understand what the competition is doing that you are not. Is the competition engaging the audience in a way that they expect them to? Getting answers to some of these questions will help in understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the competition in engaging and leveraging social media to gain an advantage over them.
10. Stay organized – Community management of social media is about managing a lot of information from questions asked for stories shared. It is important to keep it all organized so that the information can be used to the advantage of the brand.

Using these tips can help turn the online community into a valuable tool that drives leads, nurtures customers, attracts a new audience, and enriches the experience of working with the brand.