Community Management: What It Is and How to Create a Profitable Strategy

Introduction

Community management is often used interchangeably with social media management. While it is certainly a core part of any social media strategy, managing your community becomes increasingly important as your customer base grows.

What is Community Management?

Community management is the act of nurturing and managing your brand advocates and loyal customers across any number of social media sites or applications. The term “community” might suggest a single location, but in reality, your community is spread across the internet.

Why Does Community Management Matter?

If you think that community management wouldn’t have a significant impact because it is limited to small-scale interactions, that’s not true. Customer service today is public. Customers no longer express their concerns through private call centers; they voice them all over social media.

Your community could be on: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Snapchat, Quora, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Reddit, online forums.

One angry customer has a voice that reaches others, whether it’s through word-of-mouth, sharing screenshots, or the comments they leave online. But the same goes for happy customers, and community management helps you create more of those customers.

Brands lacking a community management plan miss out on opportunities for: managing customer complaints, turning customers into loyal fans, winning over influencers and potential customers, engaging with and partnering with other brands, obtaining valuable product feedback, and being the coolest voice in the comment section.

Community management makes your brand come alive online – as if it were a real person with a genuine personality behind real interactions.

Increasing Engagement with the Brand

“Building an active community is like pouring rocket fuel on your brand strategy,” says David Broderick, Community Manager at Traffic Think Tank. A community can bring people together, online and offline, and create a sense of belonging among its members.

David explains that “Traffic Think Tank members ask me if they can pay us for our merchandise. Members of our community have met and started businesses together. At every major SEO conference, Traffic Think Tank members arrange dinners to meet one another in real life.”

“I haven’t seen anything else come close to achieving that level of brand engagement,” he adds. “It comes from creating a community that delivers value to its members every week by sparking interesting discussions and creating content that sharply focuses on solving members’ most pressing problems.” I haven’t seen anything else come close to achieving that level of brand engagement.

Community Management Basics

Community management may seem overwhelming at first. So, let’s simplify it by breaking community management into 4 parts: monitoring, engagement, organization, and measurement.

Monitoring: Always Be Listening

Community management wouldn’t be possible without a continuous effort in social listening: monitoring the internet for conversations that matter to your brand. Sometimes, amidst all the noise, you’ll pick up small opportunities like turning a customer complaint into public praise or starting a viral hashtag.

Not all relevant mentions will tag your brand directly on social media. Sometimes, customers might reference you in indirect ways (misspellings, by product, etc.) or in places like blog comments or forums that are not easily found.

You can set up Google Alerts or Mention to track online mentions related to your brand.

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Also, search across multiple social networks for specific keywords or popular hashtags to find public posts that reflect certain sentiments or the demand for your product that you may want to act upon.

Engagement: Impact and Encourage Conversations

Everything from your Facebook cover photo to every comment you make online leaves a digital footprint. The more positive comments you and your community make, the stronger your brand becomes. That’s why it’s important not only to start these conversations but also to keep them alive, especially as many social media algorithms use engagement signals like comments to determine what should be shown in our news feeds.

It might be tempting to feed your social media engagement through a bot that likes and comments on your behalf, but you’ll reach a point where you start doing more damage to your brand. In today’s internet-saturated automation age, you need to prove there’s a thinking and feeling human behind your brand to create genuine connections with customers.

Instead, monitor your social media channels daily and look for opportunities to do the following: address complaints, thank happy customers, talk to people who might love your products.

Be human. Avoid copying and pasting responses all the time, and allow conversations to happen naturally.

If the channel you’re using gives you access to a large audience or you’re talking to someone with a significant following, it might be advisable to go a step further. Surprise and delight people with your responses, and you may find that you’re able to gather a crowd around what you thought was one-on-one interaction.

If you have t-shirts or other memorabilia you can send out, this is a great way to show appreciation in real life, especially to influencers. They might take a picture of it and share it online.

Remember, not every mention calls for a response. But if you see an opportunity to delight customers and build your brand reputation, take it.

Organization: Protecting Your Brand Reputation

Another important function of community management is managing your reputation online. This includes keeping your social media profiles clean and ensuring that any negative comments are addressed.

To start, hide spam that harms the quality of your comment section. Avoid hiding or deleting sensitive comments or those that are obviously promotional, as that can be interpreted as censorship or deception, leading to a much larger issue regarding how people perceive your brand. However, you should hide clearly offensive and promotional comments that could distract or confuse your community.

Of course, we can’t talk about organization without discussing customer complaints.

Customer complaints are almost unavoidable, and people tend to voice their dissatisfaction online, which is both good and bad for brands. If there’s a common question you can quickly address, keep your response public so that others with similar concerns can see it.

But if the complaint is personal or the subsequent conversation is complex, move it to a private chat, but try to keep it on the same channel.

For example, if the complaint was shared on Facebook, move it to Facebook Messenger. If it was on Twitter, invite the person to send a direct message with the details. Some brands may ask the customer to email or call support after raising a complaint on social media. This makes it more frustrating for the already upset customer.

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Airlines, in particular, face a lot of complaints, like this example from the British Airways Twitter page, and they have a particularly difficult time with organization. You can see how British Airways moves the conversation to a private channel.

It’s also nice to ensure that your name or initials are included at the end of customer service comments to show there is a human on the other side.

Even if you can’t resolve the customer’s issue, show them that you’re listening. It’s a poor look for the brand to ignore customer complaints.

If you’re in the middle of a crisis and need to manage an issue due to a flood of negative comments (for example, something went wrong with your last batch of orders), consider writing a thoughtful message that broadcasts to your entire audience, explaining your position and any steps you’ve taken to rectify the problem. Everyone makes mistakes.

Measurement: Getting Feedback from Your Community

Through all the actions we’ve mentioned so far, you’ll get an idea of how your community perceives your brand, where you can improve, and even what products you can add.

But one of the challenges of community management is the lack of resources.

Conversations can happen anywhere online, but you can’t be everywhere on the internet.

Identify the channels where your community is most active and where you are likely to achieve your main goals, whether that is increasing brand awareness, driving traffic, or maintaining your reputation. These are the channels you should prioritize.

You can also conduct sentiment analysis to understand how people generally feel about your brand.

But remember that sentiment analysis tools do not fully capture the complexity of language and how the internet feels about a topic. They provide a good starting point nonetheless.

You can also gain insights for product development either continually, by listening to what customers are saying to you, or by asking directly via social media or in relevant communities on Reddit, Slack, Discord, or in a Facebook group.

What is the Difference Between Social Media Management and Community Management?

It’s important to understand the difference between community management and social media marketing, as each has its own priorities.

Social media marketing involves producing and distributing social content to reach new customers and engage with existing ones. Here, you might focus on things like reach, engagement, and the amount of traffic a post generates to your site.

Community management is what happens after you post on social media. It’s part customer service, part listening to the internet, and part engaging in discussions about your brand.

While social media marketing starts with one person’s message to many, community management often starts on a smaller and more intimate scale. But it can build your brand’s presence in places both on and off your social media pages.

How to Create a Community Management Strategy

A community management strategy can help your brand build a more loyal customer base and maintain your online reputation. By gathering happy customers in one place and repeatedly engaging with them, you help strengthen those relationships and encourage them to return.

But to create a successful community management strategy, you need to know what you hope to achieve from it, who your audience is, and how to interact appropriately with them.

Let’s go through our five-step guide to community management for your brand:

1. Define Your Goals and Objectives

Determine the kind of outcome you’re looking for from your brand’s community. Do you want to reward happy customers with exclusive deals and offers? Do you want to provide support, educational resources, and use cases for a more complex product or service? Do you want to create a loyal group of customers?

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The first step in any strategy is to define your goals so that you know which metrics to track. Some common community management goals include increasing brand awareness, improving brand image, building brand advocacy, boosting word-of-mouth marketing, enhancing customer support, educating the audience, gathering customer feedback, increasing sales and subscriptions, and improving customer retention.

Decide what you hope to achieve with your customer community and build it around that goal/purpose.

2. Understand Your Audience

You need a good understanding of your target audience to build a successful community. You should build your community in a space where your ideal customers spend their time.

So, for example, if you’re targeting middle-aged men and women, creating a group on Facebook could be a great place for your online community.

To start understanding your primary audience, check your Google Analytics data to find some basic insights like the most common age range and gender.

You can also create a customer persona that defines the interests of your ideal customers, where they might spend their time online, the types of sites and social media platforms they use, and more.

Use this information to help guide your community management strategy.

3. Create Engaging Content

Next, you’ll need to create content that grabs the attention of your community members. This may start as general social content shared on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram to spark interaction with your followers.

Community management may mean building an online community from the most engaged customers, but it begins with engaging and interacting with your audience as they discover your website, online store, social media accounts, and more. So create engaging content, pay attention to the most popular content, and create more of it.

You’ll also want to ensure that your marketing team responds to any customer messages or mentions so that your online reputation remains intact and customers are satisfied with your team’s support.

As mentioned, once you have built a shared audience, you might consider creating an online community of the most engaged and passionate customers to join.

For example, Peak Freelance is a Slack community for freelance writers that also serves as a means to promote its job postings and product/service offerings. It continuously creates engaging content to keep its community talking, but as it grows, the community begins to interact on its own.

You might think about creating a separate online community for your most loyal customers and fans to join.

If you opt for a membership site, implement ways to keep your group members engaged with your brand and each other. Post daily challenges, ask questions for members to answer, and encourage members to share their own queries or announcements.

4. Invest in the Right Tools

Tracking all the online mentions of your business may require community management tools. By using a tool like Sprout Social, Hootsuite, or Grytic, you can gain an overview of your community and the people talking about your brand.

Here’s an example of what the Sprout Social interface looks like when displaying all social media mentions for a brand:

Tools like Sprout Social and Hootsuite allow you to manage all your brand mentions in one inbox. Tools like Grytics make it easy for brands to create and manage an online community in a Facebook group, for example.

Look for tools that make your community management strategy easier, and allocate some of your marketing budget to ensure a successful community management strategy.

5. Measure Success

Finally, you want to monitor your success to ensure your strategy is working. Think about the goals and objectives you set at the beginning of this guide and pay attention to the relevant metrics.

For instance, if you want to increase brand awareness, keep an eye on things like your website traffic, the number of followers you have on social media, and the number of mentions you see online. If you’re looking to build brand advocates, pay attention to the growth of your distinct community and use a referral program for those advocates.

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Also in tracking your sales or online registrations. You can easily do this in the Shopify Analytics dashboard and see if you started generating more sales – especially from returning customers.

Hiring a Community Manager

It is important to have one person dedicated to community management (unless your company is large enough to require expansion). This ensures consistency in all your conversations and keeps you in touch with your audience.

What is a Community Manager?

A community manager oversees your community management strategy. They act as the intermediary between your business and its audience. Community managers control the group, provide support and content, and engage in interactions that build trust among members.

You can be your own community manager at first, but if you are running a solo business and your company is experiencing a lot of growth and interest, it is advisable to hire someone to take on this role.

Key Skills for Community Managers

If you decide to delegate this responsibility, you should ensure that the person you hire has the following qualities: strong communication and social skills, empathy, patience, and tact (always important for customer service), creativity, a sense of humor, and the ability to adapt to your brand’s voice, the ability to analyze social data to find opportunities and engage members, knowledge of social media channels relevant to you and tools like Hootsuite, basic experience in marketing and content creation, an understanding of your field or curiosity to learn more.

Above all, this should be someone you can trust, as they will be, in many ways, the voice and ambassador of your brand online.

Where to Find Community Managers

Upwork is a great place to find community managers eager to work for your brand. You can post a project on the platform outlining what you are looking for and the required skills or qualifications. Among more than 4,380 customer reviews, clients using Upwork rate community managers at 4.7/5.

LinkedIn is also a great platform for hiring a community manager or even joining a community management group. You can search for community managers worldwide who are open to job opportunities or post a job for free.

Community Club is the community for community builders. With over 4,000 people in the group, you know you will find some community management experts there. Even if you aren’t part of the community, Community Club allows you to post jobs on its job board. The brand also offers community-based growth services through Commsor, where you can hire help to develop and implement a successful community strategy.

Community management is a full-time job – you can’t just turn it on and off. Best Community Management Practices

Whether this is your first or fifth time taking on a community management role, keep these best practices in mind: Define community guidelines and rules. If you are managing a private community on Facebook or Slack, provide clear policies for members to adhere to. Create a document outlining expected behaviors and ask new members to read it upon joining. Guide people to your site when appropriate, with links to your content or products, and ensure you track them. Follow the 80/20 rule (provide value 80% of the time and ask them to check out what you’re doing 20% of the time). Add a link to your site and a simple explanation of what you do in your bio across all your online profiles. Keep your brand personality consistent but adjust your conversational style based on the channel (just like real people do). Don’t be afraid to have a sense of humor. Encourage happy customers to share pictures of your product directly (a great way to get user-generated content under your brand hashtag). Be active in engaging with your community, and don’t just be reactive. Integrate community engagement posts into your publish and
Source: https://www.shopify.com/blog/community-management