What is Community Management? Unlocking Value for Your Brand

Most people working in marketing or social media marketing will be familiar with the term ‘community management’. But for anyone unsure exactly what it entails, let’s start by answering the question: what is community management?

Put simply, community management refers to all the activity that goes into building a loyal, engaged community of customers, potential customers and other followers (such as team members, suppliers or any other stakeholders) across digital channels.

Your brand’s digital footprint is a giant shop window, where existing and potential customers are checking you out, shopping around and sharing their experiences of your business. While you can’t control everything, when it’s done well, social media community management is much bigger – and more strategic – than simply replying to messages in the comments section.

Audiences on social have high expectations and are looking for authenticity in their brand interactions, making effective community management a fundamental part of marketing and customer service.

So, how can you unlock value for your brand? Here are six tips for successful community management:

1. STOP, LOOK AND LISTEN

Before doing anything else, make sure you’re taking advantage of all the valuable insight at your fingertips by getting to grips with where your audience members are active, what they’re interested in and what they’re saying about your brand.  

Knowing what people are talking about online – both on your own channels and elsewhere – will help you understand what’s landing with your audiences, where there’s room for improvement and where there are untapped opportunities.

From ‘social listening’ to competitor analysis, making sure you’re monitoring what’s happening on social in relation to your business is the starting point for everything that comes next.

2. HAVE CLEAR COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT POLICIES IN PLACE

Day-to-day interaction and moderation are the foundations of your community management. Increase efficiency by creating a clear policy outlining roles and responsibilities, timeframes for responses and community guidelines. For example, if you’re not going to respond out of hours, make this evident. The goal is an empowered team able to respond quickly, accurately and concisely.

Different platforms offer different tools and features that can facilitate moderation, allowing you to set and enforce rules, remove spam, trolls or inappropriate content, and resolve conflicts or issues. A consistent approach to moderation means you can stay on top of what’s going on, nipping potential problems or crises in the bud.

3. BE AUTHENTIC TO YOUR BRAND VOICE

Social media has created a powerful, direct way to talk to customers and reach new audiences. By removing barriers, it’s put your team and your brand voice right into the palms of the people you want to reach.

How you engage through community management is a key opportunity to convey this tone of voice, building authentic relationships and a human connection to make users feel they know (and can trust) your brand.

That said, it’s also important to equip your community manager(s) with the confidence and ability to adapt chatty, playful styles appropriately when dealing with problems or sensitive issues.

4. TURN YOUR FRIENDS INTO SUPERFANS

Everyone knows you have to deal with negative comments, but don’t ignore the positive ones.  

The happy customers in your community are your greatest resource, and engaging with positive comments creates strong brand affinity with new, existing and prospective customers. These are the people you need to be nurturing to turn happy customers into committed, passionate brand advocates.

Keep the following in mind:

• Always respond to positive comments from customers saying how much they like the brand or what a great experience they have had.
• Answer questions, regardless of whether they are a closed or open-ended question.
• If a user tags a friend in the post, like their comment.
• Look for ways to start two-way dialogue by asking questions and encouraging interaction.
• Reshare any posts of customers saying what a great experience they have had.

In a related point, building a base of brand advocates can also feed into your influencer marketing strategy if it allows you to identify potential content creators to partner with in a more formal way. 

5. BE PREPARED WITH A CRISIS PLAN

It won’t all be plain sailing. For authentic conversations to take place, you’ll need to accept that some of the comments might not be what you want to hear. There’s mileage in taking a tongue-in-cheek approach to less than favourable comments for some brands – think Marmite and it’s ‘love or hate’ strapline; there’s a lot of room to get away with negative comments if you make a virtue of dividing opinion. But for most, you need to handle these situations carefully.

Before you face some sort of pushback, complaint, controversial comments or trolling, make sure anyone responsible for community management knows the protocol. You don’t want to devise your approach while facing down the storm; much better to have a clear plan in place, with an escalation path for senior involvement as required so that decisions can be made swiftly and appropriate action taken.

Here are some general guidelines:

• Be conscious of your tone – make it clear you’re taking it seriously and want to help. 
• Publicly reply to the negative comment asking the customer to direct message with more details including contact and query details (never ask a user to share personal information publicly). It can be easier to calm the situation down if you take it offline.
• Avoid discussing a negative matter in the public forum – either move it to direct message or call/email the customer.
• If the customer has made false claims, it might be appropriate to provide the correct information in your public response. But do not belittle the customer’s complaints or sound dismissive in your reply – keep comments factual and to the point.
• In case the situation spreads beyond one platform, make sure your plan is integrated with a wider crisis communications plan so that all your comms channels are aligned.

6. DON’T OVERLOOK PROACTIVE ENGAGEMENT

It will depend on team capacity, because this can become time consuming, but joining the conversations happening in the chats around trending content elsewhere can be an effective way of putting your brand in front of new audiences.

It won’t suit every company but don’t rule it out if you’ve got something to add – whether it’s a witty comment or a serious contribution – to a discussion your audience will be following on another platform, forum or blog.

IN SUMMARY

Effective community management can establish your brand’s tone of voice and personality in an authentic way, increase organic reach, create a loyal base of brand ambassadors, resolve customer problems and even win over the occasional disgruntled customer!

It’s a crucial aspect of your social media management so, if you’d like to talk to us about how to build and implement a social media community management strategy for your brand, drop us a message or get in touch via our social channels.

The author: Grant Yardley is senior content manager at WPR. A guru of the written word, he specialises in formulating style guides, advising on tone of voice and guiding our team of writers through every step of the creative process.