When community management is done right – efficiently and effectively – it will be a key asset to your business. Aside from creating customer relationships, engaging audiences and presenting your brand in the best possible light, community management is about building authentic supporters that will be eager to promote your brand to their own networks as well. Effective community management will help make your brand more approachable and human, where customers will be able to know that the community isn’t run by a bot.
A well-managed community will allow your brand to have an engaged audience who will be your own brand advocates, in turn setting your business up for success. We’ve rounded up some tips for effective community management that will make it more meaningful for your audiences.
Establish ground rules
There should be clear guidelines for how your team should handle certain situations or behaviors online. Determine which comments need to be hidden, deleted or reported. The foundation of great community management is efficient internal communication.
Regularly moderate comments
It’s crucial to have a daily check of comments made to weed out spammers and blocking bot or fake accounts. Leaving spam comments unchecked on your social media accounts may give off the impression that no one is keeping an eye out on your community. Some comments may even contain malicious content or links so it’s better to keep your community protected from these too. Another thing to watch out for are internet trolls, who could dilute your brand message and conversations about your brand. The best practice is to hide their comments and block internet trolls from your pages.
Promptly respond to customer complaints
How and when you respond to genuine customer complaints on social media could make or break your brand. It’s ideal to respond to complaints at the very least within the day to show that your brand cares for their customers. This will help build more credibility and trust. Another best practice is to acknowledge the matter publicly, but resolve the issues privately, especially for issues concerning personal information from customers.
Proactively listen to your audiences
Make it a part of your daily tasks to monitor the feedback your brand gets on social media. Make an effort to listen in to conversations and mentions of your brand outside of your own circle. This will give you more insights into how people, including non-followers, feel about your brand.
Personalise interactions
As much as possible, personalise your responses to who you’re interacting with. Simply mentioning their name or username will help form a more human connection. You can also sign off with your own name so that they know there’s an actual person on the other end of the screen.
Add in humor when appropriate
This is a great way to add a human element to your brand. This may not apply for all industries and situations, so your team will need to determine whenever humor is acceptable or not.
Use community management to inform your overall social media strategy
Community management and social media management is a collaborative effort. Community managers get to communicate closely with their audience, and that gives them more opportunities to learn about their audience’s concerns and interests. Community managers will need to track and monitor the audience responses, take note of keywords they use, and the general sentiment towards the brand. These would help the team calibrate the social media strategy and adjust the tactics accordingly.
Community management is a powerful tool for brands that use it efficiently. The challenge is that execution can be time-consuming especially for new brands or teams. If you need guidance with your community management needs, have a chat with our community management experts. Our team has extensive experience with the right tools to help you start your community management journey.