Effective Community Management: Creating Stronger Connections
Effective Community Management: Creating Stronger Connections
Effective community management is a critical part of any social media initiative. When handled correctly, it can help your brand develop stronger relationships with your target audience, provide valuable customer feedback, and allow you to bring new customers into the fold.
Here, we’ll explain how to optimize community management for your business, why it’s important, and share some examples of how it can help amp up your social ROI.
Why Is Having Effective Community Management Important?
What’s the point of building brand awareness on social media if you don’t engage your audience in a two-way conversation there?
Community management should be considered just as important as face-to-face conversations with potential customers. If a customer directly asks you a question, you’d want to provide a quick answer, correct?
It’s the same for online social communication. Companies should be engaging regularly with their target audience to keep them interested and answer any questions or concerns they bring up in the social space.
Community management is also important for your brand’s authenticity, visibility, and customer relationships. It provides an important avenue for answering questions, sharing knowledge, and building awareness among your interested prospects. Brands can get a better understanding of how their customers make purchase decisions and the real questions they have, which may or may not be the same ones that showed up in focus group research.
Effective community management is also a great way to generate authentic user-generated content (UGC), for use in creating effective social media content. UGC is one of the most effective forms of social content, over influencers and promoted content.
Examples of Effective Community Management
Need some more convincing? These well-known companies are masters at community management, and they have the results to prove it.
Wendy’s is famous for replying to comments regarding their food with funny comments to get people talking. It creates that one-on-one conversation between customers and restaurants that draws more and more people to click that follow button. Audiences on Twitter enjoy engaging with a brand that speaks their cultural language and likes to make jokes just as much as they do. People love talking with real people. If a brand comes off as inauthentic, it negatively impacts their social engagement.
Lululemon often reaches out to customers with free events related to their products and corporate mission. Lululemon promotes their free events on their social media to get their community personally involved with their brand.
Airbnb jumped on an opportunity to help famous TikTok influencer Alix Earle when she got stranded in Europe by a scam booking website. One day after Alix posted her situation, Airbnb responded to her video and booked Alix and her friends a luxurious villa to stay in throughout the duration of their trip. From their effective community management, Airbnb received millions of views in just a few hours.
Creating An Effective Community Management Strategy
Identify your goals
What are you trying to accomplish? Increase brand awareness? Reach more followers? Overcome purchase objections? Get more audience feedback on your product or service?
Consistently engage with your audience
It’s essential to check customer engagement daily. Always like and respond to comments whether they are positive or negative. Don’t delete negative responses, unless you absolutely have to, which may happen when a consumer becomes particularly abusive or repeatedly spams your account.
Responding to negative comments whenever possible shows that the people behind the brand care and helps build customers’ trust.
You can also hide nasty or unnecessarily derogatory comments on Facebook and Instagram. We recommend only using this tactic for repeated or particularly negative comments. When you can, it’s always best to respond with concern to a complaint and offer to take the consumer’s issue to the organization’s leadership team to be addressed.
Make community management someone’s job
According to a Sprout Social study, 60% of consumers expect a response to their social media inquiries within an hour, and 42% expect a response within 30 minutes. It is crucial to designate someone on the team who is responsible for monitoring social channels for new comments so they can provide answers expediently.
Track your results monthly
You get what you measure so be sure you track your community management success. What’s working and what needs to be improved?
If you’re not getting the consumer response that you’d like–particularly if you’re using social for lead generation–try varying your approach to get better results. This could involve asking a question in a different way, crafting a shorter response, or taking a more direct approach.
How Can We Help?
Contact Us when you need an effective community management strategy that builds stronger relationships with your customers and prospects. We’re here to help.
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