When we talk about leveraging your online communities, we’re really talking about community management.
What is community management?
Community management is the process of building an authentic community among a business’s customers, employees, and partners through various types of interaction. It’s about relationships and how your brand leverages opportunities to interact with your community in public online spaces.
Your community consists of your current customers, target audiences, and all the people who interact with your brand directly and indirectly online.
How is community management different than social media management?
Communities are inherently social, so social media will usually be involved. However, if you rely on social media alone, you will likely ignore your members who are engaged in other ways, either offline or other online media. A community manager acts like a membership representative and is focused on creating supportive environments for users to engage, share and discuss ideas with others.
4 Elements of Community Management
In order to be effective at managing your online community, it’s important to pay attention to four critical elements.
Monitoring: Always Be Listening
It’s important to listen in on and tracking conversations that relate to your brand. Create a listening culture so you can listen to the trends and behaviors of an organization’s constituents and adjust decision-making processes to reflect and respond to what you hear. This means monitoring the internet for conversations that matter to your brand.
Engaging: Spark and Spur Conversations
Keep conversations alive by proactively engaging with customers, prospects, and influencers. Every comment leaves a digital footprint, so these touchpoints can lead back to your brand at any time.
When engaging on your own posts, it’s important to probe deeper to really understand how you start these conversations and keep them alive. Engagement is especially important because social media algorithms use engagement, like comments, to determine what to show in news feeds. As a result, focusing on engagement within social media can keep your posts relevant. When engaging, find ways to surprise and delight people with your responses. You’ll find you might be able to gather a crowd around what you thought was a 1-to-1 interaction — creating more of a community atmosphere that encourages fans and followers to share and contribute.
Conversations that take place in the comments can be used to drive people to your website (when appropriate) with links to your content or products. Be sure to use tracking code so you can see how these links are being used.
It’s also important to keep your brand’s personality consistent, but adapt your conversation-style based on the channel (just like real people do). Encourage happy customers to share pictures of your product — which is a great way to share user-generated content under a branded hashtag.
Moderating: Protect Your Reputation
As a community moderator, your job is to weed out comments and conversations that don’t add value, and troubleshooting customer complaints to be helpful. Moderation is also about managing your reputation online. Keep your social profiles clean from spam and ensure that any negative feedback is addressed — not ignored or deleted (unless they violate the rules of your page). Even if you can’t solve a customer’s problem, show them that you’re listening.
Measuring: Get Feedback From Your Community
Your community is a living and breathing thing, so you’ll need to regularly analyze how your brand is perceived and process real, unfiltered feedback. Because it’s always evolving, conversations can help rebuild trust or sustain customer loyalty during tough times.
Conversations can happen anywhere online, but you can’t be everywhere online. Figure out on which channels your community is the most active and where you’re most likely to satisfy your main objectives, whether it’s to build brand awareness, drive traffic, or maintain your reputation. These are the channels you should prioritize.
Creating & Engaging Online Communities
Community management, much like social media management is what you make of it. Your community will be only as good as what you put into it. Communities need to accurately reflect the culture of your organization and provide meaningful incentives to members.
Add Value
Your community should be focused on adding value to your fans, followers or customers. It should be something that they can get anywhere else. Provide something that is special or exclusive to your community, without making it too hard for members to participate.
Be Transparent
In any community, members expect a certain level of transparency. It’s important to be upfront with the goals of the community so they know what to expect and why. Additionally, you should be honest when replying to questions and comments — no matter how difficult or uncomfortable.
Measure & Adjust
It might be hard to figure out what you should measure to gauge the effectiveness of your online community. Think about what the goal of the community is as well as the questions you’re asking to glean valuable insights to help with product development or brand management. If you want to drive traffic to your website or events, monitor click throughs and monitor the types of posts that drive the most traffic. The sooner you can set benchmarks, the sooner you can start charting your progress.
Engagement
There are a lot of ways you can tailor your engagement with you audience. Specify the actions you want your audience to take. Use clear calls to action (download this handy guide, read reviews, watch this video, etc) when offering support or guidance. Whatever actions you want them to take, make sure it’s clear, easy and rewarding to do so.
Conversations
Community management is about being proactive, not reactive. Create meaningful conversations by asking questions, but don’t pressure your audience to talk if they’re not ready. If they aren’t ready, figure out if there are specific issues you can address to build their trust or make them more comfortable in sharing and contributing more actively.
Culture
Ultimately, strong, supportive community depends a strong, supportive company culture.
What kind of company are you? Open and evolving? Or Closed and stagnant? Your community style should be authentic, but if your community persona doesn’t fit with the rest of your company culture, it won’t take long for others — your customers, fans and followers, and employees — to figure it out.
If you’re asking members to be engaging and personable, your company should be comfortable being engaging and personable, too.
This blog repurposes content featured in a webinar I presented on behalf of the Hub for Brand Innovation and Advertising Technology and the Charles H. Sandage Department of Advertising in the College of Media at the University of Illinois in partnership with Lodgic Everyday Community, and The Urbana Free Library.