Community management is a process to build an authentic community among the customers, employees, and partners of the business through various types of interaction. This is how a brand uses multiple opportunities to engage with the audience to create a network in which they can connect, share, and grow.
It is becoming popular and recognized by all types of businesses. But how can you manage your community? What should you do as a business to connect and engage?
Well, here is an insight for you, some proven practices for businesses to manage the community.
Setting Rules And Guidelines For Community
When it comes to anything related to the business, it is good to assume that you want to represent yourself as well and serve as the accurate portrayal of the brand. And for this, your community is not an exception.
You are going to set rules and guidelines for the members and contributors. It depends on the type of community in which you are going to set the community rules and guidelines. Although there are some suggestions.
You can write a document with the expectation for how you want the members to communicate, behave, and contribute.
If you have a community website, forum, or FAQ document, you can make this document available at all times for the members. If your community meets in person, then you can review the detail in person and consider handing out the printed set to them.
You must have a method for your team to escalate the major problems within your community to the right person at the company to manage.
Ensure updating the rules and regulations from time to time if necessary.
Show Appreciation
A huge part of managing a successful community is by showing appreciation for the members. This will help you in building loyalty and trust between you and the members.
It will also show the members how much you value them and their time and commitment to your brand. You must keep in mind that some of your community members are most likely to be someone who invests more time and effort in the community, and are supportive and loyal fans, followers, and customers already.
To appreciate your members, you can try the following suggestions.
- Interact with the new members when they joined the community. You can thank them or write an appreciative post. You can also ask them what you can do to make their experience much better.
- Pay attention to who is your biggest contributor to the community. You can give them a shout-out for being simply awesome.
- Keep an eye on all keywords, hashtags, and mentions on your every social media platform, website, forum, or more so you will be able to engage more.
Define Your Progress Metrics To Track
Measuring your success might be unclear particularly because it is a relatively new industry. But there are many ways by which you can gauge the progress like by looking at engagement, social mentions, and brand sentiments.
These engagements might be different on each platform but the likes, comments, shares, and replies are often standard to the metrics to track.
You can also track how often your brand is mentioned and how those changes over time. You can also measure the qualitative data.
There is a suggestion for businesses that are still in their startup phase or make their way to the national level among the audience to have a Wikipedia page. It will help you to connect with your audience. You can inform them about your business and this can also help you to get the audience towards your business website. Although, if you are assuming, how do I create a Wikipedia page about myself or my business? There are a lot of professionals who can help you with that.
Identify Where Your Audience Is
A lot of social media platforms are here such as Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, Snapchat and the list will go on. And these social media platforms are available to consumers, community managers need to identify where their target audience is more active.
The main idea here is that you want to prioritize the platforms that can help you in reaching the most users and generate the most engagement. For example, if you are targeting young adults, then you can focus on TikTok or Instagram which caters to a good amount of the younger generation.
Monitoring The Conversations Surrounds Your Business
Social monitoring and listening are the main elements of your community management strategy. It will help you stay connected to the audience and find out what resonates with them and brainstorm ideas for content.
For example, let’s say you have a clothing company that hires a community manager. However, monitoring the conversations surrounding the brand, they realize there is a lot of mention about the sustainability efforts of your brand – it means that your key message is taking part in their conversations.
And this discovery can help them in informing future marketing efforts and will help in generating more interest in your brand.
Engaging Your Audience Constantly
Building a community is not a one-way street. It is a two-way route and you have to ensure that you are planning your community strategy very well. It is not enough that you publish your content, you must have to be reactive to your audience.
It means leveraging user-generated content, responding to comments and engaging with your audience to build their trust, creating polls and surveys.
