The Importance of Community Management

What Is Community Management? 

Community management is the process of building an authentic community amongst a brand’s customers, potential customers, employees and partners. Community management aims to harness these connections to increase brand relevancy and awareness whilst nurturing the consumer base you’ve already acquired. It’s easily mixed up with social media management which is the overall act of managing a social media account, including content creation and execution.

Community management is a technique brands should definitely be incorporating within their social media strategy. Many businesses that have a strong community online have a dedicated community manager as part of their social media team. It has been found that doing this can increase your performance by up to 12%! We understand it can be a time-consuming task, so it can be a good idea to employ an agency to take over this task for you. There’s a wide range of choices to find a community manager, searching by location, for example digital marketing agency London, can help narrow it down.

How Can I Do Community Management?

There are many different types of community management depending on your business goals. Community management can include customer support/ success, forums, community websites and brand ambassadors or advocates. It also involves social media community management, which is potentially the most common form. Social media community management surmises engaging with your community by liking and commenting on competitors’ posts, responding to direct messages from customers, and also putting a positive response out there to any complaints you may see. Community management is all about creating and nurturing relationships. This may be with similar brands to start a collaboration and increase brand awareness or to create a set of loyal followers that will repeatedly convert. Keeping a positive brand image is also incredibly important for consumers to be able to trust your business enough to spend their money. Community management enables you to have control over how you respond to bad feedback. When done properly, negative feedback will have a limited effect on your brand’s reputation, as your response will have mitigated any issues.

A key aspect of community management that’s important to do well, is having a definitive tone of voice for your brand. Responding and engaging with your community with a continuous personality and using similar emojis will mean customers will recognise your brand before seeing the name and logo. This unconscious association will result in consumers remembering you and thinking of your business first when they need a product like yours. We understand this may seem overwhelming, but if you just don’t have the time to undertake effective community management, you can enlist the help of a community management agency.

Why Is Community Management Important? 

Community management keeps you on the map within your industry. Just liking and commenting on others’ posts will get you further up the timeline or feed of your followers. In an incredibly overly saturated space, staying relevant is one of the best ways to ensure you’re growing your business. If you’re not engaging with your community on a regular basis, you’re going to fall into the back of people’s minds, which will lead to a drop in your sales and lead generation. By being active in your digital space, your followers will recognise that you’re reliable and consistent, making them more likely to convert!

It Helps Build A Loyal Community

Your followers and brand ambassadors are great ways to spread the name of your business by word of mouth. However, you need to give them a positive reason to be talking about you. By having excellent customer service and community management, your followers will recommend your brand to others. Having quick responses to customer queries via your direct messages or website will also increase customer retention. Potential customers won’t just move to a different brand if they have a question as they know your company is easy to get a reply from.

It Increases Credibility

Effective community management not only helps grow your following but also increases your credibility as a brand. Your opinion becomes more valuable the more conversations you’ve contributed to. With a lot of fake news and scams occurring online, followers will be looking for signs that your account is legitimate. By providing information in a confident and coherent manner, your customers will feel confident in your business and stay loyal.

It Humanises You

People resonate well with other people; that’s a given. Having automated responses makes your company seem less real and also gives your customers nothing to engage with. Real relationships are always more likely to be long-lasting, and authenticity is the best way to turn a one-time buyer into a loyal customer.

Community management is an incredibly important tool in this day and age. Your industry will have hundreds of other businesses claiming to do what you do, better than you. The little things like engaging with your followers, giving them a real person responding to queries and opening interesting conversations amongst other brands will set you apart from the rest. Ensure your community management is getting done, a little each day is perfect, and if you’re still not sure if you can manage this, enlist the help of a top digital marketing agency.