Community Management

Why should a brand continuously engage with its audience?

In today’s era of a highly digital and linked world, at times people feel disconnected from others. With millions of people communicating online, it gets hard to truly connect with others and make sure that the message is communicated efficiently.  Brands need to develop a strong online sense of community and work on its community management.

How can community management be defined?

If you are a relative new person to the social media game, you might not know what community management is. It is defined as how well your brand captures opportunities to interact with its current and future target audience in public online spaces. It is very important these days to develop a strong communication with your target audience to identify what improvements you can make in your product or any other aspect related to it.  Imagine yourself scrolling Facebook and commenting on a brand’s post and then immediately the brand likes your comment and acknowledges it. This helps to create an authentic connection behind a brand by creating a strong bond between its followers and the brand itself. These types of connections spark interest of the audience in that specific brand’s content and online community. This makes the audience feel important as they are heard and acknowledged.

Importance of community management

The main essence of community management is capturing all online opportunities to engage with its audience and to make the online presence of the brand acknowledged by its target audience and other stakeholders. This overall helps to strengthen the online presence of the brand making it more interactive for the audience.  For this purpose, brands need to hire community managers to make sure the interaction is done in a professional way. These managers will create a tone, set a voice and ensure a human element behind a brand. Nobody would be interested in communicating with a robot. So it is very important to make your followers feel that they are communicating with a real human and not a robot with no emotions that they can relate with.

Involve feedback from your customers

Through an online community, your brand gets an insight on customer preferences in terms of content they want to see on the brands page. This helps your brand to understand the audience better and gauge their interest in upcoming products and projects.  Various polls and comments are used as a medium of communication by the brand with its audience.

Offer support to your audience whenever they need it

A great portion of the community management is based on customer support and success. It is very simple to do that. You can use forums, FAQ sections on your brand’s social media pages and many other ways. Through this way your customers can help themselves and many others with communication along with the team members, find resources that they need and review FAQs at any time. On social media, customers often comment when they are facing any problem related to the brand. The brand can clearly see who exactly is contacting them so that they can intervene and provide the best possible assistance to them. This is a great way to resolve issues in real time.

Increasing brand awareness

The more active your brand is online, the more relationships it is able to generate with prospective customers. Brands should use every interaction as an opportunity to better understand the customers and what can the brand do to keep them satisfied and loyal.  This, in return increases brand awareness as you are able to generate a group of followers who have good interest in what your brand is up to. Most importantly, new customers can find out about your brand usually online only. These days the strong online presence of the brand is extremely important.

Engaging with your audience

These are some steps through which you can engage with your audience effectively as a brand;

• Determine which social media application your audience lives in and then divert your online community managers to that application. 
• Secondly, define the metrics. Figure out how you will measure success for your online community. Your brand might want more engagement, social mentions, brand sentiment or user-generated content. You might be interested in having more comments and likes as a brand on your content. 

You need to find out the metric first and then direct your strategy towards it. One thing that the brand shouldn’t ignore is the conversation happening on their social media posts.

• Building a sense of community is a two way process. As much as you post content, you need to keep your target audience active and interactive towards your post. This can be done through user generated content and responding to comments, asking questions on the page and through various polls. You can even go Live on your social media pages to interact with your audience. 
• Maintaining your brand’s voice and authenticity is essential. You need to have a positive attitude while communicating with the audience. Have a lighter tone and enjoy it with them. 

Community management is comparatively a new, yet impactful industry. By implementing an effective community management strategy, you will be able to create a safe place for your current and potential customers.