Understanding Community Management

To truly succeed as a business in today’s fast paced world, it’s essential to create a vibrant and interactive community. It’s good for your business and it’s good for your customers too. However, despite the leaps in technology that help people to stay in touch today, there is a definite disconnection between individuals and groups. While spending hours communicating online, behind screens, this ever connected world can still feel isolating. This is the case for both personal relationships and business also relationships, and just as a personal relationship takes time and effort, business relationships require hard work. Building a community is what will help to create a feeling of connection in your business relationships, establishing a sense of loyalty and belonging for your customers to your brand.

The necessity of such strong connections and sense of community is causing many brands and businesses to invest in a process called community management. In the information to follow we will learn more about what this process is, how to build strategies achieve it and the best practises of such process. We will also analyse how the principles apply in the field of social media, and what a community manager could offer you in terms of assistance in this regard.

What is Community Management?

First of all, what is community management? Community management is a process, or collection of complementary processes, that work to build a community. This community could be built among the customers of a business, its employees, or its partners. (In this article we will particularly focus on building a community amongst and with a brand’s customers.) There are different forms of communication that can work to achieve this, and it comes down to how a business takes advantage of opportunities to interact with its audience and create a strong network that encourages connection and growth. With the power of community management, brands and businesses can get real feedback from their customers and audience and thus be in a better position to improve product offerings and support. Furthermore, the awareness of the brand is raised throughout the target audience and the strong one-on-one relationships that are formed creates a feeling of loyalty and trust which in turn boosts conversions and sales.

How Can You Build Strategies for Community Management?

There are many ways that you can build your community management strategy, build strong connections and this improve your overall health as a brand and business. So how do you go about starting to build such a strategy? If you follow some of the suggestions listed below, you may find ways to help you either get started in your strategy building or improve the strategy you have in order to achieve your goals and create a thriving community.

Get to Know Your Audience

Truly understanding your target audience is essential to creating a community management strategy that will truly attract them. It’s important to gain an understanding of the demographic of your audience, so that you can tailor your content and approach so as to connect better with them. Also, you need to know the goals and objectives of your target audience. Therefore, the efforts you make to build a community will be a lot more successful.  Additionally, by understanding the needs and preferences of your community, you will have a better grasp of what you community wants so that you can create content that engages them. By reaching out for feedback and offering regular surveys, you will be able to gather and interpret this valuable data into actionable insights.

Boost Your Online Presence

There are several things you can do to improve your online presence. By creating a community hub, a place for members to engage with each other and access information and resources, it will help to create that feeling of connection and belonging. The principles of community management also apply when it comes to managing communities on social media platforms.

Social Media is Proving to be a Wonderful Platform

Social media is proving to be a wonderful platform for creating and maintaining communities as you post relevant content, interact with your followers, and join in with industry related groups and conversations. Another powerful way to utilise social media is to encourage users to create content linked to your brand, perhaps in the forms of product reviews or sharing experiences.

Create Opportunities for Interaction and Engagement

As previously discussed, it’s a great idea if you can create opportunities for members and customers to interact with each other either through forums or virtual events. By taking the initiative and hosting community events, either in person or virtually, you and making opportunities for members of your community to meet together as well as learn more about your brand. When you identify active members, use that as an opportunity to offer exclusive perks and rewards that help individuals in your community to feel recognised and appreciated.

Make the Most of Feedback

The value of feedback from your community cannot be understated. Through surveys, focus groups or simply asking questions to your audience, you gain precious insight into their thoughts and opinions. With this knowledge you can see what is working and what isn’t, what areas you need to focus on and which you need to improve to better serve your community and the individuals within it. When you can use the feedback that you gather to improve your strategy, the sense of community grows even stronger as the opinions of your customers are taken seriously and proven to be appreciated.

Keep Growing and Improving

Developing and maintain a strong community takes continual effort, evaluation, and improvement. Don’t settle, but keep assessing the health of your community, make decisions moving forward based on the data you collect and keep evaluating your strategy. Community managers and specialists can assist you in doing this, proving the skills, experience, and expertise you need to keep growing and improving.

Evidently, community management strategies are essential tools in your business toolbox to help you keep growing, improving and succeeding!