What is Community Management?

The Act of Building Relationships and Interacting with Communities in the Digital Space

Have you ever wondered what ‘community management’ means or what the purpose of it is? Communicating and engaging with your audience are critical components to the growth and success of your business. Within this article, we’ll explain the importance of community management and how it can be an important part of your marketing strategy.

Defining Community Management

Community management is all about engaging with your audience while also protecting your brand. We’ve all seen companies on the front page of The New York Times because of a mis-tweet or Facebook post. The goal of community management is to be in the conversation, establish your brand as a thought leader, and drive customers to your website—not to be on the front page of the news.

When engaging with your audience you have the option of starting an online conversation or contributing to an existing one. This is an opportunity to talk with your customers, engage prospects, and communicate with other thought-leaders within your industry. While in conversations with customers, you will likely have the opportunity to provide customer service. As we all know, customer feedback isn’t always positive, and social media is a common platform for customer concerns. We are going to touch on this point a little bit later in this article when we are discussing moderating your own digital content.  

Participating in online conversations can also bring more visibility to your business. Every day on social media there are ‘trending topics’ or topics that have a lot of active conversation. Joining industry relevant trending conversations will bring more visibility to your business and you can drive traffic to your related digital content and establish your business as a thought-leader. There are even times when you could be the start of a trending topic because of your conversation efforts! This all sounds great, right? Well, it is great! However, we would be amiss if we didn’t mention that social media monitoring is critical to community management to ensure the health of your brand.  Be sure to read about the importance of social media monitoring from our experts at Pivotal New Media!

Moderating Owned Digital Content

Sometimes there are conversations and comments that take place on your digital channels that don’t add positive value your brand. Someone may leave a comment that doesn’t relate to the conversation. Well, community management empowers you to moderate and control content on your brand pages. Within the administrative side of your social media pages, you have the capability to remove potential spam and identify detractors.

This is also where we want to discuss customer concerns. Every customer concern is an opportunity for learning and growth. However, not every customer concern needs to remain public on your business social media platforms. Here are a few tips for handling customer concerns on social media:

• Ensure that all customer complaints are shared with the appropriate team members and brought in to the correct channel.
• Complaints shouldn’t be ignored rather; the complaint needs to be funneled in to your customer solutions process in order to best be addressed.
• Move the customer conversation to a private platform, maybe direct message or email, and away from public facing comment sections or tweets.  This gives your business more power to take care of that customer or even make exceptions without the public eye watching. (That’s a plus for both the customer and the business)

Impact of Community Management

Communicating and engaging with your audience are critical components to help you reach your business goals. Community management:

• Helps to grow your audience
• Establishes your business as a thought leader
• Creates value for your business outside of your conversion point
• Supports your brand awareness efforts
• Positively affects customer loyalty
• Converts customers and fans into brand advocates
• Positively impacts your brand reputation

With community management, you will be able to build an engaged audience that will be more receptive to your marketing efforts and will help your business reach its goals.

Let our experts at Pivotal New Media help your business integrate community management into your marketing strategy. Contact us today!