Community management is a key element of any social strategy, managing your community becomes more and more important as your customer base grows.
If you want to establish yourself with your brand on the market, you must invest more time in community management.
Let’s come back to a simplified definition of community management.
Community management is how your brand interacts with your community on social networks.
It is the set of actions which aim to engage, to make visible, to interact with your audience.
Your community is made up of your current customers, your target audience and all the people who interact with your brand directly and indirectly online.
Community Management brings your brand to life on social media, as if it were a real person with a real personality. This is why it is essential to think about a strategy upstream.
Here are the 4 main points of community management that you must remember to successfully carry out your social media strategy:
To engage your community, provide value-added content on your social networks, such as competitions, challenges or questions that encourage users to leave comments. Then answer it too.
Every comment you make online leaves a digital footprint. The more comments you and your community generate, especially positive ones, the stronger your brand is.
Social networks use engagement algorithmslike comments, to determine what to display in our news feeds, use this algorithm to your benefit.
Avoid automating your social media engagement with a bot. To stand out prove that there is a human behind your brand to create this proximity with your customers.
The 80/20 Pareto rule can be applied in community management, provide valuable content 80% of the time and highlight your product 20% of the time.
Direct people to your website when it makes sense with links to your content or products.
Don’t be afraid to surprise people with your answers and your content because you would quickly be surprised to bring together a group of people around a subject.
Encourage happy customers to share photos of your product and add a hashtag.
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Listening to community requests is essential in community management
Listen to your community.
Managing your community would be impossible without continuous effort and without being aware of what is happening on the internet.
You need to monitor interactions and conversations that could concern your brand.
You can set up Google Alerts (free) or BuzzSumo Alerts to keep tabs on mentions of your brand online.
On these tools, you can monitor and watch social media interactions to find specific keywords or hashtags of your next posts and messages to reach your target.
These messages can respond to a demand for your product and meet customer needs.
You can also monitor multiple channels, keywords, or events using the free version of Hootsuite or a similar social monitoring tool.
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Protect your brand’s reputation online.
Another important element in community management is managing your online reputation. This includes keeping your profile clean, protecting yourself from spam, and addressing any negative activity.
To start, remove spam and ads from comments on your posts.
Then, keep in mind that customer complaints are almost inevitable and people tend to vent their frustrations online, which can be both good and bad for you.
Address any issues and avoid hiding or suppressing them because this could be misinterpreted. Face these users and respond in a very professional manner.
If this is a question you can answer quickly, keep your response public so that other people can see it.
If the complaint is personal, take care to reply in private message. Above all, do not redirect them to another service by giving them a telephone number, this technique could be frowned upon. Address the problem directly.
Don’t forget to sign at the end of each comment to show that there is a human behind it. Users will appreciate it more when you take the time to cover each topic. This is why community management is essential for the reputation of the brand.
Thanks to the actions we have taken so far, you will have an idea of how your community perceives your brand and you can subsequently improve it.
But one of the challenges of community management is the lack of tools to analyze everything that is happening.
Indeed, there are billions of conversations on the internet, it is very difficult to track everything and be everywhere at once.
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We therefore advise you to:
- Prioritize your channels by determining which channels your community is most active on and where you are most likely to achieve your goals, whether that is increasing brand awareness, driving traffic, or maintaining your reputation.
- Conduct sentiment analysis to get an idea of what people think of your brand. There are tools like Social Mention (free) that do opinion analysis of your brand or a specific keyword.
Keep in mind, however, that sentiment analysis tools do not reflect 100% of how users feel.
You can also get information in relevant communities on Reddit or in a Facebook group.
Starting a topic of conversation and growing your community is necessary for your business. The impact you have on your community increases as your business grows.
Community management presents your brand to the world as a likeable personality. It allows you to engage and establish this close relationship with your community on social networks. It is also an opportunity to fuel positive discussions about the company’s vision and around your products.
Invest in a strong community and you will build a loyal fan base who will defend your brand and even come to your aid when you need it.
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