What Is Community Management?

Merely relying on online presence isn’t enough for your business.

In today’s highly digital and connected world, people interact online and onsite but still feel disconnected from each other and this goes not only for personal relationships but business relationships as well.

Despite having social media presence, people still hesitate to effectively engage and interact with a brand voice behind a screen, and this creates a gap between businesses and their customers.

So what is this gap which makes people reluctant to connect with a business or a brand voice?

There’s a need for ‘community’.

This leads us to question:

• What is community management?
• How can it benefit your business?
• How can you transform your social networks into social communities?
• What to look for before hiring an enthusiastic community manager?

What is community management?

When you humanize your brand by bringing it to life through real communication, diving deeper into your customers’ needs and as a result build strong communities which interact personally and share a common purpose, this process is called community management.

Today, words spread faster, and one bad experience handled routinely can leave longer impacts on your brand’s reputation, because people talk about experiences whether you listen or not.

So the solution is to listen and build loyalty and customer satisfaction by engaging with your customers as real personalities behind real conversations.

Community management is inevitable today for the success of your business:

To build up your business, you need to build a community!

Today, businesses are competing for stronger business communities by transforming their common brands to humanistic brands – the ones who understand their customers deeply by listening to their stories, and then work on them for upgrading their products or services.

“A community manager is the tone, voice and human facet of your brand, and that’s why you need to hire them.”

(Krystal Wu, community manager at Shopify)

Community management benefits your business by:

• Providing empathetic support for the customers when there’s a need.
• Causing real conversations with your customers and as a result obtaining feedback that can derive ideas and result in innovations.
• Boosting the sales by increasing product awareness and customer engagements.
• Being a bridge between the brand and the clients by taking actions according to their expectations regarding content, services, commodities, and customer support.
• Creating a one-on-on relationship between the brand and the customer and one-on-many relationships between the followers.
• Delivering value and support to your followers by going beyond a product or service.

Does it matter?

You’re probably thinking ‘how small-scale interactions can have such a big influence?’

Well from 2015, social media has increased by eight times and one single angry client can cause such a bad reputation for your business either by sharing screenshots of indifferent customer support dealing or through a long trail of comments on your social media pages.

Never underestimate the power of word-of-mouth, be it for angry or happy customers.

Businesses who do not work on their community management miss out on so many things like:

• Turning new customers into dedicated fans and increasing raw and valuable feedbacks
• Reaching influencers, winning their trust, and as a result, increasing trust score among their followers
• Effectively managing complaints
• Collaborating with other brands
• Showing a human side of your brand which people can relate to.

So how community management is different from social media management?

A social media manager is

• The brand’s voice on all platforms
• Responsible for delivering news about the release of products and new features
• In charge of creating and scheduling posts to promote your products and services
• Responsible for analyzing post engagements and followers

A community manager

• Is a community’s campaigner for your business
• Interacts with the followers without being a robotic brand voice
• Acts as an average user, and deals with clients on a personal level to increase discussions
• Responds to the questions and helps the brand in troubleshooting issues
• Obtains raw feedback from customers through different forums and surveys

To summarize, the responsibilities of a community manager are way extensive than a social media manager.

The community manager starts his work on a smaller, more empathetic scale which can build stronger foundations and increase loyal customers. That is because his goals are long term and usually broad, which can take him many years.

While a social media manager’s goals are short term and limited, which focus on deals and conversions.

How to convert your social networks into social communities:

Even if you’ve thousands of social networks, without a shared purpose, they’re just glorified phonebooks and contacts.

In order to convert them into a community, you must create a social media strategy so they can interact with each other effectively around a common purpose and build associations.

Better the strategy, the more the chances that your clients will share their stories and generate shared experiences, and this will result in purposeful connections between the brand and its customers.

How social communities maintain the health of your business:

If there isn’t a common purpose, businesses run a risk of declining the quality of their services because when there is not a social community, you think of your customers as merely fans and followers instead of participants.

By inferring that they are just passive audiences, brands fall into ‘bad habits’.

A community compels you to maintain and increase the quality of your products because when you constantly receive raw feedbacks, you strive to sustain your reputation among your worthy people.

So start nurturing your social community by implementing these different methods or types of community management.

Different methods or types of community management:

There are many kinds of community management since it’s a broad term. Some take place behind the screen, while others require face-to-face interactions with you and your representatives.

Here we have listed a few types which you can implement to nurture your social community and boost your trust score.

A Customer Support System:

An easy way to start a social community is by establishing a well-organized customer support system that has a forum, where customers can ask questions, provide feedback, share their experiences, and interact with each other.

With an FAQ document, they can self-help by looking at the answers to commonly asked questions, or you can intervene in discussions by providing them with a link to the FAQ document.

In this way, people will have a platform under your supervision where they’ll share their feedbacks about your products instead of sharing on other social media handles where there’s no one to help them.

Innovation based on Feedback

Surveys and questionnaires help a lot if you need innovative ideas to improve your products and services.

You can also invite your loyal customers for a meet and greet session and ask their opinion about your products and how you can improve your services as they use your products.

By arranging these types of in-person and online meetings, they’ll be encouraged to provide raw and valuable feedback and as a result, you’ll be able to bring innovation to your business.

Sponsorship and Acquisition

Turn your real customers and followers into brand advocates and ambassadors, so they’ll promote your products enthusiastically through partnership programs, social media, and word-of-mouth.

This is called brand ambassador initiative and it can attract real customers because common man’s voice is heard by common people.

External Interaction

External interaction allows your supporters and customers to interact in a space outside your business place. It creates a sense of belonging among the followers and it mostly takes place through social media handles.

For instance, Legiit social media community managers make sure that every single member, be it a buyer or a seller, is noticed and dealt humanly -not just as another entity having a query.

The members interact with each other and discuss the best services offered on the platform, freelancers offer huge discounts on their services, share their reviews, and the happy clients tag freelancers under the queries so new people can use their services.

Members share valuable feedback, and as a result, help each other in availing the best freelance services.

Internal Interaction

Just as external interaction is important for the popularity and engagement of your business, internal interaction is essential to build stronger foundations within your team because your partners, employees, team members and retailers are the main supports of your business.

It’s important to strengthen your internal business relationships so that your team members can experience a boost in the company’s morale, and can work in a lively environment.

By reserving an online or onsite space for internal interactions, you can bring together like-minded individuals which can work together and support each other in the workspace.

It also creates a sense of belonging which increases their happiness.

Reasons why you should hire a dedicated community manager

Once you realize that a social community is inevitable for the success of your business today, you need to take further steps in order to start the process because it can take years to build a community that genuinely cares about your brand.

You’ll have two options in front of you:

• To hire a community manager
• To handle all of the things by yourself

There’s no problem in creating and managing a social community for your brand yourself, but you will certainly have less time to focus on the actual thing: your products and services.

Unless you have a small company, which doesn’t require as much attention regarding the quality and check & balance of the services, you must hand over this task to an experienced and professional community manager who understands your core purpose and goals for your business.

Community management is a tiresome task and some day-to-day responsibilities of a community manager include:

• Managing giveaways, competitions, and sponsorships online and onsite.
• Spreading the voice of your brand through social media by interacting in all posts and discussions, presenting himself as a user or brand ambassador.
• Making sure all the content that’s regularly being shared is up to the mark and serves a purpose.
• Being aware of the needs of customers and followers.
• Being in charge of the rules and regulations and ensuring every community member follows them.
• Analyzing the results of campaigns, giveaways, and promotions.
• Updating the brand about new industry trends in the market and implementing them in time.
• Handling tough situations and solving problems by knowing when to say, “We understand”, “We support you” and “We are sorry”.

Social media managers already have a lot to do daily and it’s unreal to think that they can handle all of this along with their own responsibilities.

So a community manager serves his purpose best because community management goes further than only social media.

6 Skills Every Community Manager Needs

Whether you’re looking for a community manager for your company or starting a new service as a community manager, you must know beforehand:

What qualities do a community manager must have?

Excellent Communication Skills

Being proficient in communication is the first thing in need for a job like community manager. Along with that, critical thinking abilities and rational decisions can help a community manager in difficult situations.

The ability to decide where the conversation goes is crucial.

Besides this, a healthy community is the result of a lively environment with valuable engagement & activities and the person in charge of a community must be an excellent listener, and skilled in his talk.

Organizational and project management skills:

Up till now, you must have realized that a community manager position is not a 9 – 5 job, rather a 24-hour continuous assignment because social media activities happen all the time.

So a community manager must have exceptional organizational abilities to handle all the digital data, reports, deadlines, and meetings that contribute to the maintenance of healthy social communities.

Without project management skills, all of this can create a mess.

That’s why there are various online tools to help community managers manage tasks. For instance, scheduling apps, timers, time management software, social media scheduling posts etc.

Creative Nature

The ability to choose attractive designs, logos and written content also require a creative spirit.

Sometimes, a community manager can also be called on for a clever copy for advertisements and branding projects. Because at times, what you need for your organization can’t be arranged instantly and you’re the first person who knows what your community needs, so the responsibility is on your shoulders to handle the situation by telling stories that will fascinate and attract the audience.

Analytical abilities

A community manager must be able to take an in-depth look at the qualitative data (that is collected through user statistics) and quantitative data (which is based on community members’ experiences).

Collecting, analyzing and putting this data in a report form is crucial for the job of community managers because the purpose is not only informing the business authorities but also responding to customers’ wishes and demands.

Adaptability

Being flexible is an inevitable personality trait for a community manager. To satisfy different clients, you must be flexible in your decisions and change your ways to what is the demand of the situation.

Not only in interactions with the customers, adaptability is required in the current technological advancements too.

You must be tech-savvy to understand new trends that are coming and going in an instant. Adaptability requires a curious mind, an eagerness to learn new skills.

Empathetic personality

Even if you’re dealing with a homogenous community, you are going to face many distinct personalities because social media hosts all kinds of people around the world.

Different personalities, different temperaments and different ways of expressions result in vague meanings and one wrong message can ignite the fire!

Don’t take it literally ?

Bottom line: a community manager must deal with the members by thinking from their perspective and his acts must resonate with everyone. By being empathetic, he’ll be able to see the brand from everyone’s viewpoint.

Where to look for a Community Manager?

Freelance Market places:

Freelance marketplaces are the best if you want to hire someone either on a contract basis or permanently.

You can search for the best community managers by analyzing their profiles, qualifications, the number of reviews, their portfolio, and the discounts they offer.

For a community manager, Legiit is a great place to look for, because this platform not only provides you with the ease to search for the services offered by community managers on the website, but in the Legiit Facebook group, you can post your job description and needs, and other clients will guide you about the best services they’ve availed.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the second-best place if you’re looking to either join a community management group or hire a community manager.

There you can find community managers based on location as well as industry.

If you want to offer community management services, you can look at the profiles of other community managers and analyze what road they took and what your profile is missing so you can improve it.

LinkedIn also has community management groups where community managers share updates in the industry, post job opportunities and even advise each other in the light of their experiences.

Facebook Groups

Facebook community is so vast that you can find hundreds of community management groups based on industries and location.

You can check out their Facebook profiles to determine what type of personality they have in the light of your business industry.

So start working on your community management strategy or hire a professional to create and implement a strategy for your business!