Community Management on Social media: The Ultimate Guide

What is social media community management?

It is the process of building and managing a community on social media channels to build loyalty and forge strong bonds with the audience. An audience includes followers, customers, employees, and business associates. 

It involves three main activities: 

• Reading and listening to your audience on social media 

• Responding to the audience on social media 

• Maintaining audience interactions  

Brands and businesses employ community management techniques to engage a group of people to promote their shared interests, values, and goals.  

With that in mind, here are the five types of community management.

Social media community management use cases

1. Customer service: To provide customer support via social media channels. 

2. Sharing product ideas and feedback: Using communities to run beta testing and gather customer feedback. 

3. Customer acquisition: To generate hot leads and engage potential customers who seem interested in your products. 

4. Customer engagement: Building communities on social media just to keep your customers connected with your brand. 

5. Employee engagement: Both for existing employees and to draw the attention of prospective candidates to your brand as an employer.

Social media community management is critical for your business for several reasons, and here’s why.

Benefits of social media community management for brands

Community management generates new opportunities to connect with your brand's social media followers and earn their trust by being present online whenever they need you.  

Moreover, around 88% of community managers agree that branded communities play a significant role in achieving their business goals. Community management allows your brand to:

Gather customer feedback regularly 

Real-time conversations engage your customers and encourage them to share their thoughts about your brand on social media. While it could go either way for the brand, it gives you a reality check of your brand’s perception and position in the market.  

Build and improve customer relationships 

Community management helps you provide timely responses and support to your customers. You learn their likes, preferences, and expectations and ways to serve them best. You can forge strong relations with them and nurture loyalty. 

You can also facilitate the building of one-to-one and one-to-many customer relationships. 

Boost brand recall 

A recent study dictates that brand recall influences 38.7% of brand perceptions. As such, community management helps maintain your reputation on social media and turns more customers into your advocates. This, in turn, boosts your sales, too. 

Learn More: Social Media Reputation Management: A Complete Guide  

Promote brand authenticity 

Faking doesn’t work on social media anymore. People see through charades, so authenticity is the perfect way to build brand loyalty. In fact, 90% of consumers consider authenticity a decisive factor when choosing a brand. Also, millennials and Gen Z respect genuine and organic brands more than perfect and well-packaged product names. 
 
Next, let’s get into the six main principles that govern community management on social media.

6 principles of effective community management on social media 

These community management principles focus on where the audience is and how to engage them. Now, let’s look at each of them more closely. 

1. Define the guidelines 

Start by laying the foundation for community management for your social media channels. If you have a team, lay down the ground rules for them to follow when representing you online. These guidelines would typically include: 

• Specifying the names of members who are allowed to engage with the online community at a time. 

• Elaborating on the type and tone of language to be used. It’s a given that being respectful and positive are the basic social media etiquette. Apart from this, you could tell your managers to be timely with their posts. For example, they should respond to the first fifty comments within three hours of the post. 

• Sharing these guidelines with the new team members when they join. 

• Setting up a hierarchy for escalating and handling issues and complaints. 

• Specifying a procedure to handle negative comments and complaints by your customers online. 

For closer consideration of these guidelines, consider the Global Elementor Community, which has a couple of balanced group rules set by the administrators.

Source 

2. Determine your main audience networks 

Find out the main channels where your target audience is present. So, if you are trying to reach the millennials and Gen Z, Instagram and TikTok should be your preferred channels. 

For example, the main channels for Netflix are Facebook, X, and Instagram. 

3. Identify success metrics 

Likes, shares, comments, and mentions that indicate the essence of brand sentiment remain the same across channels. As a community manager, you may want to track these social media metrics to know your audience engagement score. 

4. Focus on trending content 

Social media content is highly perishable. What’s trending today could be stale tomorrow. You need to focus on fresh content that draws your customers’ attention to your brand and keeps them engaged. 

Keep an eye on the latest news, topics, music, hashtags, or trending celebrities and influencers that keep your audience hooked. 

Also Read: How to leverage customer engagement for increased satisfaction and sales 

5. Start new audience interactions frequently 

It is easier to interact with old and new customers on social media where gaps are bridged. Here, you can introduce a topic and start a discussion relevant to your brand that makes heads turn. These discussions will personify your brand and make it more relatable. That helps your audience connect with you at a deeper level. 

6. Monitor and moderate audience reactions 

Social media is prone to negativity. It is the community manager’s job to listen to the audience’s negative comments and reactions. The way you react to negative comments can make or break your brand online. 

Also Read: What is Social Listening: Importance, Benefits and Strategies 

Now that you know how to form an effective social media community management strategy, let's take a look at a few tricks to grow your audience on social media.

3 tips to grow your social media communities

Here are the top three tricks to help you grow your online community. 

Focus on answering tough questions 

Being a community manager is tough. More so because you have to deal with all the randomness that comes up in your brand’s online community. While you can ignore, delete, or block the negative comments and abusive audience, you cannot turn a blind eye to someone who asks a difficult query that questions your brand authenticity or integrity. 

For example, Nike Service is quick in answering difficult questions online and they do it in style.

Source 

Reward the fans 

While your brand may draw a negative audience, you will also encounter the fans. It is essential to nurture and reward them. You can do this by identifying them publicly through tags and mentions. Then, you can reward them through special discounts, coupons, or handwritten notes sent directly to them. 

Give your community manager the right tools 

Strong AI-enabled tools for community management on social media can make your manager’s task easier. They enable your community manager to identify customers needing your attention. They can also aid community engagement, moderation, and maintenance. 

Several top brands make the most of social media communities. Here are a few good examples.

How top brands are utilizing social media communities

Let's see examples of Amazon, Tesco, and Innocent Drinks.

Amazon 

It has a highly active community that supports and responds to customers online on all major social media channels. Also, its community managers often applaud the brand and post about their activities as an excellent place of work. 

Take this LinkedIn post for an example.

Source 

The eCommerce giant primarily focuses on providing strong channels for multi-directional customer interactions, creating an active and efficient environment for information exchange and understanding the audience's perceptions. 

Tesco 

The British mobile company has a community management team that responds to its posts with fun and informative responses. Its employees mention their names while responding to the customers. The answers are quirky and well-timed.

Source 

Innocent Drinks 

This British brand’s humorous responses to their audience are always applaud-worthy. Their tone of voice and content capture the audience’s attention. The social media content conveys “hard” facts about the brand and is consistent across channels.

Source   

Improve your social media community management ROI

While creating a social media community is easy, it needs to be managed well to make it thrive and serve its purpose. And that requires tremendous effort by your company and the community managers.  

Having experts on board is a blessing, but that alone cannot help you manage your communities across multiple social media channels. The assistance of AI-enabled tools to sail through the sea of customers who are awaiting your responses online is much needed.  
Your customers are present across many channels, and they expect you to follow them everywhere. Sprinklr’s community management software enables your team to address your audience when they are looking for quick answers.

Sprinklr’s AI-enabled community management tool facilitates: 

• 75% faster query resolution for your social media audience by supporting online communities. 

• Personalized experiences through centralized conversations that let your customers voice their opinions. 

• 77% more enhanced performance. The tool helps your community managers monitor social media activity and take corrective actions in no time. 

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