Guide To Online Community Management In 2024

Table of Contents

Guide To Online Community Management

Ironically, individuals might still feel cut off from others in today's highly digitized and connected culture. This connected world might sometimes seem somewhat lonely since so many individuals converse online and via screens.

This applies to personal and professional connections between businesses, clients, and staff members. What makes individuals feel cut off from one another and the businesses they deal with? a lack of neighbourhood.

People may connect with a network of others in a community based on their common interests and/or traits and feel like they belong. And because of this, a growing number of companies are starting to build communities for their clients, team members, and fans as part of a procedure known as community management.

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Businesses create communities or apply community management strategies to foster genuine connections between their internal and external audiences (customers, fans, and followers) (employees, vendors, partners, and team members).

Businesses that invest in community management go from being generic brands to one that has a genuine concern for the customers, employees, and other stakeholders.

What Is Online Community Management?

Building a genuine community among a company's clients, staff, and partners via different forms of engagement is the process of community management. To build a network where people can connect, share, and develop, a business must take advantage of chances to engage with its audience (both offline and online).

What Does A Community Manager Aim To Accomplish?

All kinds of enterprises have begun to understand and appreciate community management, although it is still mainly undefined. What makes it so unique, then? Why should your company use it?

Let's go through some key arguments for why community management is essential to your brand's success in the modern day to respond to those queries. Krystal Wu, a former social media community manager at HubSpot, said, “brands need to recruit community managers because they're the tone, voice, and human aspect behind your brand.”

Using community management, your company can:

Natural dialogues are a great way to get opinions and ideas from your audience and clients.
When audience members, admirers, or clients need assistance, you should be there to help.
Make your target market more aware of your brand and products.
Find out what your consumers want, need, and anticipate from your content, goods, services, and support.
Create one-on-one and one-to-many connections between your brand and the audience.
Boost revenues, conversions, and customer engagements.
Beyond just a product or service, give your consumers something of value.

These are just a few things community management enables your organization to perform. It's vital to recognize that this is a large industry. In addition, the word “community management” is a catch-all for various activities that fall under it. Let's go through those forms of community management so you can decide which one(s) you want to emphasize in your business.

Online Community Management Styles

There are six primary forms of community management; some take place behind a screen and don't need direct communication. Others include having community members connect with you and your staff in person. The SPACE Model is the most straightforward tool for reviewing these kinds of community management.

SPACE Community Management Model

The SPACE Model illustrates several forms of community administration so that you may better understand which choices will suit your requirements. Let's look at it.

S: Customer Support & Success

The first kind of community management is success and customer support. A forum, a FAQ paper, and a community website are a few straightforward ways to think about customer assistance and success in community management. A forum is a community-based, question-and-answer discussion board emphasizing customer service and support.

It's a fantastic approach to fostering community interaction. With a forum, your consumers may interact with one another, ask questions, give you feedback, or start a conversation about a new product or service.

You may provide forum users access to your FAQ paper so they can self-help and quickly find solutions to frequently asked issues. Additionally, you'll be able to see who is writing what, so you may step in and help out if necessary.

This makes things simple for your community members and spares your staff from having to spend time repeatedly responding to the same queries. You may build a customized website or landing page for your community members dedicated to assisting your customers using a customer success platform or software.

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P: Product Ideation, Innovation, And Feedback

Product innovation, ideation, and customer feedback are proactive and reactive community management examples. It calls for you to provide a secure environment where your target market and consumers may express their opinions and ideas on how you can develop and enhance your goods and services.

You may invite people of your community to participate in surveys or your facilitated in-person focus groups. If you decide to arrange them, your audience and customers may participate in a wide variety of other sorts of user testing.

For instance, you might have a focus group in your workplace with ten actual consumers to find out how they feel you can improve your product or service after they use and/or experience it.

Most businesses would benefit greatly from this kind of community management since almost every company needs input from consumers and people in their target market to improve their offerings.

A: Acquisition And Advocacy

A different kind of community management is acquisition and advocacy. With this kind of community management, you may communicate directly with the clients, consumers, brand champions, and ambassadors who are most enthusiastic about your company.

Through numerous channels, including word-of-mouth, affiliate marketing, and social media, these community members assist you in creating brand recognition and promoting your company, goods, and services.

Through an acquisition and advocacy program, such as a brand ambassador effort, a community for these (vital) individuals may often be created. Let's examine a case in point. Any user who signs up 10 individuals for the media company's content via The Skimm is eligible for its brand ambassador program. When they do this, they are dubbed a “Skimm'bassador.”

C: Content And Programming

Developing material and programming for your members, such as your clients, supporters, followers, or staff, is another sort of community management. User-generated material, user groups, and marketplaces may all be included in your programming and content.

This is a fantastic choice for businesses that use donated content as the foundation of their products, business model, and other assets. For instance, users who sign up on sites like GoFundMe and Airbnb and utilize their platforms to share fundraisers or rental properties are what give these businesses their value.

These businesses often employ community teams to check that all user-generated material complies with site criteria, is suitable, and complies with corporate policies.

E: External Engagement

External engagement is a sort of community management that fosters a feeling of community among your supporters and consumers, strengthening their bond with your brand in a setting apart from your place of business. Social media management is one of the most popular external engagement community management styles.

(I): Internal Engagement

Internal involvement in community management is the last step. Today's businesses realize the need to develop internal solid communities among their partners, suppliers, partners, and partners. Building these internal connections fosters a feeling of community and enables individuals to connect with others, which raises corporate morale and overall satisfaction.

For instance, many businesses, including HubSpot, utilize Slack, a platform with features like channels to boost internal engagement and collaboration. This function also fosters community through groups of workers (both in-person and remotely) with similar roles and interests.

This kind of community management links your internal contributors with like-minded people, fosters a feeling of inclusion, belonging, and support, and brings them together. This increases their familiarity with your goods and services, enables them to serve your business better, and raises their satisfaction and retention rates.

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Almost any company may participate in this sort of community management since it merely calls for creating a sense of community inside the workplace, which may involve using tools you already own (like Slack) or creating interest groups among your coworkers.

You've now covered the primary categories of community management and how each might benefit your company. Let's now discuss how you can begin developing a community management plan so you can begin enjoying its advantages.

A Guide To Developing A Community Management Strategy

As you can see, several forms of community management and methods for putting them into practice at your business. We'll cover how to develop only one community management strategy for the sake of this article: an external engagement strategy (which we outlined before), especially using social media.

1. Decide On A Social Networking Platform

Selecting the social media platform where you'll manage your community should be your priority. To pick the ideal alternative for your business, consider the demographics of your target audience. For instance, if your target market is young, you may want to concentrate your efforts on Snapchat.

If you're aiming for a large audience, Instagram or LinkedIn. You may also consider creating and maintaining your community on sites like Facebook, Youtube, and Pinterest. A social media checklist will teach you all you need to know to increase interaction.

2. Decide Who Your Audience Is

Once you've decided on a social media network, pinpoint your target market. You will be able to see the kinds of material your target audience engages with on the particular platform, what they like and anticipate from companies similar to yours that they already follow, and who they are presently engaging with by doing this.

Thanks to the research and information you've gathered, you may start planning how you will customize the content your company produces for your target audience and your preferred platform.

3. Find Out What Kind Of Material Your Audience Is Interested In

To ensure you're producing and distributing relevant information to them, you need to identify your audience and ask them what they want to see. By doing this, you can be sure that your audience can access the social media information they want and are interested in.

Asking for this input and being receptive to recommendations demonstrates to your audience that you value their thoughts and views. This can help you increase brand support and loyalty and foster fruitful community involvement (versus a one-way platform).

4. Make A Plan To Measure Your Success

It's time to decide how you'll judge your achievement at this point. There is no right or incorrect response in this situation; everything depends on what is important to you and your business. What is best for my brand, you ask?

5. Set Goals

Setting realistic and ambitious goals is essential while trying to accomplish your different goals and determine your success, just as it is with most things in business. However, this work could appear challenging if you're creating a new plan or if you've never established objectives like the ones you must for your social media community management approach. Once you've decided how you'll gauge your progress, consider doing a few experiments to get things going.

For instance, you may do an engagement experiment if you've chosen to gauge your success based on how actively you use social media. Try recording all interactions with the material you create and post on social media for the duration of the period you've selected (maybe 4-8 weeks to start).

Once the experiment is done, average out all of your engagement (likes, shares, comments, mentions, hashtags, messages, etc.) and use that amount to set a realistic target (and a stretch goal, if you like) for your engagement over the next 4 to 8 weeks, and so on.

When new data is gathered, you may continually update these figures as time passes. You may A/B test several pieces of content during your experiment to see which ones your audience prefers and engages with the most.

6. Post Often And Interact With Your Followers

Consistency is vital for social media success regarding posting frequency and interaction. For your audience to know you are trustworthy and to begin to anticipate your material, you should decide how often you will publish on social media and adhere to that schedule.

This will teach them to search for your most recent postings. Creating strong linkages and connections between your brand and audience via social media is terrific. Show your followers and customers they are more than just a number and that your staff listens to them. “Like” their comments and address any queries, remarks, or issues (including those that are kind and deserve a “Thank you!” or “Yay! We're delighted that you like using our free CRM! “).

You may re-follow your most prominent brand supporters if you think it's appropriate. You can also demonstrate your support by engaging with the information your followers publish, whether or not it directly relates to your business. Remember to be genuine and treat each follower like an individual, no matter how you choose to communicate and connect with them.

There shouldn't be any scripted replies you utilize for your social media followers since social media isn't a forum. Your business will have a distinct, human aspect that consumers and community members can relate to by keeping a genuine voice and presence on social media.

What Is A Community Manager?

Community managers manage your community management activities. You could need the aid of many community managers with wholly different foci, depending on the community management you choose to implement at your business. No of their position within the industry, community managers all have a few common characteristics. As a general rule, a community manager:

Has the capacity to oversee your efforts to expand and improve your community.
They are very client-focused.
May relate to their members through forums, in-person interactions, social media, community platforms, and other settings.
Understands when to be empathic and how.
They are a sincere and meticulous individual.
May evaluate and assess community management initiatives and outcomes.
They understand your brand's identity and transfer it, along with your marketing initiatives, to your community management plan.

Let's analyze the specific in-depth responsibilities of a social media manager to return to our previous example of an external engagement community approach.

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What Does A Community Manager Do?

A community manager for social media:

Keeps the brand's voice consistent across all publications and interactions.
Ensuring that every material posted has a purpose and satisfies followers' and intended audience's demands and expectations.
Plans, publishes and interacts with all social media material.
Creates, oversees, and administers all social media freebies, promotions, and competitions.
Ensures that everyone in the community abides by the rules and norms.
Evaluates the impact of all social media activities and material (and make modifications when necessary).
Keeps up with changes made to the platform in question and developments in the industry.
Understands what users of the shared social material want and need.
Has authenticity and knows when to express gratitude, regret, and support.
Creates a secure environment where followers and members may exchange ideas, get assistance, feel encouraged, provide comments, and solve issues.

Locations Of Community Managers

1. Neighbourhood Club

Are you searching for community management? The Community Club is where you should go. It serves many interested parties, from community managers wishing to network to companies looking to recruit community management specialists, and has more than 1,000 members.

2. CMX Hub

Community builders wishing to further their professions might use the online platform known as CMX Hub. The platform provides networking, education, and mentoring possibilities for aspiring and successful community managers.

Brands may advertise job opportunities on their employment board if they are hiring. Businesses may more quickly locate someone whose credentials match the task since it's a dedicated job board for everything community management.

3. LinkedIn

LinkedIn is an excellent place to start if you're trying to employ a community manager or join a community management organization. Local and international community managers looking for jobs are easy to locate on LinkedIn.

Visit user profiles if you're thinking about becoming a community manager to see the path previous community managers travelled to get to where they are now.

There are also several LinkedIn Groups with the specific goal of community management if that is something you are interested in. Community managers talk about industry developments, provide advice, and even post job openings in them.

4. Facebook Groups

There are many community management groups on Facebook, all of which provide a specific service. While some Groups are industry-specific, others are location-based and connect community managers in particular states, cities, or regions. Most of them provide community managers with the opportunity to network and find new possibilities.

5. Upwork

Looking to contract with or employ a freelance community manager? Think about Upwork. You may publish a job that describes the project you're recruiting for and the requirements on the freelancing network.

The online community managers on Upwork get an average rating of 4.7/5, according to a study of over 1,538 customers, showing that the majority are happy with the selection of experts on the site.

Conclusion

The field of community management is young yet influential. By establishing a community management plan at your business, you'll be able to provide a secure environment where your clients, supporters, staff, and followers can communicate, give you feedback, connect, and grow.

This will promote brand loyalty, boost conversions and revenue, and provide the stakeholders in your success with a relatable human face for your company. Decide if a community manager is a next position you need to fill after analyzing your choices for forms of community management to implement at your business, defining a plan, and getting started.

I trust you enjoyed this article about the Guide To Online Community Management. Would you please stay tuned for more articles to come? Take care!

JeannetteZ

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