How To: Effective Community Management + Community Building

How To: Effective Community Management + Community Building

For brands, maintaining a social media presence is much more complex than just crafting a cohesive feed. Want to know one of our biggest (not-so-secret) tips for successful social media marketing? Effective community management!

Community management is simply engaging with your audience on social media and monitoring mentions of your brand. Sounds simple, right? Don’t underestimate how time consuming and confusing keeping track of interactions can be. Effective community management often needs automated tools that help you track and prioritize conversations. 

Here’s 5 of our biggest tips to get you started on managing and growing your social community: 

All Comments Deserve Recognition

Community management basics for brands means recognizing and interacting with (nearly) all comments. Whether you reply or just double tap, acknowledge people who took time to type out a response to your post. An exception to this rule? If you feel that someone is trolling your account or post, don’t engage but don’t be quick to delete. We delete comments that are racist, hateful, hurtful or insulting to your community, but oftentimes deleting condescending or critical comments provokes a user to post more so make sure to differentiate between the two. 

Take Negativity Offline

Many users take to social media to interact with a brand if they’re not pleased with their product experience. Our best practice for negative comments or concerns is to sympathize with their frustrations and promptly take things offline by asking customers to contact a customer service email alias. 

Engage with your Niche for Effective Community Building

Community management can be reactive - responding to inbound comments and inquiries, but community building should be proactive. Don’t blindly use hashtags without exploring the community beneath each one! Interact and engage with posts from users that identify with the same hashtags and niches as you to help grow your community and introduce your account to users with overlapping interests. 

Delegate Tasks

Consider yourself warned: community management is a big task to embark on! It’s no surprise that brands have entire teams for the job. Don’t be afraid to use automated tools to manage the workload, delegate tasks to other team members, or time block when you plan to engage and address interactions. Without structure, you might find yourself glued to your phone at all hours. 

Time is of the Essence

While being responsive 24/7 may not be realistic, some comments are time sensitive. By monitoring immediate feedback on posts and practicing social listening, effective community management can help avoid PR recovery missions. 

Can you think of a responsive brand with excellent community management practices? Have you ever had a bad experience trying to interact with a brand on socials? We want to hear all about it!