A faceless business organization fails to connect to its customers in the virtual space. This is why successful brands closely work with Online community managers. Your brand develops its identity in conjunction with a growing online community moderated by community managers. A dynamic online community nurtures the essence of belonging among its members.

Entities offering convenient community management solutions like Viafoura offer a wealth of knowledge towards successful brand development. You can click here to learn more about what it means to be a community manager.

What is community management and what is its goal?

Community management refers to developing a closely knit and authentic group of partners, employees, customers, and potential clients. Whether you are fostering your community on Facebook, Telegram, or other third-party platforms or your official website, it would be wise to create a community space where your audience can interact with your content and each other.

You can integrate the human element into your brand through community managers and a proper customer service team. This personal essence can go a long way toward engaging your community members in a competitive virtual world.

We have summed up the goal of professional community management under the following factors:

1. Posting relevant blogs, contests, and discussions to get the members involved.

2. Gaining valuable feedback from your audience from the social interactions through these conversations.

3. Offer your fans, audience members, and customers adequate support regarding their grievances.

4. Enhance your product and brand awareness among the members to grow your business.

5. Monitor the online activities of your customers to get a pulse on what they expect in terms of support, content, services, and products.

6. Develop an affinity with your customers to turn them into brand advocates and leverage a strong brand image.

7. Strengthen lead generation, interactions, and sales, thereby expanding your market to diverse demographics.

8. Continue offering value and support to your customers even after they have purchased your merchandise.

9. Considering the sheer diversity of activities that come under community management, it often serves as an umbrella term for several endeavors that engage the members.

What value do community managers add to the community?

Here’s how working closely with a community manager can leverage your business.

1. Craft your blog posts

• • The consistency and relevance of your blog posts largely define online engagement. Successful community managers are well-versed in copywriting and editing. Apart from crafting blog posts that would hook your audience, they produce editorials to voice your brand.
  • The community manager should use analytics to determine how the audience responds to the provided content, which allows them to adjust their content strategy accordingly.
  • Community managers are often responsible for researching current industry trends and assessing their impact on your website’s performance. Accordingly, they can optimize blog posts to enhance your content’s overall appeal.
  • Community managers can curate blog posts and provide the readers with a deeper insight into your brand’s culture. Along with this, they can also post product tutorials and news updates.
  • Other responsibilities include creating internal links to the website, uploading posts, and sourcing relevant blog images.
  • Community managers need to respond to the readers’ comments and keep them in the communication loop to show that the brand cares about their feedback.

2. Leveraging the relationship between the brand and the community

While you can certainly focus on acquiring fresh customers, ignoring your existing clientele wouldn’t be wise. With a competent community manager on your side, you can successfully manage the relationship between your current audience and the brand.

Remember, recurring customers account for as much as 80% of a company’s sales. Therefore, community managers should take all measures to ensure proper communication with these customers and bridge possible gaps.

Properly nurtured, your community can double as a powerful mechanism for marketing. Community managers accumulate valuable insights into customer behavior, and this information can be extremely important in helping the sales and production departments strategize their plans. Once you know your community’s values and opinions, you can factor them accordingly into your business strategy.

3. Promoting activities within your community

By sparking and encouraging fruitful conversations amongst your audience, community managers can ensure a healthy and engaging environment for everyone. Note that a good community manager delegates and takes into account the feedback from all conversations and discussions, even the ones they’re not involved in.

And when they do get involved, community managers can actively participate in conversations, sharing tips, guidelines, and valuable information regarding products with the community members. This lets the audience know that the brand is directly involved and engaged in achieving satisfaction and helping them meet their needs.

Perhaps in their most important role, online community managers eliminate negativity from the platform, professionally dealing with trolls and negative comments. Moreover, they strive to cultivate a positive vibe in the platform, arranging games, quizzes, competitions, and events.

4. Establishing new lines of connection

Established online managers go beyond your community spaces and try to forge valuable relationships with outside parties. Often, they reach out to valuable partners with deals and promotional arrangements that might be mutually beneficial.

• • Whether it’s by arranging guest post exchanges or inviting a guest author to contribute to the platform, community managers can bring outside viewpoints to provide different perspectives.
  • Community managers take care of online activities, establishing joint ventures or partnerships with related business owners to promote both brands and organizations.
  • As needed, community managers also organize information sessions & seminars to benefit your audience and inform your audience about your brand’s culture. Eventually, these efforts lead to a substantial positive impact on your business.

With all these potential strategies, it makes sense to hire a specialized community manager. Some organizations like Viafoura offer tools as well as information that works towards streamlining online community management through their consistent efforts.

5. Hosting your community across several platforms

Some brands have their community distributed across multiple platforms. Not every customer of your brand might be active on Facebook, for instance. This makes it necessary to manage communities across multiple platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest.

This broadens the task of the community manager, who needs to ensure that your followers across all these platforms need to be on the same page. Accordingly, the manager would take care of the blogs, online content, and message boards to deliver a holistic experience to all your community members.

Endnote

A dedicated community manager often serves as a versatile resource that brings all aspects of your community and engagement together. As a professional, they can cultivate your branding values and elements with new and existing community members. Moreover, successful managers can lend a face and voice to your brand, ensuring that the community members feel the urge to participate in activities and engage with each other. It’s clear why the most successful brands have several professional online community managers on board.

     INFOGRAPHIC