Community Management - It's that easy!

One of the most important tasks in social media marketing is community management, i.e. interacting with your followers, visitors, and customers. Community management offers companies the opportunity to establish long-term customer relationships and uncover optimization potential in their own product and process flows. When you know how to interact with your customers on social networks, they will remain loyal to you and drive up interactions with your company. Because that is what the algorithm is looking for in every social network with every account: a high engagement rate. If this is exceptionally high, the algorithm will also list your contributions high up. If done correctly, community management can help your company significantly move forward in terms of sales figures and market share.

We'll give you an overview of community management and show you how to deal with your online community in a relaxed yet professional way.

Managing a community

As with any company or association, a community needs a framework or an organizer who has an eye on the big picture and manages the issues. The Federal Association of Community Management e.V. for Digital Communication & Social Media defines community management as follows:

“Community management is the term for all methods and activities relating to the design, development, management, operation, support and optimization of virtual communities and their equivalents outside virtual space. A distinction is made between operational tasks and issues relating to direct contact with members and strategic tasks and issues relating to the overall framework. ”

What are the responsibilities of a community manager?

There are basically four areas of responsibility for community management:

Member generation: Building up a communicative reach is the core task of every community management. Generate interest and actively market the platform on all communication channels (analog and digital).

‍Commitment: It is important to constantly promote dialogue. In particular, this includes motivating and committed moderation, intensive exchange and a particular appreciation of the most active users. Customers want lasting added value, which is created through constantly updated topics and contributions with high utility and emotional commitment. Create successful experiences for your customers, for example through sweepstakes or competitions.

‍Monitoring: Every dialogue requires monitoring and analysis. This is the only way you can identify critical topics and shitstorms in advance and banish them in good time. With reporting, successes and failures can be recorded in order to find the best strategy.

‍Interface in the company: On the one hand, the community manager communicates to the outside world like a PR manager. At the same time, he also promotes marketing campaigns via social media channels. He also provides support in simple cases and answers customer inquiries.

Be quick in replying to messages

Communication is essential when it comes to social media, and social media in particular is characterized by fast-paced development. The media thrive on current trends and no one is interested in what happened yesterday anymore. It is therefore not surprising that users in the social media sector are extremely impatient. Companies should therefore have a short response time to be successful in social media marketing. Anyone who waits a long time for an answer does not feel taken seriously and becomes increasingly dissatisfied with the company. The worst result: The customer ends the relationship with the company and switches to the competing provider.

Customers want to get help quickly. So respond quickly to your incoming messages — even if they're just mundane topics — and take every request seriously. However, do not send copy-and-paste or standard messages that you send to the entire community, but respond individually to each message. In this way, users feel sufficiently appreciated and, in the best case, recommend your company to others.

Stay professional even in times of crisis

The big advantage of social media marketing, that content spreads quickly and goes viral, can also quickly become a disadvantage. Especially on the Internet, the inhibition threshold is very low due to the anonymity of an individual person. As a result, comments can very easily go below the belt and shitstorms take on unknown and unpredictable proportions. The community has the power to destroy entire large companies — simply by having customers refuse to buy there. All it takes is a single dissatisfied customer who is not happy about a visit or purchase at your company and posts about it on social media. These contributions can also go viral and significantly damage a company's image.

Professional crisis management is then required in order to be able to contain shitstorms as best as possible. The skills of a community manager are worth their weight in gold at such times. Stay authentic with Shitstorms, respond to constructive criticism and feedback from your customers, and ignore Haters as much as you can. Comments containing statements prohibited by law, such as discrimination, hate speech or statements that glorify violence, should be deleted immediately. However, deleting a post is a last resort, as this measure only adds fuel to the fire and makes users feel run over.

In not uncommon cases, companies have reconsidered their decisions in the past in order to appease the community again. Adidas is a relatively recent example. During the corona crisis, the large corporation wanted to make use of a passed federal law and stop paying rent for its sales rooms, although Adidas has significant financial reserves. As a result of the resulting shitstorm, Adidas rowed back and now only wanted to stop paying rent to a few major landlords.

Rather see criticism, shitstorms and other negative feedback as an opportunity to win more loyal customers during a crisis, improve your offerings and discover potential for optimization. Because conflict often results in a much deeper and more long-term customer relationship than you might think now. When users see that you're reading your review and doing everything you can to change that, you've made a friend for life.

Know your community

Community management represents a company in the online community. Language and positioning should therefore correspond to the company's self-image — this conveys authenticity and creates trust. It is a good idea to create an internal briefing that contains all the rules for communication, from word choice to grammar to the use of hashtags. Adjust your choice of words depending on the platform and target group. Be more reputable on Xing and LinkedIn than on Facebook and Instagram.

Responsibilities and the face behind the contribution

To avoid discrepancies, your team should clearly define who replies to posts and acts as a point of contact. This is the only way to meet communication goals and ensure quality.

Communities also offer companies the opportunity for direct dialogue between followers or customers and their employees. Take advantage of this opportunity and make the contacts transparent, for example by using abbreviations behind the comments.

Give the opportunity to interact

Algorithms love high engagement rates. To ensure that they remain in a good range at all times, you should offer sufficient opportunities for interaction. In particular, quiz questions that test one's own knowledge are highly sought after by a community. So use the various functions of the individual social media networks, such as surveys in Facebook and Twitter and the quiz option in Instagram Stories.

Also address current topics in your content from time to time and be spontaneous. Because that is what skillful social media marketing is all about.

Be creative!

Without creativity, nothing works on social media! With creativity, you can also prepare dry topics in a relaxed and refreshing way for your target group. For example, you can divide complex issues into several small pieces — into snackable content — to make it easier to absorb them. It is best to create an editorial plan in which you plan future postings and the associated content. It is important to diversify the content and find a suitable mix of user-generated content, your own and perhaps more serious content, but also relaxed and fun content.

The focus of your social media presence should always be on added value for your customers. Make it fun for users to consume your content. This is the only way they stay on your social media accounts and interact with you.

Create an FAQ for frequently asked questions

Good community managers answer every question, even if it's already been asked dozens of times. That may sound like a mammoth task, but with a fixed list of questions, you are confidently prepared for such cases. But: Standard answers without personal reference are never well received! With a few language variants and a personal title, you can prevent the unpleasant copy/paste effect. Alternatively, you can address the problem or question individually and then refer to the appropriate section in the FAQ section.

conclusion

Community management is still often regarded as a necessary evil in many companies, yet it offers valuable opportunities for your customer relationship management. Constant dialogue with the community is particularly important in order to establish sustainable and long-term customer relationships. Efficient community management that acts close to followers and authentically represents the company can achieve just that. With our WLAN marketing package, your customers/patients/guests advertise for you, are happy and recommend you to others.