So, you’re done with the visuals, wrote down those captions, finalized the social content calendar for the month, and finally posted, what’s next?
People are next! Building an authentic connection with your brand’s fans, customers, and target audience is what Community Management is all about!
There’s so much more to community management than plain customer service. As a community manager, you’re responsible for the online personality, attitude, and presence of your brand. In other words, you’re bringing your brand to life, by interacting with the audience to further address and understand their issues, complaints, positive comments, and feedback. Every day, you have the chance to engage in meaningful and impactful conversations with people, consequently building an online reputation for your brand and sustaining this community. Keeping conversations alive and engaging people into the story of your brand can have an undeniable impact on your brand’s online growth.
It’s definitely important to commit to monitoring the social media channels, addressing the issues of angry customers, thanking happy ones, replying to general queries, and so on. After all, these are fundamental steps in community management. But what if we go the extra mile over here?!
What if we can add a more personal, out of the box, touch to how we manage our communities, to further strengthen that bond we created with people. Below are some tips on how to take community management to the next level:
Don’t just reply, ASK: User generated content can always entice more conversations and generate more discussions and interactions. Ask your followers for feedback or personal experiences with the brand, share their testimonials, and make them feel appreciated.
Be dedicated: If you addressed a customer’s issue, and he hasn’t replied back, a check in every once in a while, to make sure everything is ok goes a long way. It shows commitment and true care from your brand to the consumers’ needs. It shows them that they are indeed part of a community.
Transparency: This means acknowledging and addressing negative and positive comments equally. Negative comments or feedback can actually be used later to enhance whatever is going wrong and make sure it won’t happen again in the future. It will make the brand learn even more about itself when things are seen from different perspectives. This will build trust between the brand and the community, hereby achieving better growth and recognition.
Personalize/Customize your replies: People need to know that they’re actually contacting someone for real, and not a machine. Feeling understood and taken care of will have an enormous impact on turning customers into loyal fans. Smiles, emojis, addressing customers with their names, and so on will revive and energize your page. It might actually make someone’s day!
Those valuable tips are basically the “cherry on top” you need for sustaining a community you’re constantly trying to build. Remember, not only does your content tell your story, people will do that too, make sure they’ll tell a very good one 😊.
