What is community management? 🔎
Community management is housekeeping on social media – replying to your DMs, replies, UGC and comments.
The aim of community management should be to maintain communication between your business and your audience and a platform’s users.
Community management should not be customer service
Community management should not be customer service – that should be directed elsewhere when on social media, but it does often malform into this as the lines between community management and customer service can easily blur.
Social is meant to be social and in 2024 it’s all about personality and value for audiences. This means that whilst replying to queries is helpful to customers, you should house your FAQs elsewhere or direct enquiries on social to your website or email, rather than dealing with them on a social platform.
How often to do community management👋
Everyday! If you want to improve your brand perception, being always-on is favoured in a social-first world and it’s now expected of brands. If you don’t engage with social media users, you will lose their interest and their follow.
It’s all about the TOV🎤
It’s likely you’ll have different employees undertaking community duties, so ensure you’re all aligned on what your voice and tone is, so that your replies and social media personality are consistent and unchanging.
Your TOV literally gets you followers – think of how Aldi on Twitter, a primarily text-based platform, has amassed a ruckus around its brand with their witty, funny and sharp replies and retweets.
Community nourishment – next level-community management
Although community management is basic but vital social media housekeeping, community nourishment involves going a few steps above in order to grow your audience exponentially. If you’re on social media, you may have noticed that the companies that interact with their audience and actually invite participation, often via outbound means rather than just responses to their inbound.
Oatly is a great example of community nourishment – they’re always repurposing follower content and replies as their own content, they create engagement bait content which invites users to get involved, and they can usually be found commenting on anything or anyone that’s generally related to milk.
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