Community Management – Ways to understand and communicate with your audience

Community Management – what tasks should we consider?

Have you considered whether your brands require community management? The answer will always be YES!

A Community provides people with a sense of belonging and a network of other people can connect with based on their common interests and characteristics. That is why, as part of a process known as community management, many brands are beginning to invest in creating communities for their customers, especially loyal ones.

So, what makes community management so special? Why should brands adopt it? To answer those questions, let’s cover some tasks and the main benefits of why it’s so important for brand success today.

To begin, we must comprehend the primary goals of a community manager. Here are some brief tasks that can assist you understand more:

“Managing, growing, and developing a brand’s digital community to build positive and lasting relationships with audiences and potential customers.”

Specifically, community management enables your brands to:

Gather feedback and ideas from your customers via real-time conversations.
Assist your audiences and customers whenever they need.
Raise brand and product awareness among your target audiences.
Increase customer interactions, conversion rates and sales.
Establish a consistent relationship between your audience and your brand.
Provide customers with value in addition to a product or service.
Find out what your customers expect and require in products or services.

A community manager’s primary responsibility is to effectively communicate the brand’s message. As a result, this role needs to comprehend the audiences’ thoughts and feelings. They are required to understand the characteristics of the target market and know how to target them in the right brand’s tone of voice. The community manager should also have good spelling and grammar, as a single Facebook reply with a spelling error or an unclear message can trigger a wave of criticism.

It is critical to note that community management is a specific field of marketing and PR industry. The community manager is an important role of the branding, internal and external communications, but having this specialist in charge of the entire marketing strategy would be a massive task for just one person. As a result, the brand needs to keep in mind that the larger the brand is, the more the company needs community management.

Messenger Development Process

Anticipate Customer Needs

Besides identifying your target audiences, your brands need to anticipate what content the audiences want to ensure that you are creating and delivering the right message and conversations to them. Your brand should have a clear idea of who the target audience is and what message you want to convey. Are there any questions and topics that come up frequently?

This ensures that the appropriate content and messages are able to reach and pique the interest of your audience. Anticipating and proactively incorporating them into your message experience, in particular, will help you meet your audience’s needs and avoid drop off. Thanks to the current digital communications (including the consumer research, CRMs, website analytics and even the content of your Facebook Page and messages), we can provide useful insights into any kinds of conversations people want to have with your brand.

Take note that your brand should ask for feedback and be open to suggestions from your audiences, which will help to improve brand loyalty and advocacy, as well as create valuable interaction within your community.

Identify Your Approach (Live, automate, Hybrid)

There are three options for your approach identifications. Each approach has different advantages and disadvantages depending on the size of your Messenger experience initiative. Consider how your brand’s approach affects your short and long-term business objectives:

The most basic solution is Live Messaging. As Messenger is linked to your brand’s Facebook Page, you can directly manage your inbox from your Page or Business Manager to stay in touch with your audiences.

Whenever your chat volume rises, you should think about incorporating some automation into your messaging, such as greetings and instant replies based on some predefined questions. You can also go with a fully Automated Approach.

ManyChat, Chatkit, and Chatfuel are some examples of developers you can collaborate with to set up automated messaging. They provide a variety of options, from re-build templates to self-service tools.

If you require a more specialized solution, consider working with a third-party developer to create what you need.

Hybrid Messaging combines the ease of access to conversations with the low cost of pushing notifications. It enables your brands to benefit from increased engagement throughout the sales process.

Bring your brand identity

When you create an authentic voice for your business, people are more likely to engage with you.This can be achieved with a personable character or a good narrative. Know your audience and what kind of “language” they use for communication. Some takeaway keywords are:

Tone of Voice:How will your voice translate to Messenger? Is a more conversational approach preferable? Should a helpful assistant lead people through your experience?

Character: Consider using a character as the personality for your experience. That could mean bringing a spokesperson to life, partnering with a celebrity or giving your bot its own personality.

Narrative: Another approach is to tell a story through Messenger. You can release exclusive content to your subscribers through Messenger or even deliver an original narrative.

Social Media Crisis – What should we monitor in community management?

Well, when it comes to a crisis in any form, you need to respond fast. Especially, with the lighting-fast spreading speed of social media, you can not underestimate the power of online communities that affect your business. So what can you do to avoid or reduce the damage of the social media crisis to the business?

Define, Forecast and Planning is essential

Define: First, you need to define how your business or any aspects of it can trigger the fire alarm. People can say anything online, that’s the fact. But the huge amount of negatives bring the tension of a domino effect, and it’s waiting to expolde. So the team should understand the source that could bring the crisis, and make the action plan for each scenario.

Forecast: This is a good time to get the whole company together to talk about the experience you’ve all been through, and share knowledge and experiences from different teams. Maybe the customer service department had some important insight. Or maybe public relations has some new guidelines that need to be incorporated into your social media plan.

Planning: A company-wide social media crisis communication plan allows you to take immediate action to any potential issue. Instead of debating how to handle things, or waiting for senior managers to weigh in, you can react fast and prevent things from getting out of control.