The Importance of Community Management: How & Why Your Brand Should Be Engaging with Its Audience

With so many people communicating online, it can be hard to truly connect with others and ensure that you’re clearly communicating your message. The same goes for personal relationships as business relationships, more specifically, those between a brand and their audience. What brands truly need to succeed online is a sense of community, and with that, strong community management.

If you’re new to the social media game, you may not know what community management is or where to begin. Community management is described as “how your brand seizes opportunities to interact with your community in public online spaces.” Think of when you’re personally scrolling through Instagram and comment on a brand’s post, and notice that the brand liked and responded to it. This helps to create an authentic connection behind a brand, creating a relationship between the brand and its followers. These types of interactions help spark interest with your audience, helping your followers feel seen, heard, and appreciated.

Through community management, your brand can gain insight into your audience’s content preferences. This helps your brand to better understand its audience and gauge interest in upcoming projects, products, and more. For example, many brands utilize an Instagram poll to ask their followers questions about what type of content they like to see, or take guesses as to what an upcoming launch or new product may be. This gives the brand’s audience an opportunity to feel involved in what the brand says and does, while providing extremely useful feedback for the brand.

A large portion of community management is customer support and success. There are a few simple ways to think about customer support and success in terms of community management – like forums, an FAQ section on your brand’s Instagram page, and more. In this way, your customers can help themselves (and each other) communicate with members of your team, locate any resources they need, and review FAQs at any time. On social media, customers often comment on a brand’s posts when they’re experiencing issues, or will message their account directly with any questions. Brands can then see exactly who is contacting them so that they can intervene and provide the best assistance possible. This keeps things streamlined within your brand’s community, and resolves issues in real-time.

Community management is a new, yet powerful, industry. By implementing a community management strategy at your company, you’ll be able to create a safe place for your potential customers, followers, and more to collaborate with your brand, provide you with feedback, and bond.