Of the need for a community manager

04 Aug

captioning - transcription - subtitles - friendship

Reading time : 4 min

Why is a community manager so important? Managing your community becomes increasingly important as your customer base grows. It is therefore necessary that someone, within your company, is the interlocutor of your community. If you doubt it, this article will prove to you the necessity of a community manager.

If you hope to build a long-term business with a strong brand, it becomes important to hire a CM.

What is community management?

Your community is in principle very large and spread all over the internet. These are your networks on Facebook, TwitterSnapchat, Quora, YouTube, InstagramYou can also use the Pinterest, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google+, Reddit, the forums, and even the comment sections of articles.

Your community consists of your current customers, target audiences and all the people who interact with your brand directly or indirectly online.

Brands without a community management plan are missing opportunities to :

Managing complaints of the customers;
Turning customers into loyal fans ;
Convincing people influence and potential customers;
Networking with other brands and develop partnerships with them;
Get feedback on the raw products;

Social media or community management?

It is important to understand the difference between community management and social media marketing. These two fields have their own priorities.

Social media marketing (or social media) is the production and distribution of social content to reach new customers and communicate with your current customers. Here, you can focus on things like reach, engagement and the amount of traffic a post drives to your site.

Community management (or community management) is what happens after and beyond your social media post. It's a combination of customer service, listening to the Internet, and actively participating in discussions related to your brand.

Community management often starts on a smaller, more intimate scale. But it can strengthen your brand's presence inside or outside of your social media pages hence the need for a community manager.

The 4 key points of community management

In this article, we will break down community management into four parts:

1. Follow-up: Listen to and follow conversations about your brand.

Community management would not be possible without a continuous effort of social listening: monitoring the conversations that matter to your brand.

2. Engagement: Maintain conversations. And proactively engage with customers, prospects and influencers.

Every comment you make online leaves a digital footprint. The more positive comments you and your community generate, the stronger your brand is. That's why it's important to not just start these conversations, but to keep them alive, especially since many social media algorithms use engagement signals like comments to determine what to run in our newsfeeds.

3. Moderation: Eliminate comments and conversations that do not add value, and resolve customer complaints.

Another important function of community management is managing your online reputation. This involves ensuring that your social profiles are free of spam and that any negative comments are addressed.

The #PerleDuJour is brought to you by @freemobile (via @Tinlenval) pic.twitter.com/duLzw3waUr
- CM Hall of Fame (@CMHallofFame) September 26, 2014

To start, hide the spam that affects the quality of your comments section. Avoid hiding or deleting sensitive comments, as this could be misinterpreted as censorship or deception, and cause a much bigger problem for your brand perception.

If it's a common question that you can answer quickly, make your answer public so others with similar concerns can see it.

It's a good idea to also include a name or your initials at the end of your customer service comments to show that there is a human on the other end of the line.

4. Measurement: Analyze how your brand is perceived and get real, unfiltered feedback.

With all the actions we've covered so far, you'll have an idea of how your community perceives your brand, where you can improve and even what products you can add.

With CaptéIn order to improve the tool, we have asked our community to give us feedback on how to improve it. Thanks to our community, we have added many features (translation, mobile function, typeface customization etc...)

How do you hire a community manager?

You no longer doubt the need for a community manager? Indeed, it is worth having a person dedicated to community management. This ensures consistency in all your conversations and familiarity with your audience.

You can be your own community manager at first, but if you're a one-person business and your business is growing fast and getting a lot of attention, it's worth hiring someone to take on this task.

If you decide to disclaim this responsibility, you must ensure that the person you hire has the following characteristics:

Strong communication and social networking skills;
Empathy, patience and tact (always important for customer service) ;
Creativity, a sense of humor and the ability to adapt to your brand's voice;
The ability to sift through social data to find opportunities and ideas;
A good knowledge of your social media channels of interest and tools like Hootsuite ;
An understanding of your niche or the curiosity to know it thoroughly;