Communication Is Key: Find Out Our Best Tips For Community Managers

What is community management?

Although community management is becoming more and more popular, it is not always easy to define it precisely.

So let's start by defining the term: community management simply means building an online community and managing a social media strategy, through the interaction of users with a brand. The term “Community management” and the job of “Community manager” appeared with the emergence of social media.

Why have a presence on social media?

Having a presence on social networks is essential for any company today.

Social networks are part of most people's lives, which makes this tool very useful for your communication.

You can benefit from having one (or more!) account(s) on social media in order to increase the visibility and promotion of your brand.

Generally, when we hear about a brand, we go and have a look at their Instagram, Twitter or Facebook page!

Most of the time, this is the first image you will give to your users. They can also go to your website before visiting your social media account.

If you have at least one account on social media, you will have some legitimacy. Because your customers will be reassured to find your brand on social media. From a brand point of view, having a presence on social networks can improve your organic ranking

It also allows you to interact more easily with your customers and establish a privileged relationship with them. A simple DM (Direct Message) on Twitter is easier and faster to send than an email!

Knowing how to manage your social media: why is it important?

Now that you are present on one or more social platforms, you have to know how to manage them.

But why is it important to manage your social media presence right?

There are many reasons:

👉 To boost your presence  on the internet

👉 To manage your notoriety and your e-reputation

👉 Avoid bad buzz

First of all, it is essential to improve your presence on social media by posting regularly. Without this, your credibility can take a hit and customers may forget about you.

It is not enough to create a page to increase your visibility! It is essential to post regularly to communicate and be visible to your customers and followers.

A good management of your social media also allows you to manage your notoriety and thus your e-reputation.

Social media are the best tools for managing your reputation online, since you will be able to read everything that is said about you, and track the interactions of customers with your brand.⁣

Managing your brand’s image and reputation is necessary to minimize or avoid any bad buzz. But you still need to know how to do it! Social networks allow you to manage it quickly and efficiently.

However, you have to be careful, since social networks are very viral and information goes very fast and is easily shared.

It is therefore essential to pay attention to what you post on social media in order to ensure that your brand reputation remains positive.

The goals of community management

The concept of community management is now clear to you. Let's move on to the objectives of community management.

The main objective is communication. We use community management to:

👉 Increase your notoriety and visibility

👉 Monitor your e-reputation and your brand image

👉 Confirm your professionalism and credibility

Communication is the first goal. However, there are other objectives that may be taken into account.

Let's take a look at them:

👉 The marketing objective: social networks allow to focus on marketing objectives such as customer acquisition, sales increase, customer loyalty and satisfaction.

👉 The dissemination objective: social networks are an excellent way to disseminate information about a company's products or services. They can even convey information about your brand, about your team...

👉 The commercial objective: the use of social networks can generate leads and increase traffic to your website. So your visitors can turn into customers.

👉 Boosting your content strategy: publishing your content on social networks allows you to enhance and share it with a large audience.

👉 Ensuring customer service: customers often ask questions on social media and these allow you to answer quickly and give them the right information.

In short, community management has many objectives and social networks are not only used to do simple communication.

They are also mostly used to monitor the market, and everything is in real time!

We've answered the question: what is community management? Let's now take a look at how it works.

Community management: communication 2.0

Community management is still a fairly new concept, but it has grown incredibly in a short time.

Social networks are now a major communication channel in the digital world.

Let's see the basics of community management!

How to use social networks to communicate with your prospects?

How to use social networks to communicate with your prospects?

Social networks are an excellent way to build a relationship with your prospects.

Here are the five steps to using social networks to communicate with your prospects:

1.  Define your objective

Before starting to use social media, it is important to know what your goal is. Indeed, attracting prospects, without knowing why or how, will not be of any interest to you.

You must choose the way you want to attract prospects, to be able to transform them into potential customers. Do you want to direct them to your site, get information about them such as their email address? Or many other objectives!

2. Get to know your audience's habits

To succeed in attracting your desired audience, it is imperative to know your target customers. For that, nothing could be simpler! You have to study it, and social networks are perfect for this :-)

You will be able to find your prospects through social networks, but also to better understand them, and their problems.

Study your target market and find their habits, their frustrations and even their interests. Personas are a great way to identify your target audiences.

3.  Choose the right social networks

Take into account the specificities of each network.

Yes, they don't have the same audience, nor the same objectives. It is important to find out which social network will best suit your business 

4. Define an editorial line

To communicate with your prospects, the quality and frequency of your posts is an essential point.

For this, you can set up an editorial calendar to plan your posts and have an overview of your content.

It is important to bring some spontaneity to your social media, but you must keep in mind that your content should be coherent. Thus, avoid low quality, irregular posts etc.

5. Analyze the results obtained

Any work is always more pleasant when you see the results it gives. Measurement tools are available on social media platforms, or external tools can be used as well.

This way, you will be able to improve your messages and adapt your content according to your audience's tastes.

Gather a community

Now that you have created a presence on social media, it is important to get followers and thus build a community.

But how to do it?

Social networks allow a close relationship between companies and their customers. To create a community, (which is not always easy if you are a small company) there are many ways.

First of all, you can ask your current customers to subscribe to your social media pages. This can be done via a newsletter for example! Today, more than four billion people in the world are actively using social media, so there is a good chance that your customers are there!

Then, influencers are a good way to quickly gain visibility. It is important to know how to attract them first and welcome them to your community so that they can share your content and thus increase your visibility thanks to their influence on consumer behavior.

They can be experts, customers, opinion leaders, bloggers and even your own employees!

Finally, the key to building a community is interaction.

By regularly posting quality content adapted to your target market on social media, your number of followers will naturally increase.

Fill in all the information related to your business so that visitors know who you are in the blink of an eye! Adding value to your content is also a great way to create and build a community, using viral content for example.

Be accessible to your visitors and listen to their questions, comments, etc.

Community management is a real opportunity to build a real community.

Engage and encourage your followers to take action

"I have many followers but few likes under my Instagram photos. Why?"

This is a question many of you may be asking. It is not enough to have many followers to make your social media work well and have interaction with your community.

There are a lot of ways to engage and encourage your audience to take action:

👉 Create a brand universe

Creating a universe around your brand allows for some consistency on your social media. The storytelling method for example, is used by many brands.

👉 Ask questions

What better way to generate interaction, than to ask questions to your followers. This method results in creating a real connection with them, taking an interest in them and it often generates a lot of interaction and responses.

👉 Be honest

Honesty is a very sought after value on social networks. Users have access to real-time information. They need to trust brands and are looking for honesty.

👉 Showing corporate life

Backstory is increasingly used by businesses. The human side behind brands is of great interest to customers and gives your brand a good image.

👉 Use video

Video is a great opportunity to create engaging and dynamic content for your community.

Videos catch the eye more than images, or text. Videos can be shared as a single post, or even as a story to generate even more engagement.

👉 Interact with your followers

Take care to respond to your customers, to maintain the relationship you've built with them. This also allows you to keep some credibility.

👉 Organize contests

Organizing contests on social media is a great way to increase your subscriptions and interactions, but also to collect information about your followers.

Keep in mind that you need to use the right social media to organize the contest.

These tips are a great way to engage your community and increase your engagement rate. But keep in mind that other solutions are possible!

Let your imagination run wild...

Community management in itself

We have seen what community management is and its main features. But how to handle it successfully?

Let's see it together...

Which social media to choose for my business?

First of all, you have to choose on which social networks your brand should be. You don't know how to choose social media platforms according to your brand content?

We explain it all here!

To choose a social media platform, it is necessary to know who you are addressing and what products or services you are offering.

Here is an overview of the objectives of each social media, to help you in your choice:

👉 Facebook: this platform will be very useful if you want to make a massive presence on social networks. You can also create a company page on Facebook. This network is ideal for B2C communication, because it builds relationships with customers and allows you to make recommendations, reviews, etc.

👉 Twitter: the major benefit of Twitter is real-time engagement. Sending a tweet is very easy, so information is generally shared on Twitter first. This network is also great for researching your market.

👉 Instagram: ideal for visual content. Instagram allows you to post photos, images, videos, etc. It will be essential if you offer visual products, like clothes, or decoration items, or services such as sports, or cooking for example.

👉 LinkedIn: this platform is considered as a professional network, and not as a social network in its own right. It is very much used for B2B communication, since it allows you to build a professional network.

👉 YouTube: this platform must be taken into account in your marketing strategy. It allows massive video distribution. Moreover, videos improve memorization and have a greater impact on your audience.

👉 Snapchat: although Snapchat has the reputation of being very personal and used by very young people, the network is evolving. This platform can have a high impact, but still addresses a relatively young audience (Z generation)

👉 Tik Tok: "do you know Tik Tok?" If not, it's normal. This fairly new platform allows the posting of short videos. It is also aimed at a very young target audience (10 to 24 years old)

How to organize your posting schedule?

To organize your posting schedule, it is important to be methodical and precise.

First of all, choose a tool to build your schedule. There are many of them, for example: Excel, Google Sheets, or Trello.

Once you have chosen your tool, you can start creating a schedule for each of your social networks and plan your content in advance, so that you never run out of ideas.

Here are a few key steps, to organize your editorial schedule!:

👉 List events and the holidays (July 4 th,) Christmas, Halloween...

👉 Define content themes you want to talk abou

👉 Choose topics for each category

👉 Work on each topic one by one (image? Text? Infographic? Etc)

Getting ahead of the game and planning your content will help you optimize your social media strategy. You are sure to be regular and ensure the success of your community management strategy.

The best tools for community management

Here are the best community management tools

Here are seven essential tools for community managers:

• Canva: for creating visuals for social media. It's a good alternative to Photoshop, which allows you to create cool visuals in no time.

• Buffer: for publishing your posts. Buffer allows you to schedule your posts. You will be able to schedule posts months in advance, on several social media accounts.

• Feedly: for text inspiration. It's a monitoring tool that allows you to gather information that interests you.

• Trello: for project management. It allows you to make to-do lists and create your editorial schedule.

• Unsplash: to find royalty-free photos and images

• Mention: to measure your e-reputation. This tool allows you to be alerted when your brand is mentioned, and thus to know what is said about your brand.

• Google Analytics: to measure the impact of your activities. This tool will allow you to collect data to see if your actions on social media are actually growing your business.

Website and community management: a good duo!

 But how to connect your website to your social media pages?

The answer is simple, they work together. 

Use community management to boost your website

We have seen that community management can be a very good way to give a boost to your website.

For example, you can share articles from your blog, if you have a blog, on social media.

It is also useful to share a link to your website on your social media accounts.

Your website is the central point of your digital strategy, and social networks are there to boost it

Social media can provide your website, and your business with:

👉 An increase of new customers

👉 An increase of traffic on your website

👉 More visibility on the web, because social networks are largely used.

👉 An advertising tool, for example with Facebook Ads

So don't hesitate anymore, and associate your website with your social media!

Social media, community management and website

Nowadays, community management and website work together for brands and companies.

Social networks allow users to reach your website, or to know your brand. They will be able to highlight your brand or your website, by improving its SEO.

Social networks allow you to be present on many digital channels and to reach a large target audience that is both on the internet and on social media.

It is not just a matter of ensuring a presence by creating accounts on these platforms, but also of taking good care of them. The management of social networks is not to be neglected, because they can increase your visibility and your acquisitions.

Community management: in summary

We have come to the end of this guide on community management. You now have the basics of this practice!

Now it's time to ask yourself the question, "should you handle your community management yourself, or should you delegate this task to a professional community manager?"

Whatever you choose, we wish you great success for your business! 🚀