Social Media Community Management: A Complete Guide For Beginners

Social media is not just a platform to post content; it has become much more than that. Many businesses and brands use social media platforms as a medium to build meaningful connections and build brand awareness. The level of brand exposure you get from social media is impossible to get offline. Social Media is a platform that gives you a chance to promote your brand not just nationally but internationally.

This blog is like a complete guide for starters who want to learn the basic fundamentals of community management on social media. It will include the best strategies, benefits, and some of the cases of social media community management to help you understand how it works.

Table of Contents

What Is Social Media Community Management?

Social media community management refers to building and managing a community on various social media platforms to build loyalty and strong bonds with the audience.

It helps in building trust, raising brand awareness and setting up your audience base. An audience includes followers, customers, employees and business associates. Social media community management includes three main activities, which are:

Listening to your audience on social media
Responding to your audience on social media
Interacting with your audience on social media.

Various businesses are shifting towards online platforms and online branding to level-up and scale their business. In such a case, community management becomes more important. Brands and businesses use the community management techniques to engage a group of people to promote their shared interests, values and goals.

Social Media Community Management Use Cases

Social Media Community management can be classified into 5 main types. It shows why and how it is used by businesses to grow themselves. Let’s have a look at each of them.

1. Customer Service

As we discussed before, social media platforms are not just about posting content anymore, social media communities are also used to provide customer service to the people.

2. Sharing product ideas and feedback

Brands and businesses also use communities to run beta testing and take the feedback of the user to perform better and give satisfactory results to the customers.

3. Customer Acquisition

Social media community management is also used to generate leads and engage potential customers who seem to be interested in your product or service.

4. Customer Engagement

Social media communities are also built to just engage and interact with the audience to keep your brand and customers connected. Various brands put up Q&A sessions or conduct live sessions to do the same.

5. Employee Engagement

Social media communities help you to draw the attention of the new employees towards your brand. It is also used to stay connected with the existing employees.

What Are The Benefits Of Social Media Community Management?

Community management gives you new opportunities to expand your brand by building trust for your brand’s social media followers by being present (virtually) whenever they need you.

It is seen that about 88% of the community managers agree that branded communities play a significant role in achieving their business goals. Some of the benefits of social media community management include the following:

Builds and improves customer relationships: With proper community management, you can learn about the likes, preferences and expectations of your customers and find out ways to serve them with the best. This will help you to establish strong relationships with your customers by providing them with satisfactory products.
You will get customers’ feedback quickly: Real-time conversations help you to engage with your customers and encourage them to share their thoughts about your brand on social media. It can result in either positive or negative aspects but it gives a reality check to the brand.
Promotes brand authenticity: People trust when they believe that the brand and the business is authentic. Faking doesn’t work on social media anymore. Authenticity is one of the best ways to build loyalty.
Boosts brand image: Brand image influences approximately 38.7% of the brand perceptions. Community management helps to maintain your reputation on social media and as a result it can lead to a boost in your sales.

Join Our Digital Marketing WhatsApp Channel

Principles Of Social Media Community Management

We have talked a lot about community management but now a question might come to your mind that how to manage social media communities? Well, you can keep a note of the following key principles for effective community management on social media.

1. Define the guidelines

Every brand or business requires a solid foundation for community management. You can start by setting some basic and simple rules for your community.

Make a plan and decide who will reply to people, who will solve their queries, which language and what tone should be used and how quickly all the queries will be resolved. This will help the team to stay focused and keep everyone on the same page.

2. Determine your Main Audience Networks

Each person is different, and so is your audience. Everyone from your followers or audience might have different interests, and they might spend time on different platforms.

For example, younger people might prefer Instagram more as compared to middle-aged people prefer Facebook. Find out where your customers are most engaged and focus on those platforms to target them more effectively without wasting your time and effort.

3. Identify success metrics

Just building the community won’t help you. You have to constantly keep a check on whether your community is working or not. Now, this can be done by looking at the numbers, checking your likes, comments, shares, and mentions to see how people are talking about your brand. This might give you a positive or a negative result, but at least it gives a reality check and makes you walk on the right track.

4. Focus on trending content

If you want your brand to stay in the limelight, you will have to focus on the trending news and updates. A news or trend that is popular today might not even matter tomorrow.

So, you have to make sure that you remain up-to-date with the trends and cover them as soon as they are out. Keep checking for trending hashtags or trending songs and use them in your social media posts and stories.

5. Start New Audience Interactions Frequently

You don’t always have to have your audience to add a comment for you to reply. It’s you who needs to promote your brand, start the conversation yourself. You can ask questions, share polls; which will help you engage with your audience and establish a better connection with them.

6. Monitor and Moderate Audience Reactions

When you receive the reviews, reactions, and feedback from your audience, take a look and analyse them. Not all the reviews will be positive and that is okay. As a brand, you must be happy about what your customers like about the products and try to make the things better that are not very likable by the audience.

Also Read:

Start Your Social Media Journey With PW Skills

Build your own online presence on social media with the PW Skills Social Media social media marketing online course. Learn all major fundamentals of Digital marketing with the power of AI. Learn fundamentals of SEO, WordPress, Google Trends, Hubspot, Hootsuite, and more. This 4 month course contains everything you need to start your career in digital marketing.

What More Does this Course Offer?

You will get professional-led sessions from people who have experience working in this field.
Recognise your unique style and develop it along the way.
You will learn the fundamentals of digital marketing, Digital marketing with AI, Social media marketing from basics to advanced level.
You will get access to hands on digital tools.
Get guidance for digital marketing portfolio creation.
Get inbound call support and career guidance with our dedicated team
You will earn a industry recognised certification from PW Skills

Social Media Community Management FAQs

Q1. What is social media community management?

Ans: Social media community management refers to the process of building and managing relationships with your clients and customers online. It helps to build trust and improve loyalty among your audience towards your brand.

Q2. Why is social media community management important?

Ans: Social Media community management is important because it helps businesses and brands to get quick feedback, build trust, enhance brand reputation, and improve customer loyalty.

Q3. How to grow a brand’s social media community?

Ans: If you want to grow your brand’s social media community, the best way to do so is to be transparent with your audience, maintain an authentic image, and constantly focus on engaging and interacting with your audience.

Q4. Are social media community management and social media marketing different?

Ans: Yes, social media community management and social media marketing are both different aspects. Marketing helps to spread messages, whereas community management helps in building relationships.