4 Social Media Community Management Best Practices for Your Business

Social media marketing involves more than just creating and publishing content. Essentially, social media is all about building connections and cultivating a sense of community, and this is where community management comes in.

What Is Social Media Community Management?

Community management is often confused with social media management, but each has its own special role in contributing to the overall success of your marketing strategy.

Community management vs. Social media management:

• Social media management is focused on representing and promoting your brand
• Social media community management, on the other hand, is focused on developing your brand’s online community

Community management on social media involves the following activities:

• Engaging: Proactively engaging to comments and keeping conversations alive with current and prospective customers, as well as influencers and other brand advocates.
• Monitoring: Listening to conversations about and/or relating to your brand.
• Moderating: Removing and/or handling comments and conversations that might be harmful or are irrelevant to your brand. May also include responding to negative comments and complaints.
• Tracking: Monitoring and analyzing keywords used in conversations relating to your brand, as well as audience sentiment.

4 Social Media Community Management Tips for Your Business

1. Proactively engage and respond with your audiences

Two key things come into play when it comes to audience engagement: being proactive and being timely.

As a social media community manager, make it a part of your daily tasks to check comments and respond accordingly in a timely fashion. Additionally, make an effort to listen in to conversations and mentions of your brand outside of your own circle. This gives you more insights into how people—non-followers included—feel and think about your brand.

Using social listening tools, such as Sprout Social, Buffer, and Hootsuite, can help automate this step for you.

2. Regularly moderate comments

Another crucial role of social media community managers is moderating comments. Check your comments daily and weed out spam-like comments while also removing/blocking bot and fake accounts.

Leaving spam comments unchecked on your social pages may give off the impression that you don’t care, which could harm your brand’s reputation. Even worse, if these comments contain malicious links, any adverse interactions can be associated with you. Additionally, internet trolls could botch your brand message and the conversations around your brand.

The good news is that most mainstream social media platforms have built-in and free tools, such as Facebook’s community management tools — particularly the Comment Moderation Plugin and Instagram’s API for Comment Moderation.

3. Promptly respond to customer complaints

Social media has evolved to become a customer service platform for consumers. How and when you respond to customer complaints and negative reviews on social media could make or break your brand reputation.

The key here is to provide prompt responses. If resources permit, it’s ideal to respond to complaints within an hour, as 72% of social media users expect this. If not, at the very least, ensure that you respond not more than a day after the comment was posted.

However, it’s important to note that not all negative feedback warrants a response. Spam or fake reviews are best reviewed, which leads us back to our previous point of regularly moderating your social media pages.

Additionally, for very irate customers or for issues requiring personal information from the customer, the best approach is to acknowledge publicly but resolve the issues privately.

4. Closely work with the social media managers

Lastly, remember that social media management and community management is a collaborative effort.

As a community manager, you get to interact closely with your audience on the daily, giving you more opportunities to learn more about their interests and concerns. Track and monitor the responses you receive from your audience. Take note of the keywords they use, as well as their general sentiment towards your brand.

Doing so helps you and your team fine-tune your social media strategy and adjust your tactics accordingly.

Harness the Power of Social Media for Your Brand

Social media is a powerful platform, both for consumers and businesses alike. The challenge is that creating content and managing your community can be time-consuming, especially for businesses that are just starting out on their journey.

If you need help with any of your social media marketing and community management needs, Ilfusion can help you. We have the professional experience, the right people, and the tools to help you fully harness the power of social media for your brand.

To get started, call us at 888-420-5115, or email us at [email protected].

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