There is no question that great content and a solid feed are how brands make themselves stand out on social media, but community management will set each brand apart from its competitors.

Consistently engaging with your audience will help maintain your brand's reputation, engage and excite your audience, and set you up for success with future launches or campaigns. That is why it is important, now more than ever, to have a multidimensional voice online!

Let’s dive into community management — what it is, why it’s important, and how you can do it productively to enhance your connection with your ideal client and ultimately help grow your business!

What Is Community Management?

In its most basic form, community management is engaging with your community on social media in a timely manner by responding to messages, comments, and questions, and sharing valuable content.

Overall, the goal is to fulfill the needs of your online audience. But having GREAT community management is about more than that.

You are not only speaking to your current followers but your target audience and prospective customers as well! Excellent community management has three parts; listening, engaging, and discussing. Leading your community management strategy with these three parts will help you better connect with your audience and have a clear understanding of what they want to see or learn from your content.

How To Utilize Community Management

Your community management strategy should have multiple layers to it — this is what we call having a multidimensional voice! Here are a few key ways that you can develop that voice:

Go live

This is a great way to proactively engage with your audience in real-time. It lets you reach your community directly and injects some personality into your marketing plan.

In a live video, you are able to answer questions immediately, showcase upcoming events, provide information about new products or services, and make more genuine personal connections. The opportunity to have a real-time two-way conversation between your business and your consumers encourages engagement and establishes brand loyalty. 

Create friendly competition

Running a contest amongst your followers will help you turn up the likes, comments, and shares. Strategies for giveaways, inducing likes/and or comments to win, share to enter or tag a friend are the most common ways to boost engagement, but there are other creative and fun ways to get your followers engaged!

A "caption this" prompt is a fun way to encourage followers to comment on your photo and engage with your brand. Sharing a "vote to win" post, creating a "play to win" game, or launching a best comment competition are also fun ways to get your audience motivated to let their voice be heard.

Stage a social takeover

Social takeovers do a fantastic job at strengthening a brand's reputation with not only their own followers but also the followers of the influencer they are collaborating with — in short, it’s a great way to make your way into a new audience!

Social media takeovers create a sense of urgency that can compel your audience to take action because they have a short window of time to engage with the influencer of your choice. 

Get in on the top trends

Using social media trends and hashtags can help to connect with followers and join in conversations that are happening digitally on a global scale.

What is important to remember when it comes to trends is to pick and choose the ones that make the most sense for your brand — there should be a relevant alignment between the trend you’re jumping on and your brand’s message.

Our tip when it comes to social media trends? Participate when it is relevant to your brand values and voice, when it is timely, and people are still interested, when you can cast your own spin on it while still staying on trend, and when you are passionate about the topic. 

Open the door to conversation

In today's world of social media, people want to feel a real, genuine connection with the brands they follow and support. They expect to have their questions, messages, and comments answered, and they hope to have you engage with THEIR content (especially if they’ve tagged you, or use your brand hashtag).

Open the door to communication with your followers by listening, remaining open-minded, showing gratitude, staying engaged, and keeping it real with your audience.

The Bottom Line…

The truth is, It's not enough anymore to just engage with your followers through likes and comments. Having a complete, well-rounded community management plan is a must-have for all businesses.

If community management is something that you struggle to keep up with, that’s just one of the many things that outsourcing your social media can take off your plate! If you’re ready to hand off the social media side of your business to a team of experts, we’re here to help!