Once you’ve established an online community around your brand, community members and followers naturally begin to interact with you and with one another.
You may not have an official staff member wearing the hat of “community manager”—it could be you, your social media team or an agency. But if your brand is out there in an interactive space, someone should be managing it. To speak for the brand, sure, but more importantly to build relationships with members of your community.
After all, it is the quality of the connections that indicate a successful community, not just how many people claim membership. A successful community may attract a lot of people, but if they are not getting value, they won’t stay. Community managers are a crucial asset for building your community, from prompting and moderating conversations to engaging with members and encouraging contributions.
Here are some tips for empowering community managers to run a sustainable community for your business.
- Set the rules and know when to enforce them. It’s a given that you expect members to conduct themselves civilly. However, community managers must know the difference between a debate and a flame war. And while they should show up to conversations, they should also sense when to intervene personally and when to let the community take care of unruly members. Too much enforcement from the top can kill engagement.
- Go off-message. Even in professional B2B communities organized around particular companies or associations, no one is joining for the privilege of hearing marketing messages. It’s about the conversation. Community managers should be allowed to talk to members in a helpful, authentic way, without micromanagement and relentless editing of every tweet, post and response.
- Recognize leaders. As the community forms and evolves, certain members tend to become more prominent. Get to know them and make sure that they know their contributions are appreciated, anything from a quick message to little giveaways of branded swag. And you can also recognize these leaders by recruiting them to help nurture new members. Either way, they become powerful advocates for the community and the brand.
- The audience is listening. In most online communities, the number of people actually doing the talking pales in comparison to the number out there listening. They may be waiting for an opportunity to jump in or they may prefer more passive participation such as liking or sharing. Whether responding to user-generated content or moderating discussion on your own posts, keep these quieter members in mind and look for opportunities to encourage them to come out of the woodwork.
- Listen to all feedback, but choose your battles. Inevitably, the online space lends itself to being a complaints department. Many users use social media channels as a shortcut to customer service; it’s easier to leave a negative comment on a forum or tweet dissatisfaction than to contact support. If this is the case, set boundaries, such as stating that the community is only moderated during business hours. You don’t have to respond to every single complaint, but the community manager should be alert to emerging patterns and be empowered to elevate issues to the company and to talk to the community about it.
Ideally, the community manager, no matter who it is in your company, is equal parts ringleader, diplomat, counsellor, police, and advocate. Because the community is made up of people—unpredictable, diverse people who come for the content and stay for the connections.
