The Increased Importance of Online Community Management
We spoke to Community Management Pros, Diana Aguilar Díaz and Gerard Rabara, to see their take on what a community manager means to a brand these days.
A solid community management strategy is now more important than ever. COVID-19 created an environment online where people are more high-strung, and more susceptible to the highs and lows of fake news. These volatile emotions can mean that abusive comments in your online community are on the rise, and the haters are in full force. Community management is a labor of love — but how can this help brands to negate and manage the sometimes-toxic environment?
At the end of the day, customers need to feel understood. Community management can be a powerful tool to bridge the gap and make each customer feel understood by the brand. They’re looking to your brand for reassurance and guidance, help and understanding.
A great online community management leader is compassionate, but strong, able to understand, but not let the trolls break the door down. Here’s some guidance on how to manage the COVID-19 online landscape, especially as we go forward into 2021.
Community management is the best tool you have to humanize your brand. It’s not merely a customer complaint management tool. It gives your brand a personality that sticks in the customer’s mind. Leveraging this will help your brand maintain customer loyalty, build a community and boost your trustworthiness as a brand.
Part of crisis communication is about empathizing through emotional responses. It lets your audience know that you care about their pain points, their worries and concerns. This creates a deeper emotional attachment with your brand while cultivating an audience that cares about your product. The bottom line: handle your customer feedback properly to ensure that you’re able to innovate as need be, without alienating any of your following.
It can only help your image to be involved in that conversation between customer and your brand. Keeping the channel open for dialogue doesn’t only create lifelong fans but also has the potential to turn conversations around – turn negatives into positives. There’s always an opportunity to convert sentiment. Sometimes, all it takes is listening to an unhappy customer to make her/him change views and opinions.
Social media is a vast landscape, full of avenues and channels to find conversations about your brand outside of your own channels. You have the golden opportunity to take control of those conversations and be part of the narrative.
Customers respond to human conversations; they don’t want to talk to a bot. So caring about the customer with a professional and branded voice is essential for great community management. Sensitivity, humanness, uniqueness, make for meaningful interactions that help brands better understand their customers.
At this day and age it’s almost impossible as a brand to exist as a passive bystander online. The customer is much savvier, more discerning, quick on the keyboard and has high expectations. Community management has not only proven to be the most effective first response to direct online feedback, but also a great tool in knowing the pulse of your followers/audience/customers. Harness that feedback into reshaping your business and helping it grow.
We spoke to Community Management Pros, Diana Aguilar Díaz and Gerard Rabara, to see their take on what a community manager means to a brand these days.
How do you use social media to boost your brand’s image? Here’s everything you need to know about creating the best online community through community management.