When you do marketing and branding on social media, you’re automatically creating a set of people online who are interested and not interested in what you’re offering on social media platforms, regardless of your social presence.
Community management is the art of engaging and monitoring all social engagements that happen online that you/your brand are related to. Social media community management is a subtle combination of providing necessary customer support/service, uplifting brand reputation, and brand growth simultaneously while connecting people online.
Community management is required to check comments, reviews, and reactions you’re getting for the page, posts, page mentions, and shares you got across social networks.
During the community management process, the community manager (the person responsible for this process) is in charge of:
- Maintaining the brand’s reputation
- Replying to inquiries
- Providing support
- Solving people’s complaints when needed.
Sometimes, it’s necessary to hide comments when there is a negative effect on the brand when someone comments on a post—hiding negative comments protects the brand’s reputation and prevents the brand from getting hurt by the public. Suppose your brand has an app or a physical location. In that case, it’s better to acknowledge the reviews, whether negative or positive, on the Play Store, App Store, or Google My Business.
Before jumping into the importance of social media community management, do you know the negative side of having social media? Here are the two main factors to consider:
- Broad exposure
- Vulnerability
Broad Exposure
When it comes to marketing on social media, marketers want exposure. However, social media handlers must learn about the limitations that the brand should follow. There are over 3.6 billion social media users, and one post or comment can increase brand exposure by negatively exceeding the required expectations. Assume the brand attracts an unwelcome audience. In that case, irritating topics may cause a crisis for the brand.
Ex: Some time ago, a clothing juggernaut in Sri Lanka faced harmful exposure when they tried to sell lingerie on Facebook.
Vulnerability
The truth is that maintaining a brand’s reputation on social media is difficult, and one rumor about the brand is enough to create an annoying buzz on social media. Because social media is a public platform for exchanging information and ideas, anything the company or its employees say or do will be seen and reacted to.
Ex: A Sri Lankan hotel giant faced a vast social media crisis on the TripAdvisor website due to an action taken by the hotel management.
Since you have a rough idea about the negative side of social media, let’s jump into why you should care about social media community management:
- To provide support for customers and followers when needed,
- To know your audience and to build brand loyalty,
- To recognize trends on social media and have an up-to-date mindset.
- To stop the brand crisis from the beginning.
Tips for social media community handlers,
- Refrain from limiting yourself to the platforms you manage -For example, if your company has an app, be wise enough to check the app store and play store app reviews. If you’re a hotelier, check TripAdvisor reviews of your hotels.
- Be personable – Try to maintain real-time conversation reducing bot messages.
- Always respond to the comments and inquiries the brand receives.
- Do not delete negative comments, but hide them.
- Ask questions through the story option.
- Have fun with it.