Social media is one of the most suitable channels through which a brand can reach, touch or listen to its consumers. Nowadays, more or le...
Social media is one of the most suitable channels through which a brand can reach, touch or listen to its consumers. Nowadays, more or less all brands understand the importance of social media communication. So, have brands adequately understood the importance of community management, which is an integral part of social media communication, or in other words, makes social media communication meaningless if not done? At this point, the lack of brands stands out. Many brands cannot yet manage their community well enough in online environments.
What is Community Management?
Community management is actively managing the communication process of consumers in social media communication as they interact with the brand or institution on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google Plus, Linkedin, YouTube and similar online platforms. In short, community management is defined as the creation, growth and management of online communities around a brand.
Why is Community Management Important?
Community management is vital to a brand for more reasons than one. The most important thing is the correct and manageable bond that the brand establishes with its consumers. The closer you are to your consumer, the more you will be ahead of your competitors in terms of defending yourself, developing your product/service and creating brand loyalty. Because social media users are a mass that receives information from different channels and feeds on their social network instead of one-sided communication. He expects the brand he is a consumer to establish a relationship/interaction with him on social media. The media that a person trusts most is himself, then his relatives, and then his social circle and network. As a brand, you must enter this environment through community management and establish human relations with them.
Community management is defined as the creation, growth and management of online communities around a brand.
Another important aspect is to get feedback from the consumer. Community managers are the most important monitoring tool that not only builds relationships with consumers but also spends time with them and listens to them. Being close to the consumer means that it has a lot of information about the consumer. In an environment where data is so valuable, listening to your consumer or potential consumer, producing solutions and interacting with them contains great opportunities in terms of business and expansion.
What is Ercüment Büyükşener's Social Media Communication Not? It is also worth reminding the following items in the article:
Article 26- Social media communication does not mean doing online monitoring and saying "if we communicate, we will create controversy, let's just watch" even though you see the negative results.
Article 27- Social media communication does not mean "if we communicate, the consumer will want more, they will be spoiled, and then we cannot stop it" even though you do online monitoring and see the positive results.
Article 29- Social media communication does not mean engaging in this business to collect your customers' data from social media platforms and store them in the vault.
How to Create an Online Community?
Creating and shaping a community in Social Media in line with your brand strategies and goals is a little more difficult than managing it.
1. Define your goals correctly
The first stage of creating community management is to correctly define your business and brand goals. Don't think only about social media, website or only offline channels. Think further, think more. Determine where you stand against your competitors and what differentiates you from them. If you understand your brand's present well, you can determine the goals you want to achieve for the future more realistically and accurately. By determining the right target, you can develop the right communication strategy for your brand and manage your audience correctly in accordance with this strategy.
2. Choose the right agency and community manager
Because in order to manage the audience well, it is necessary to understand the spirit of the medium in which the audience is located and to speak the language of that medium. If you cannot break the official language in traditional media channels and create young, dynamic and appropriate communication for the audience, you may cause your brand to lose power and trust or build walls between you and your consumer.
3. Create your team that will manage your agency, which will help you achieve your goals, as carefully as your agency.
If you cannot build the right squad with the right players, you will constantly struggle with today's problems and you will not be able to make the decisions that will help you or your brand achieve tomorrow's goals. Therefore, agency/employee selection is at a very critical point in community management. Your community manager is your most valuable ambassador; the communication decisions he or she makes on your behalf constitute an important building block of your strategy that will take you to your goal.
4. Always deliver the right message with the right purpose
Your community manager and agency are the people who deliver your messages, discourses and services/products to people and receive their comments. If you do not choose your message correctly, you will not be able to go beyond ordinary daily correspondence containing many messages that are not suitable for your main strategy and goals. Every step you take on social media should have a purpose.
How Should Community Management Be Done?
First of all, your consumer is human. People don't talk to brands, people talk to people. Community management is done through human communication and is dynamic like any communication. The conversations the community manager creates are an incredible source of insights that will take the company to the next level.
1. Make a communication that is compatible with your product and touches your consumer
Of course, it is important to create content and associate this content with your products/services. However, it is also important to produce content/questions that will enable mutual communication with the consumer and their participation. The content you produce by knowing what your audience feels and talks about, in line with current trends, without exposing your product/service too much to them, will benefit your brand.
2. How it is said is as important as what is said on social media.
Every community manager should be a good story teller. They will find stories that will both tell the story of the brand and touch them. Therefore, it must know its consumers well and understand them.
3. There should be no generalizations in community management, reductions should be made to specifics.
Very general expressions and inclusive discourses are disturbing, like screams in a vacuum. Communication is about touching people, and in order to touch people and feel what they feel, special discourses, contents and arguments should be used for followers.
4. Each consumer/follower should be dealt with individually and copy-paste answers should be avoided.
Instead of giving ready-made, pre-written answers to comments and ideas from followers, answers that will make the person feel special should be produced. The community manager can use many things when responding, from gifs to videos, from song lyrics to current trending jokes. Remember, the important thing is to make the person feel that they are cared for.
5. As in communication with people, honest, sincere, original, quality and creative content is a must for community management.
6. Each step should have predictable results.
In every step taken, in every content and comment written, the positive and negative reactions of the community should be considered, and the crises this may cause should be foreseen. A crisis that you cannot prevent can destroy many things you have built.
In short, you should take care of your followers, or in other words, your consumers, as you would your guests at home. You should ask each of them one by one how they are, what they are feeling, and make them feel special with special answers. The time they spend with you and the experience they have will affect the rest of the audience and will enable you to achieve your goals for the future, mentioned above, more easily.
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