Community Management: Strategy, Examples, Software 2024

Many businesses get cold feet at the idea of diving into community management. They look at it as regular social media management or, at best, a marketing platform. We want to remind you that fostering communities for D2C and B2B businesses is also about building a collaborative channel.

Multiple stakeholders including employees, customers, and related businesses, can be part of a community’s ecosystem. It facilitates user support, exchange of ideas, and partnerships.

Platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, X, and Reddit are popular hotspots for communities to thrive. If you’re still on the fence about running a community, look at this study.

What is Community Management

It is a strategy that businesses use to bring together users and prospects to interact on a topic that revolves around the interests of the company/agency. The community is created to have discussions, and collaborations and give feedback.

The brand typically creates, curates, and moderates content for users to engage with. The day-to-day aspects involve building relationships, laying guidelines, and providing support. This is done by leveraging the brand’s domain expertise and resources.

Look at the clothing brand Chubbies, for example. Their approach to community building is seemingly unpretentious and overall- quite fun. The key is to know your average user archetype and make them an offer that's hard to turn down.

Let’s get into the specifics.

Social Media Community Management vs. Social Media Management

Fostering and managing a social media community is a field of its own. Companies today have a dedicated community manager to create and engage with their audience. Social media management must keep the bottom line in mind, whereas community management plays the long game. Managing forums online and on social media is done to bring together people with mutually beneficial motives.

A business’ audiences get a specific place to gather and share their thoughts. The key point is that the brand is not necessarily the conversation initiator. Community members may choose to initiate and involve themselves in discussions. With social media management, the brand typically starts and controls the scope of conversations.

Understandably, the metrics for measuring the success of these two fields also differ. Unlike social media management, community management might not have an immediate and tangible measure of success. Scaling it is gradual and involves consistent effort.

Online vs. Offline Community Management

A company’s way of connecting to its stakeholders is often a blend of online and offline community management. So what sets them apart?

Building an offline community allows people to form a deeper relationship with your brand. Online community management lets people create and maintain connections. It's not an either/or- it is about how they can serve each other.

Meet and greets, seminars, user groups, and networking events are all catalysts to build a sense of belonging among your audience. In the age of parasocial relationships, a brand is an individual. The community manager has the opportunity to relate with the audience and convey what the brand stands for.

Offline community management adds depth to your online activities and business goals. More soft sell, not too on the nose. Conducting surveys can help you curate events preferred by your target groups.

5 Real Methods To Prepare A Community Management Strategy

Here are questions you should ask yourself to frame a solid strategy to build and grow your brand’s community:

1. What kind of community management does my business need?
2. How can I build engagement for my community?
3. How can I moderate content?
4. How can I gather insights and feedback?
5. Who is going to be my community manager?

1. What kind of community management does my business need?

We promise it's not as overwhelming as it seems. To answer this question, let’s look into the SPACES Model.

Your community can be divided into Support, Product, Acquisition, Contribution, Engagement, and Success-oriented activities. It can be one of these or a combination of aspects. We will break down each element to arrive at a rough understanding:

• Support: Support-oriented communities are the most common of the types. Members usually pose and answer questions about the use and functionality of a product/ service or an activity/theme. Groups like this usually have designated expert(s) to resolve issues. The quality of community management in this type of group can give confidence to prospective users who are curious about your brand.

• Product ideation, innovation, and feedback: User groups share ideas to help innovate products and services. They can give you the most useful insights, which can also help with the adoption of new product features. This further helps with customer retention.

• Acquisition: This type sits at the nexus of community and marketing. Platforming brand advocates and ambassadors can bring in more eyeballs and prospects.

• Contribution: Member posts are the primary source of content and contribution, in this category. This falls under the distributed models framework, which relies on user-generated content and open-source platforms to engage with the audience. Google Developer Groups, is a open community driven by technologists and developers.

• Engagement: Communities may be internal or external, depending on the objective. Internal communities are used by companies to connect employees, suppliers, or vendors. This is getting more relevant by the day, with offices spread across the globe and remote work settings. External communities bring together people with a shared interest or identity.

• Success: The success community picks up from where the support-oriented community left off. It brings users together, to ensure smooth and continued use of product/ service. It involves a more active tackling of issues, and may even help customers become mentors.

2. How can I generate engagement for my community?

Sure, we have all heard the advice- more ‘social’ and less ‘media’, when it comes to engaging with your audience.

But really, how do you go about curating content that people actually like?

And can you get started today?

You first have to make peace with the fact that you can’t predict the outcome- where the community will go.

Here’s where the concept of Minimum Viable Community (MCV) could help. Get started with just enough tools to create a group with users who are likely to be involved and give you feedback. Considering your user's initial touch point, interests, competitors, and the value that your brand can add- informs the purpose of your community.

Including your members from the start, makes sure that they are invested through the process. To sum it up: User profiles, user experience, and feedback mechanisms can help give structure to your content plan. A tip, incentivizing your audience to be part of the community is a sure-shot way to get your audience queueing.

3. How can I moderate content?

Say ‘open-source forum’, and look at the fear in your social media manager’s eyes. Brands are cautious of their image (rightly so), and wary of the inherent risk of inviting comments from the public.

The key is to monitor member activity and moderate the content in the group. Additionally, communities lay down guidelines for members to ensure conversations are helpful.

It's best to employ a dedicated community manager who can shape the course of conversations, moderate posts/conversations and assign issues to the right department. Using comment moderation tools, for instance, can help you manage your brand’s reputation.

Comment Auto-moderation tool by Statusbrew can help you manage community interactions across different social media channels. Using AI-powered Rules to stay on top of things minimizes surprises. It ensures that you’re prepared for any unwanted dialogues that aren’t beneficial for your brand.

There are concerns beyond negative feedback. Issues that require domain expertise and time to resolve must be addressed quickly in the interest of customer retention.

4. How can I gather insights and feedback

Data such as the volume of organic interactions, rate of resolving issues, and inbound leads are good indicators of where you stand. Website traffic and overall brand awareness improve when you have a sound plan.

Tracking metrics and understanding audience engagement can reveal the effectiveness of your strategy. This step is also crucial to get your company’s leadership to see the benefits of the activity.

Collecting feedback from online and offline events can give you key information. Hosting seminars or virtual events can help you get an insight into who your audience is and what they need.

Very simply put, you can put an open-ended question to your members to understand their inclinations. Community members are more involved when they know that a brand cares about user experience.

5. Who is going to be my community manager?

41% of communities have at least 2 to 5 full-time team members working on engagement. This alone is a sign that communities are here to stay.

Your community manager should be someone who can understand your industry and brand. They need to have the ability and tact to build relationships, handle internet chaos, and boost engagement. Too much to ask of someone? Not really.

Much of the nitty gritty will be learned on the job, as every industry and domain is unique. You just need to make sure that your hiree can handle crises and understand user behavior.

4 Examples of Brand Community Management

1. Zoom Community

This cloud-based video conferring platform’s forum came in handy, especially during the pandemic. People were using the platform to hold meetings and work remotely. This naturally created a need for a community to address queries and confusion that users were having about the app.

The volume of conversations was round the clock, and so the management created this space in 2021. The community today boasts of over 250,000 members and about 20 million page views.

2. Forbes Community

This community connects senior-level technology executives, who are vetted by a selection committee. The selected members then choose and apply for a membership.

Membership here is in great demand because of the range of benefits. Community members get to connect for business opportunities and partnerships. Additionally, members can share insights, publish by-lined articles, and be recognized as domain experts. Members typically include founders, partners, and CEOs of technology companies, CTOs and CIOs, and VPs.

Depending on the tier, participant details are included in descriptions and listed as field experts. Profiles include the individual’s headshot, bio, company description, links to their socials, and all of their Forbes featured content. Member profiles are given visibility and optimized to be discovered as credible thought leaders.

3. Lego Community

Lego has one of the most ardent follower bases. For starters, the brand’s community page lets users submit ideas and become LEGO designers. That is a huge crowd-puller. Members get to vote for their favorite designs, which increases the likelihood of the designs translating into products.

The brand also sees a lot of other fan-led pages, which helps with brand recall. One of the biggest appeals is that the audience gets to indulge in brainstorming sessions and participate in the innovation of toy sets.

4. Fitbit Community

Fitbit offers users a variety of forums. These include product queries, and conversations about specific fitness goals, hobbies, or health conditions. These forums provide a space for members to interact, ask for advice, and share their experiences.

Customers can ask queries about product lines and request support with any snags that they may be facing with a device. The forum also allows members to send private messages to have conversations or thank them for their support.

One can choose to subscribe to certain subtopics (very much like Reddit) and unsubscribe if they wish to. Members with higher community involvement are assigned a higher profile rank. Higher ranks mean increased voting weightage, account customization, and access to private boards.

3 Common challenges in Community Management

1. Hiring the right resource

The primary challenge in hiring a community manager is that they need to be a little good at a lot of things. They need to be able to address customer queries, know your industry, help drive sales, retain customers, and manage your brand reputation. They would also need to get used to CRM tools, and be able to mentor team members to optimize workflow.

It takes some level of social media experience and skills to manage crisis communication. They would need to understand the socio-political climate, industry trends, and market competition.

You would need to find someone as good at managing content, as they are at creating it. Inspiration for content is everywhere, but it takes special skills to handle the full spectrum of user interactions.

2. Complying with top management

56% of professionals say their organization's leadership looks at community management as an essential activity since the start of the pandemic. That being said, a lot of top executives of brands look at it as stirring the pot a bit too much.

The truth of the matter is that a lot of times there will be a mismatch in the vision of the top management and the community manager, owing to the differences in responsibility. A lot of times the leadership can understand community goals only if it relates to business goals.

The community manager must be detail-oriented in their vision and back their ideas with the right data. Brand executives must also understand that growth will be slower, especially if it's a start-up or a newly launched community. It is therefore important for the community manager to document every action, highlight incidents, and track metrics in the reports. Doing this demystifies the activity and adds to the learning curve.

3. Keep it fresh

Should you start a broadcast channel on Instagram or create a Facebook group? Maybe both? The challenge with building a community is to anticipate where your audience and competitors may go, and get there on time. If you’re not careful, content can get repetitive.

That is the worst that can happen to a brand in the attention economy. The community manager has to scout the web for interesting hooks and pique curiosity. Looking at communities from businesses in similar industries can bring a fresh perspective on engaging with your target group.

Collaborating with other brands can make conversations interesting and add value to your community members. Moving away from sales-y topics to more educational content could make your community indispensable to your audience. Figure out your niche, and draw out a plan to keep reinventing.

Top 4 Community Management Software and Services

1. Statusbrew

With Statusbrew, you can monitor your community’s comments and filter them by sentiment, keyword, and more.

The platform also offers community management tools that you can use across different platforms. You can review, hide, or delete spam and inappropriate comments to keep the group decorum in check.

After filtering out important comments by sentiment analysis, your community manager can consult with management on serious concerns. This enables a smooth and efficient response system.

What’s more, listen to keywords and hashtags on X, Reddit, and Instagram. You can obtain meaningful analytics that reveals what’s working and what’s not.

2. Khoros

Khoros is a customer engagement platform that helps businesses manage online communities, including content moderation. The software is built to bring the brand’s social media accounts, ongoing campaigns, and departments under one roof. Users can manage cross-channel campaigns and moderate interactions with this tool. You can escalate workflows and get help from specialized teams.

3. Circle

Circle is a platform to help brands create, manage, and engage with their online communities. It enables conversations, interactive courses, events, and payment methods too. Brands can customize the structure of the community to create spaces for different membership levels, courses, and subgroups. This platform is especially useful for brands who want to monetize their community activities.

4. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a platform that can help you with scheduling your content, social listening, and analytics. The software’s workflow features ensure that no comments are missed, so you can assign issues to the right members of your team. With this app, your community manager can pick up conversations happening on the web related to your brand. This can help fuel conversations across your brand’s communities.

Takeaway

According to this study, revenues from online communities were estimated to have a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 24%. Many brands still look at community interactions as the kryptonite that can bring down an otherwise functional social media engagement.

But they’re missing out on the opportunities. Not to mention the value addition that comes with putting your brand out there. Community management can also put you in touch with businesses that can help you cross-sell. There is a certain trust factor when a brand is seen interacting and supporting users on a day-to-day basis.

Modern-day consumers love businesses that are willing to get real and be transparent. It only makes sense that brands embrace the spirit of openness. You can start thinking about building your community today. Your first and biggest payoff with community management is this- being perceived as a brand that isn’t afraid to have a little chat.

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