In the process of building a social media presence, you will find that fans, current customers, and new customers will be flooding your comment section and inbox. As your brand grows, these conversations amongst your audience become harder and harder to moderate. If you’re at this stage with your business, you need a community manager. This will not only increase engagement and bring new customers to your social media landing pages, but it will also create opportunities for growth and connection with the people consuming your product. Community management is important to marketing because it nurtures organic and paid social efforts, helps build and support an online community and helps a brand get a better understanding of its audience.
What is a Community Manager?
A community manager is basically your fans’ best friend and a brand expert. They take on answering questions, concerns, bringing “hype” around the brand and starting conversation. They also engage with the brand’s community and to know everything that is happening on the brand’s social media channels. Since they are interacting with fans on a daily basis, community managers get a sense of what your customers are looking for and can provide feedback based on how the community is responding to your content on social media. They also keep up with social media trends and see how we can implement them to the brand, look for user-generated content, and provide recommendations to continue to capitalize on growth.
Why is Community Management important?
Community management is important for many reasons – consistent and meaningful engagement with your community is favored in the algorithm, it shows your audience that you are present and want to hear from them/interact with them, it creates an authentic & transparent feel for your brand, it provides information through answering questions about the brand/products etc (basically an extension of the customer service department). Community Management has become increasingly popular and recognized by all types of businesses and organizations. This is because, it allows your company to do the following:
- Obtain raw, authentic feedback and ideas from your customers and audience members through real conversations, in real time.
- Provide support for audience members, fans and customers when they need it.
- Increase brand and product awareness among your target audience.
- Learn about your customers and what they want, expect and need in terms of content, products, services and support.
- Build one-on-one and one-to-many relationships between audience members and your brand.
- Boost customer interactions, conversions and sales.
- Provide value to your customers beyond a product or service.
As mentioned, brands can leverage social media platforms to successfully form connections and meet their objectives. But, in order to accomplish this, they need efficient community management teams to drive the conversations. That’s where we come in! However, before we get started, there are a few factors to consider, as they can impact the overall price of our services:
- Posting Cadence: How often a brand is posting to their social media will impact the amount of time required from our team to either make sure everything goes out on time or to monitor and engage with each particular post. Are you only posting once a week? This will require a substantially different level of effort from our team than a brand that is posting every day. Providing a content schedule for your community manager is essential so that we can be prepared, know the level of work needed, and then can have someone online when posts go live to maximize on engagements.
- Time Commitment: It’s always ideal to have someone watching notifications for your social accounts so that questions can be answered in a timely manner. In fact, 79% of customers expect a response within 24 hours. Things move fast on social media so having someone always in tune with what’s happening is very beneficial. We can make sure to have members of our team scoped out and ready to respond, but the amount of hours you require our team to monitor your channels can impact the final cost.
- Available Tools & Platforms: In order to respond to comments in a timely manner, it can be extremely helpful for our team to have access to social listening tools. If your team doesn’t already have access to any, this could be part of our discussions for which tools would work best for your account. Purchasing apps such as Meltwater, Hootsuite, Sprinklr, etc could also impact the overall cost of services. Additionally, it is also essential to have pre written and approved answers to common questions and have a fast and direct way to communicate with the correct person from your team to get questions answered.
- Brand Identity: Community managers are able to adapt your brand’s voice, tone and personality when engaging with the community and answering questions. Does your brand have a clearly defined brand voice already? If not, our team would be happy to work with you to establish one!
The earlier you implement community management to your brand, the quicker you will draw in new customers and engage current ones! Having that personal touch associated with your brand elevates it and is what helps keep people coming back to your business, and recommending your brand to friends and family. Community management would set your brand apart, and many companies are starting to recognize that. Don’t get left behind! If you don’t know where to start, Reach out to us at BuzzShift and see if community management is right for you!
About BuzzShift
BuzzShift is a digital growth strategy agency with a focus on mid-market, scaling DTC Brands. By combining the ideologies of branding, performance marketing, and retention agency, we are able to create memorable experiences with measurable results, and build long-term success for our clients with scalable, sustainable growth. Learn more about BuzzShift.
