Everything You’ve Wanted To Know About Building Your Online Community From Scratch

June 1, 2021 • onegreatstudio

Creating an online space for your business is one of the most important steps in growth. Though it can seem pretty scary, its rewards are innumerable! Managing your community goes beyond social media management. It brings your brand to life online and acts as a real person with an authentic personality showing genuine interactions. If you’re considering implementing community management into your business plan, you must think of it as a long term project.

Brands that don’t practice community management often miss out on the chance to:

•  Convert customers into loyal fans
•  Receive honest feedback
•  Diffuse and manage customer complaints
•  Be the friendly voice in the comments
•  Get familiar with influencers
•  Network with other brands

All it takes is one angry customer to leave a comment and a couple screenshots to start a frenzy about your brand. And of course, the same goes for positive comments. Think of community management as a four part recipe for a “making my brand personable” cake. The four main ingredients are: measuring, engaging, monitoring and moderating.

Measuring

Deciding which platform to capitalize on can be a little tricky but to help, you can consider your goals for your brand. Is it to drive traffic to your website? Is it to build brand awareness? Or do you just want to keep up the good reputation you’ve had going? Based on your answer, you can then decide which platform is best for interacting with your community.

Engaging

Although it may be tempting to hop online and fully automate your engagement on social media platforms, I am here to tell you to stop right there. To be the difference in a world filled with bots, you must humanize your brand and spark organic conversations.

Monitoring

Always be the listening ear. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with chiming into conversations about your brand or even spinning a negative comment into a positive one. Community management at its core is proactively engaging with customers and potential customers that may be on the fence about trying your product.

Moderating

A cool part about community management is being able to protect your reputation online in front of millions of people! For starters, hiding spam and setting up a profanity filter is the right step in having a great comment section. Your comment section should be a comfortable lounge where your customers can have all their needs taken care of. Instead of removing negative comments, invite them to have a chat in direct messages to work things out.

Community management is just another great way to take your business to the next level. Don’t be shy, your community will love you!