Practising Good Community Management
Social media is part of daily life for more people, brands and companies day by day. The enormous popularity of social media brings a lot of new opportunities and insights for brands and at this moment most brands know they need to be present in social media now or they will miss the boat.
Being present on the most important social media channels is the first step in becoming a manager for your community. By starting a (fan)page or for example a Twitter account, you will actively start with community management. When you’re done with this it’s time for the next step: entertaining your fans or followers with all kinds of content about your brand.
Think about contests, campaigns, events, behind-the-scene pictures, videos and news. It’s not that difficult as long as you make sure you have a good community manager that loves and knows your brand and understands its community and the differences between the social media channels. Choose carefully at which posts, pictures or videos from fans you’re going to react, dose it out, don’t like everything because if you do, you’re fans will think you are buttering them up.
Besides this you can – for example – retweet or give updates with content about the bigger picture as it relates to your company or brand. It’s about demonstrating wider leadership and know-how and this also means jumping in on big happenings in the world, local and global, positive and negative.
The next step in community management is the most difficult: what to do with negative content? It’s wishful thinking you won’t receive any complaints on your wall. Be careful with deleting negative content, don’t be a dictator and try to avoid deleting content as much as you can. Keep in mind the customer is king and if he or she was standing in front of you in your shop, what would you do and say? Would you throw him out of your shop if he said something negative? Think before you react and react understandable.
While practising Community Management, keep the companies vision in mind and think what suits with your brand and target group. If you are handling all these facets with good care and smart thinking it will add value to your brand on your social media channels and as a brand you will be able to gain a foothold in the daily life of your fans and followers.