Your customers are the foundation of your brand.
Community is hugely important in social media strategies, and you can’t afford to ignore it or push it to the side. Lots of businesses are now hiring people specifically for this function, but what if you don’t have a large budget?
What does a Community Manager do?
CM’s do a wide variety of things from responding to comments to organising online events. One common theme in all community jobs is engagement, getting your customers to be active and forming relationships.
Why is community important for your strategy?
Community management to us means transforming your marketing from a one-way to a two-way relationship, shifting away from traditional marketing at people to engaging with your customers and forming a relationship.
But why does community management matter?
- It gives you a much easier and direct way of receiving feedback and comments about your brand straight from your customers.
– Customers can (and will) tell you what they don’t like about your product, use this to your advantage, it’s free feedback!
- It will change the way your customers build trust and loyalty with your brand.
– Having a brand that interacts 1-1 with their customers makes you automatically stand out against other brands.
- Your brand will be more authentic in the way it treats customers.
– Taking the time to listen to your audience, treating the relationship as valuable is going to build your reputation.
All of this is a lot to take in and manage if you’re a small business, so we’ve got a few tips for you to implement this into your strategy without taking up too much time.
- Interact with any comments you receive, even if it’s a small ‘Thank you!’ It makes a big difference.
- Listen to your community. For example, if you have received lots of comments asking how a feature works, why not create a video demonstrating it?
- Reward your community. When you’ve nurtured your community, you want to make sure you continue to reward their engagement and loyalty to your brand with contests and giveaways.
- Experiment with different ways of engaging. Take a look at what other brands are doing well, research how they interact with their community and use it to try out new strategies.
Every brand is different.
Some are playful and casual, some more serious and professional but for every brand it can be hard starting out, wanting to follow trends and copy big brands.
Sometimes though, that can be more harmful if you’re not tailoring your strategy to your audience.
If you’re a small accountancy firm, your strategy is going to look very different to a small business selling knitting kits, and that’s something to embrace.
It would be difficult for an accountancy firm to host workshops for their customers to make their own knitted scarf, but it would be a lot easier to host a Q&A session about tax returns.
Don’t underestimate low value actions, customers will appreciate your authenticity as a small business and place a lot of value on small interactions and thoughtful gestures.
If you need some more help with your community management, we’d love to hear from you!
In the meantime, download our FREE social media checklist to ensure you’re not forgetting the basics when it comes to your social media marketing.
Post by Alice, our KJP Creative Community Manager
