Community management, especially through social media, becomes imperative as a business grows. It is also equally important for businesses that are just starting out. As a community manager, you must be aware of the fundamental importance of engaging your customers and building a community of ambassadors for your brand.
Here are some of the best cases of community management to help you establish a better community management strategy:
Best Case #1: Establish a Strong Brand Identity of Superb Customer Service
Most businesses fail to extend their customer service beyond the initial touchpoint with a customer. This is often the reason why they lose customers. As the community manager, you need to embrace customer service as the primary ethos for your strategy.
Take for example how Tesla’s Elon Musk replaced his CEO hat with that of a community manager. His twitter thread is a treasure trove of golden nuggets on customer service.
Musk understands that customer service can make a big difference in building a community of loyal customers. He has been known to respond to customers’ complaints and inquiries through Twitter. This has endeared him to his 21.4 million Twitter followers and has helped Tesla build a reputation of superb customer service.
Check out more of Musk’s on point utilization of social media that epitomizes world-class customer service.
Best Case #2: Engage with Customers Who Have Legitimate Complaints
Sure there are plenty of online trolls but sometimes there are customers who voice out their criticisms and have legitimate complaints. Make sure you engage with them to showcase that your business really values their patronage.
You achieve two important things when you address legitimate concerns from customers.
First, you acknowledge their valuable feedback and it gives you a chance to make things right. This simple act of acknowledging their grievances can help your business prevent losing a valued customer. Second, it gives your business a chance to follow through on what you will say you will do to address the matter. Nothing turns off a customer more than empty promises.
You can also direct the conversation into a private channel that can help you better resolve the customer’s concern.
Community management has a lot to do with relationships. As such, community managers must always make it a point to take action that can extend customer service to online complaints that customers post on your business’s social media pages.
Best Case #3: Accentuate a Culture of Sharing Among Your Brand and Its Customers
A culture of sharing is important for community management. Take the Harley Owners Group community membership as an example.
Harley-Davidson successfully built one of the world’s best community membership clubs. Its loyal customers get to exchange ideas and tips regarding their Harley-Davidson motorcycles. More importantly, the Harley Owners Group or H.O.G. as it is fondly called by its members, succeeded in making it a close-knit club of loyal customers who not only share information but experiences that accentuate its culture of sharing and fostering better customer loyalty through shared interests and experiences.
Now let’s check out some of the worst cases of community management. You need to avoid making the same mistakes as these:
Worst Case #1: Pick a Fight with Trolls
It’s inevitable for businesses to have online trolls who wreak havoc on their social media pages. As a community manager, one of the worst things you can make is to fight them, literally.
You will always lose once you engage in a word war with trolls. Best case scenario is you just wasted your time bantering with someone whose sole intention is to toy around with you. Worst case is you’ll make a blunder and the trolls will hold your incorrect statement against you.
Instead of engaging in heated exchanges with trolls, just ignore, block, or report them.
Worst Case #2: Not Turning On the Profanity Filter
Brands do not want to be associated to profanities. Hence, you must implement some policies when you are managing a community of online members.
You never know when trolls use profanity-laden posts on your social media pages and turn that into negative PR. Next thing you know you are in the middle of a backlash for failing to manage your community members. You must avoid having things get out of hand.
For example, if you are managing a discussion page, sticking a rule post at the very top of discussion threads can help you establish civil and polite discussions among members. You can give out a warnings to first time offenders or ban those who seem to always break the rules.
You can also turn on the profanity filter in your social media page, if this is a supported feature. For Facebook, you can do this under Settings.
You can easily block posts that contain spammy words, profanities, and racial slurs.
Community management is an ever-growing important function for businesses. Make sure you follow the best cases and avoid the worst cases of social media community management.
Sources:
Korosec, K. (September 18, 2017). Elon Musk’s Angry Customer Twitter Thread Is a Gold Mine of Customer Service Advice. Retrieved from
http://fortune.com/2017/09/18/elon-musk-customer-service-twitter/
Clifford, C. (March 8, 2017). Talk about customer service – Elon Musk responds to Tesla driver’s super specific questions on Twitter. Retrieved from
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/08/billionaire-elon-musk-responds-to-tesla-drivers-questions-on-twitter.html
Target Internet (2018). 5 Examples of Incredible Social Media Community Management. Retrieved from
https://www.targetinternet.com/5-examples-of-incredible-social-media-community-management/
Gilliland, N. (January 23, 2017). Six successful examples of online brand communities. Retrieved from
https://econsultancy.com/blog/68720-six-successful-examples-of-online-brand-communities
Hamilton, E. (April 23, 2017). Trolling isn’t outlier behavior, and we can stop it. Retrieved from
http://www.evanhamilton.com/trolling-community-management/
Braveen, K. (June 8, 2017). Why Community Management Matters For Your Business (And How To Do It Right). Retrieved from
https://www.shopify.com/blog/community-management
