Why is Community Management Important?

Community management has evolved from a niche role to a strategic pillar for companies of all sizes. It's no longer just about responding to comments or posting updates; it's about building a loyal, engaged, and passionate community. But why is community management so crucial? And how can we leverage the social sciences of sociology and psychology to make it even more powerful?

The Power of Community: A Deep Dive

Humans are inherently social creatures. We crave connection, belonging, and understanding. A strong community can provide all of these. A well-managed online community can become a powerful asset for any company. There is a range of benefits stemming from community management:

1. Enhanced Brand Reputation:

• Positive Word-of-Mouth: A positive community can significantly boost a brand's reputation through organic, authentic word-of-mouth. Turning customers into brand advocates, when they share their positive experiences.

• Building Trust and Loyalty: A strong community fosters trust and loyalty among its members. You can build lasting relationships between the brand and your customers, through community.

• Crisis Management and Reputation Repair: Even when things do not go quite as well, a strong community can help mitigate the impact of crises. Community Managers addressing concerns promptly and transparently, you can start taking control of the narrative and protect your reputation, in an effort to maintain customer trust.

2. Deeper Customer Insights:

• Direct Feedback and Suggestions: Community members often share their honest feedback, especially the pain points they experience along the customer journey. This invaluable information that can help you tailor your products and services to better meet your customer needs, and remove friction points leading to better conversations.

• Identifying Trends and Unmet Needs: By analysing community discussions, a community manager can identify emerging trends and topics not yet thought of. This allows you to stay ahead of the curve and innovate for your customer!

• Co-Creating Products and Services: Involving community members in the product development process can lead to more innovative and customer-centric solutions. Any test phase is an opportunity not just to learn about your product, but also about your customer.

3. Increased Customer Engagement:

• Building Relationships and Loyalty: A thriving community keeps customers engaged, reducing churn. By fostering a sense of belonging, you can create emotional connections, which we go into a little bit more detail further below.

• Encouraging Active Participation: By providing opportunities for participation, from polls over contests to challenges, a community manager can encourage active engagement from their community members.

• Creating a Sense of Belonging: A strong sense of community can make customers feel valued and appreciated. Creating welcoming, inclusive environment, you can foster a sense of belonging not just between members but also between your brand and its customers.

4. Improved Customer Support:

• Efficiently Addressing Issues and Concerns: Community members can help each other by sharing solutions and advice. This can reduce the burden on customer support teams and improve response times.
  A community manager can also proactively broadcast information to help deflect customer support contacts.

• Empowering the Community to Help Each Other: As part of the community strategy you can work towards empowering your users to help each other. This leads to stronger customer relationship building an even stronger sense of belonging, and a more positive image for your brand.

• Building a Strong Support Network: A well-managed community can serve as a valuable support network for customers. They connect with like-minded individuals, helping each other, encouragement, and advice.

5. Cost-Effective Marketing:

• Leveraging Organic Reach and Word-of-Mouth: A strong community amplifies your marketing efforts through organic reach and word-of-mouth. Community members sharing their experiences, you can reach a wider audience at a fraction of the cost.

• Reducing Marketing Expenses: By building a loyal and engaged community, you establish a base to who to market to. It can reduce your cost and reliance on paid advertising, because you already have a starting point of an established user base.

• Increasing ROI on Marketing Efforts: Community can help you increase your return on investment (ROI) for your marketing efforts. Based on your user data and insights you’ll be able to target specific segments of your audience. Therefore, you can craft much more specific and effective campaigns.

Leveraging the Social Sciences for Effective Community Management: The Power of Emotions

To truly harness the power of community management, we need to understand the underlying psychological principles that drive human behaviour. By applying these principles, we can create stronger, more engaged communities, and craft messaging that resonates with your audience on an emotional level.

Principles include, but are not limited to:
Reciprocity, social proofing, commitment and consistency, establish expertise, leveraging the right influencers, building relationships, shared experiences, and most crucially: Emotions.

Emotions:

Emotions play the most significant role in decision-making. By understanding and leveraging emotions, we can create a more engaging and impactful campaign, and targeted community messaging. Here are some example approaches:

• Evoke Positive Emotions through storytelling to evoke positive emotions in your community members. Positive emotions can lead to increased engagement and loyalty. Stories can evoke strong emotions and create longer lasting memories.

• Create a Sense of Belonging by using inclusive language, celebrating milestones, and creating opportunities for social interaction, help give your community members a sense of being part of something special.

• Empathize with our Community: Show empathy for your community members' feelings and experiences. It is the most impactful way of making someone feel seen, heard, and valued.

• Using a Visual identity: Visuals are faster to process. Use the right images and videos to enhance your community's experience, as part of your content strategy can help making it all the more recognizable and identifiable to your entire audience.

These are only some of the examples that can help you better understand how to look at our campaigns. Applying an emotional driven approach creates a much more engaging and impactful way of communicating, and rallying a community around your brand.

Key Strategies for Effective Community Management:

• Active Listening: Paying attention to what your community is telling you.

• Authenticity: Especially online we’ve grown to appreciate a genuine and transparent way of communicating. It shows a sign of respect and appreciation for the customer.

• Moderation: Establish clear community guidelines and enforce them consistently learn more about this in our video on Social Norming.

• Data-Driven Insights: Use analytics to track community engagement and identify areas for improvement. In our video on sentiment, you can find out more on our approach on how we quantify emotions to help drive our internal decision-making by creating a data driven reality of the emotional state of our users.

We here love building strategies with our social science hat on. We help business grow their brand through community building, by looking at the entire customer journey in a wholistic way. Want to have an initial conversation? Contact us here!