Best Practice Community Management: Eight Tips for Your Team

1. 1. Quick reactions
2. 2. Useful Tools
3. 3. Listening pays off
4. 4. Uniform tonality instead of pointing fingers
5. 5. Make it clear: people are sitting here
6. 6. Exchange with colleagues
7. 7. Breathers
8. 8. Coordination with the team

With the rise of social media, community management has also become increasingly important. This development poses many questions to companies: How do I deal with criticism from customers or other users on digital platforms? How do I structure my team and my work to be not only efficient but also prepared for a possible shitstorm? What tools can help? Julian Gottke, who has been in the industry for many years as an expert, gives answers to the most important points as a guest author with a list.

Fortunately, discussions in the social media cosmos have evolved over the last few years. Companies hardly ever ask whether community management is necessary, but instead work more on how they can implement it as best as possible. I want to help you find the right setup, introduce you to good community management tools and give you helpful tips that will turn you and your community into real partners.

1. Quick reactions

Top commandment: Social media discussions require answers almost in real time. This means: Quick responses are essential in contact with the community, so that the other person does not get the impression of being ignored or neglected. Therefore, your team should always keep an eye on the "Response Time" metric and it should be a clear goal to reduce it. Speed is important. What is even more important to many users: to receive an individual answer with added value. Despite the hurry, your team should take enough time to respond adequately to each comment.

2. Useful Tools

Hardly any area in the organization of community management is given as much attention as tools. They are the tools of the trade, can simplify processes and professionalize procedures. But not all of them are equally useful for every company. Which community management software do you find simplifies the work and suits you best? To understand this more precisely, I spoke with a handful of experts who deal with community management on a daily basis. Their favorites:

Agorapulse

Is a Swiss Army knife for community managers with many functions. With the all-in-one tool, social media teams can cover the entire range of community management. Agorapulse offers a comprehensive social media inbox, where messages and interactions from all networks are bundled and assigned to colleagues. In addition, the tool offers an analysis and reporting area, content scheduling, and also covers brand monitoring.

Brandwatch and Meltwater

Brandwatch and Meltwater are leading. In the area of ​​social listening. Above all, Brandwatch enables you to break down exactly who in the industry is talking about which topics. A less comprehensive but cheaper alternative for this is Mention.

quintly

Also a specialist like Brandwatch, but in the analysis area, is quintly. If your team really wants to know which content works and which doesn't, the analytics specialist comes into play. Strong features of quintly: Competitive Benchmarking, Post-Tagging and the ability to individually customize each metric.

Besides, there are of course a large number of other practical tools:

• Canva - for building graphics
• InShot - for cutting videos
• Slack - to make the coordination within the team fast (also from the home office)
• Asana - a kanban overview can help to keep track of handovers and responsibilities, as well as seeding projects

3. Listening pays off

Knowing what the community is talking about is extremely important for many reasons. One of them is that community managers can get to know their community better and understand what moves them. The team should be given the relevant time to listen in a focused way. This is the only way to give holistic answers and respond to each user.

In addition, the community managers can proactively join discussions. This can nip any emerging shitstorms in the bud, but also identify potentials directly.

Stephan Naumann

Listening is also worthwhile outside of your own community. By actively following other communities, your community managers can learn from others and bring the knowledge gained back into your own company. In addition, leaving your echo chamber is also a way to interact with new users and draw their attention to your community (also called "seeding"). This can happen ad-hoc in the comment columns of relevant accounts, be covered in the listening area of ​​an all-in-one tool, or be supported by the use of specialist tools such as Brandwatch or Mention.

“Social listening is the perfect tool for product managers to collect consumer feedback on the current TV, online video or out-of-home campaign in almost real time. Valuable insights into the creativity of the creation can often already be gained here,” says Stephan Naumann from the media agency OMD.

4. Uniform tonality instead of pointing fingers

Similar to the color palettes, which can be part of your corporate identity, the written word also conveys a feeling and thus creates a feeling. What is important is that this feeling corresponds exactly to the one that you want to convey to your users with your brand. This can be playful, friendly or cheeky - that depends on your brand identity. However, a patronizing finger pointing is usually out of place.

Franziska Hendreschke

“My experience is that users quickly go into confrontation mode when someone 'explains the world' to them or communicates in a pedagogic manner. It is better to ask again in communication than to point the finger. Facts and food for thought can also be accommodated here and there,” says Franziska Hendreschke, Head of Social Media at Deutschlandfunk Nova.

The tonality of your brand should in no case be a random product, but should find its place in the brand guidelines next to the color codes and communicated to all employees. This is the only way you can ensure that everyone, whether community manager, sales employee or PR officer, carries out communication into the outside world in the right way.

5. Make it clear: people are sitting here

Often, tough shots are fired in the comment columns; there are heated discussions and sometimes it goes below the belt. Your team should communicate clearly that people are also sitting behind the screens in your team who read these comments and reply. The subsequent responses are often formulated more conciliatory.

In addition, your team should be able to provide pre-formulated answers for certain statements after internal discussions. This way, you ensure that all employees follow the same line. Such "templates" for answers in combination with personal, detailed answers can represent an ideal mix.

6. Exchange with colleagues

Misunderstandings can occur in both private and professional life - especially in written communication. The risk is therefore even higher in community management. The exchange on sensitive topics with colleagues from the content team is therefore extremely important in community management. So make sure that your tool set enables quick exchange.

Use Slack or Teams for arrangements and quick feedback from colleagues. The opinion of others can be very helpful in tricky situations and prevent misunderstandings before they arise.

7. Breathers

In few other jobs do you get caught in the crossfire as quickly as in community management. Even if community managers are actually communicating for a company, constant criticism can also leave personal traces in them. Taking breaks to be able to switch off - and explicitly encouraging colleagues to do the same - is therefore immensely important.

Even if breaks initially cost time, you or your team members will save time through increased productivity after your break. In addition: Often the best ideas come during the break on the balcony, or on the way to the coffee machine.

But it is also important that the breaks are communicated within the team, so that other community managers can jump in. Communication is therefore not only internally the be-all and end-all in this case.

8. Coordination with the team

The tonality mentioned further up, but also many other topics such as FAQs and current workflows, have to be coordinated within the team. In addition, this information must always be kept up to date and made available to all employees at all times. There must be responsible employees for this.

As community management becomes more and more important, the teams are also growing. This is nice to see, of course, but it also increases complexity. Depending on the service plan, handovers should also be well planned and weekend services defined, because your community does not know about public holidays. If your team is divided into different hierarchies, it also makes sense that responsible people have on-call duties in which they are at least available for urgent queries.