Community management is the process followed by organisations to engage audiences of all sorts, be it business’s customers, employees or partners. It is how a company uses opportunities to interact with their audience while also creating a network in which they all can connect, share and grow. Now in today’s digital era, the idea of community management is no more limited to offline interaction but because your community is spread out all over the internet, community relationship management has gone online.
Many a times, online community relationship management is often confused with social media marketing and it is important to understand the difference between the two:
Social media marketing
This includes creating and pushing the content on the internet to reach new customers and communicate with your current ones. The focus of social media marketing is to have more traffic and reach more customers thus driving sales.
Online community relationship management
This includes the processes after the content is pushed online. Customer service, listening to the internet and being active in discussions related to the brand is a part of it.
While social media marketing is about propagating message from one-to-many, community management is more about informing or interacting with inner circle and building brand’s presence in places both on and outside your social media pages. Online communities are an asset that can help organizations grow if there’s good communication between all members. And here’s how you can have a great online community relationship management:
- You must have the right digital platform or tool for community relationship management – In order to have good community management online, you must invest in a CRM tool from where you can view feedback online, conduct effective internal communication, inform stakeholders, gain useful insights, etc.
- You must have the right community manager – Besides the tool, you also need to have an online community manager (CM) who not only knows the brand well but also understand its target audience and thus the solution for creating close ties between the participants and forming in them a sense of belonging to something great.
But even the CM would require feedbacks in the form of messages, comments and reviews; the best way to provide him/her with that is online community management tool. Using the online platform, CM would be able engage users and evoke a sense of belonging in them. One of the best community management tool that can help do all of this Engagement Hub. Engagement Hub understands how crucial community engagement is and is designed accordingly.
