Should You Outsource Community Management To A Social Media Company?

Hiring a reliable San Fransisco social media company offers multiple benefits for your business. Social media has become an integral part of business success now. The benefits include better brand awareness, generating new information, increasing web traffic, building a strong online presence, and much more. With an efficient social media management team, you can plan and execute a well-thought-out social strategy. 

The best part of social media is that it enables businesses to build a community of followers. The community allows people to connect based on their preferred interests or characteristics. In today’s social media world, businesses are increasingly investing in building communities for their targeted customers, employees, and fans.

The process of managing these communities is known as community management. You can either hire a social media company providing community management services or appoint an in-house community manager.

In this blog, let’s understand community management in detail and whether you should hire a San Fransisco social media company for the purpose or not. 

What is Community Management? 

Community management refers to the process of building an authentic community of customers, employees, or partners. It is how businesses interact and engages with the audience. In other words, community management is how a business engages with its audience on social media. It is all about developing an active online community that can become loyal customers of your brand. 

Why is Community Management Important? 

Having a strong online community management strategy offers a lot of benefits to the business. Social media community management begins at the very start of the customer journey. If done effectively, it helps to build a strong relationship between the brand and customer. It brings the customers closer to your brand. Read on to know the other benefits of community management. 

  • Increased Engagement 

By engaging in conversations with the customers, you can show your care towards the customers. You can ask questions or opinions within the community to increase engagement. With a strong online community, organizations can expect an increase of up to 21% in engagement rate. Apart from that, the suggestions from the community can largely help businesses improve their products or services. 

  • Know About Customer Expectations 

Online community management offers an opportunity to learn about what customers want or expect from your brand when it comes to products, services, or customer support. It involves listening to the conversations about your brand and the industry as such. All these data can become valuable resources for improving your product or services. 

  • Humanize The Brand

One of the major benefits of online community management is that it helps to humanize the brand. It helps to build a more personal and real connection with the target customers. The audience will feel more connected to the brand which will ultimately lead to a group of loyal customers. 

  • Improves Customer Experience 

Having an online community management strategy can largely boost customer experience. This is perhaps the strongest argument for building a strong online community. Your customers feel heard and recognized within the part of the community. By providing instant support and enabling quick communication, you can ensure their concerns are answered promptly. 

  • Decrease The Cost of Customer Support  

It is the age of social media customer support. More than half of your customers will be expecting you to address their concerns through social media. By providing social media customer service, you can reduce the resources for traditional customer support activities. Moreover, community management allows users to provide peer support when they have some queries about product usage. In fact, community management helps to lower your customer support costs. 

  • Data Ownership 

An active online community allows businesses to get ownership of numerous data sources for improving all major aspects of the business. It allows you to understand what your customers are thinking about your approach to sales, customer service, product development, etc. You can make the best out of data sources and grow your business.

  • Improves Customer Retention Rate 

The cost of customer acquisition is on a rise. Hence retaining the existing customers has become critical for businesses now. If done right, they can become brand advocates as well. Online communities allow businesses to have valuable conversations with customers post-purchase. It is an opportunity to show how you care for them, understand their needs, and build brand loyalty. 

Tips For Social Media Community Management

To build a strong online community, you should devise a strong community management strategy that aligns with your business goals. Here are some of the best practices that businesses can adopt for strengthening community management efforts. 

Keep The Community Guidelines Clear

Like any other business activity, community management should have a set of rules and guidelines for the team members and contributors. You can create and share a document in which you can mention how members are expected to communicate, behave, and contribute to the community. Also, you should have written policies or guidelines for dealing with adverse situations. You can mention the person to be contacted if there is any issue between the team members.  

Proactively Engage Within The Community

To reap the benefits of community management, you should proactively engage within the community. You should ensure that the members are receiving quick support when they need it, the concerns are promptly addressed, and issues are resolved on time. You should have a community manager who would check comments and respond promptly in the community. 

Ensure Authenticity And Consistency 

No matter what type of community you manage, you should ensure authenticity in your communication. Having a genuine voice helps to keep your customers, leads, and fans closer to your brand. Moreover, they feel valued when you talk realistically. Therefore, make sure you engage with the community members on a human level, and not like a corporate robot. Ensure you show empathy while you interact with the customers. 

Listen Actively To The Conversations

Businesses are increasingly being attentive to social listening to reap its various benefits. It is crucial in community management as you have to thoughtfully interact with the customers. By listening to the discussion happening about or around your brand, you can improve your communication effectively within the community. Furthermore, it gives the message to your community members that you listen to and value their opinions. 

Post-Support Follow-Up 

Let’s say you resolved an issue from a customer within the community. You can follow up with them after a couple of days to check whether the product is working fine or if are they still facing issues. Following up after providing support is one way you can show the care the brand has for its community members. 

Ask For Feedback And Suggestions

Building a strong and vibrant community is a long process. You may have to change the engagement techniques and community management strategy multiple times to reach your goals. You can gather feedback and suggestions from your customers on community management practices, products, customer support, etc. for improvement. You can analyze the feedback and tweak your current strategy for better engagement.

Monitor Progress 

Your community management strategy should have a specific goal so that you can analyze and monitor the progress you have made from time to time. By determining the KPIs that help you measure the success rate of the community management strategy, you can check whether your efforts are helping you reach the goals. If not, it is better to hire a new social media company or change the existing strategy that better aligns with the goals.   

Introduce Innovative Ways of Engagement 

There are countless tactics you can try for improving your user engagement rate within the community. Explore new ways to interact and engage with your community members. For example, you can change your content strategy, introduce out-of-the-box contests, host a creative survey, and more. 

Should You Outsource Community Management To A Social Media Company? 

Now that you have read the importance and best practices of community management, the next question is whether you should handle it in-house or outsource it to a community manager. There is no one-size-fits-all strategy when it comes to social media management. The right way is to weigh the pros and cons of both and figure out the best solution that fits your business. 

Community management is more or less an umbrella term, and multiple activities come under it. When choosing a social media company for community management, you need to ensure they have trained professionals who have hands-on experience in social media community management. Always remember the community manager functions as the face of the brand within the community hence they should be hired thoughtfully. 

FCS For Community Management

Are you looking for a San Fransisco social media company providing community management services? Look no further! 

Fresh Content Society is the agency that you can rely on for building a vibrant social media community. We are an award-winning social media agency offering full-fledged digital marketing services that help you reach your marketing goals.

Get in touch with us today for further discussion!