The value of community management

While the field of community management is still relatively new to many, it has quickly proven its value to many businesses. Some business managers are still stuck on whether or not investing in community management is a viable decision. It starts with understanding what community managers do.

Community managers play different roles depending on your industry. They are often the first in line to help your customers understand and engage with your business thus helping to drive sales, retain customers and grow your brand. 

 Growth 
 The community manger's role is crucial in getting people not only to your community, but actively involved in it. This is why you will see community managers searching relevant topics, terms and or keywords to find blogs or forums to comment on, questions to answer or networks to participate in. it's also common to find a manager using various social media platforms to have conversations with potential customers.

 Engagement 
 Community managers are also responsible for humanizing your brand by connecting with customers. This is commonly referred to as engagement and can be carried out in several ways. Some of the methods include creating, sharing and or distributing relevant content; facilitating introductions within the community; monitoring forums, answering questions and replying to threads. 

Listening
Also referred to as measuring, your community manager will listen to feedback from users and social media metrics to carry out a community evaluation on a regular basis. The process may involve measuring the brand's social media analytics; asking users for feedback, either by polling or directly; speaking directly with users, whether via email, social media, on phone or even in person. In measuring, the manager can also monitor the community's online presence by checking whether your business comes up when current or potential customers are searching.

Improvement 
Technologies and companies are quite dynamic in this day and age. Evolution is crucial in any community. That said, your community manager should be building on the listening phase to ensure your community is not left behind. This may involve monitoring industry trends and competition to determine what they are doing better, how they are doing it, and how this information can be used to improve the community.

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