Community Management is a fundamental strategy for companies that decide to invest in Social Media Marketing to leverage their sales and strengthen their brands in the market. The professional responsible for this practice aims to interact online with the public, in order to develop a solid relationship that helps the company to grow.
But why is this so important? It’s simple. ‘Relationship’ is one of the pillars of digital communication, essential to fostering consumer engagement and brand loyalty. Ultimately, all customers want is to be heard. They want to feel that their opinions are important and taken into account, and will stay with the companies that can offer this.
Community Management is how brands can open this fundamental dialogue channel, through which they can receive honest feedback from the public about their products and services. This gives brands a great competitive edge, as they have the chance to make assertive adjustments, in full knowledge of what their customers want.
Now that you understand the strategic importance of managing a companies’ reputation in the marketplace, let’s take a look at the 8 most common mistakes that should be avoided by communicators who are taking their first steps in Community Management.
When the company neglects to create a persona, each communicator responsible for Community Management responds to comments, doubts, suggestions, compliments and criticisms received through the available channels using their own language.
As a result, the company doesn’t develop a linguistic standard – in other words, a consistent tone for each of its responses. This can be both confusing to users and harmful to the company brand.
Companies can opt to use a more informal language on their communication channels, including well-known internet abbreviations such as ‘asap’, ‘tks’ or ‘btw’. But that doesn’t give community managers licence to make grammatical mistakes.
This is a very serious shortcoming, which can damage a brand’s reputation by coming across as sloppy and unprofessional. In addition, a ‘mere’ error in punctuation can change the meaning of an entire sentence, and sabotage the intended message. When in doubt, aim for simplicity when constructing your sentences.
Not responding to messages sent by customers is one of the gravest mistakes a company can make. Doing so conveys to the general public the image that your company doesn’t care about attracting new customers or retaining existing ones. The best-case scenario is to answer queries quickly, preferably within 24 hours. If that isn’t possible, always better late than never.
In addition, while some user messages such as “Good Morning” may seem ‘irrelevant’, your company will earn a lot of goodwill with the public by demonstrating empathy and kindness. Try to convey the image of a friendly and welcoming brand, that’s willing to talk and listen. People become loyal to the brands that give them attention.
Community Management shouldn’t be consigned to the last few spare minutes of your workday. As mentioned earlier, it’s a fundamental strategic facet of your company’s online reputation. So get organized and set aside quality time for this task, which should be done regularly. If your customers have to wait too long for a response, this may end up damaging your brand’s image.
Our tip is to use 30 to 60 minutes of your daily schedule, depending on the influx of messages received. Organize your schedule to respond to all communication channels during the week. For example: Mondays for answering the Facebook Inbox, Tuesdays for Instagram Direct, Wednesdays for comments on posts, and so on.
People want to talk to people, not robots! So it’s very important to tailor messages for each user, avoiding the usual ‘copy and paste’. After all, if you were to give the same answer to everything, you wouldn’t even need a community manager behind the keyboard, right?
Take the time to create an Answer Guide that contains enough information to support your message exchanges across communication channels, but include specific messages for each person. This will improve customer experience and show that the company values its audience.
To keep improving its customer service, a company should share internal information. So, if you don’t know the answer to a question, or have doubts about how to respond to a customer’s feedback, don’t hesitate to consult your peers.
Ideally, at the beginning of the work you should map out the employees or sectors that can help you at short notice, pointing out the best way forward.
Passing on inaccurate information to users can seriously damage a company’s image, giving the impression that it isn’t prepared to serve its audience. Once again, the Answer Guide can help you to avoid this kind of mistake.
But community managers are human, not robots, as we said earlier, and accidents can happen during the daily rush. When they do, always be prepared to apologize for what happened. If the information you have passed on has inconvenienced your customer, solve the problem and – if the company allows it – offer some form of compensation.
Take care with your answers, so as to not cause offence or appear discriminatory in any way. Your audience is likely to complain, in addition to offering praise. In this case, replies should always be courteous, and explain the company’s positioning as politely as possible.
Bear in mind that, even if the Community Management professional is talking to a consumer in private, the user can take screenshots and make the exchange public on social media, So pay close attention to what you’ve written, to avoid any misunderstanding.
