What good is all the PR and hype around building your social media presence, if an artist doesn’t have a clue what their message is or what they want to do with it all – there will be a disconnect. We’re talking about your brand and what it stands for. It is essential to figure this out up front in order to build real relationships with your fan-base.

“Community management” is often used interchangeably with “social media management”. And while it’s definitely a key part of any social strategy, managing your community becomes more and more important the bigger your fan base becomes.

Community management, at its core, is about relationships and how your brand seizes opportunities to interact with your community in public online spaces.

And if you hope to build a long-term career with a strong brand, it’s something you’ll want to invest in.

What is Community Management?

“Community” might suggest a single location, but in reality, your community is spread out all over the internet: on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Quora, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google+, Reddit, forums, and even the comment sections of articles.

Your community consists of your current customers, target audiences, and all the people who interact with your brand directly and indirectly online.

Community Management brings your brand to life online – like it’s a real person with real personality behind real interactions.

Brands that don’t have a community management plan miss out on opportunities to:

Manage customer complaints.
Turn customers into loyal fans.
Win over influencers and prospective customers.
Network with other brands and partner with them.
Get valuable, raw feedback.
Be the coolest person in a comments section.

Community Management vs. Social Media Marketing

It’s important to understand the difference between community management and social media marketing because they each have their own priorities.

Social Media Marketing is the production and distribution of social content to reach new customers and communicate with your current ones. Here, you might be focused on things like reach, engagement, and how much traffic a post drives to your site.

Community Management is what happens after and beyond your social media publishing. It’s part customer service, part listening to the internet, and part being active in discussions that relate to your brand.

Where social media marketing broadcasts a message from one-to-many, community management often starts on a smaller, more intimate scale. But it can build your brand’s presence in places both on and outside your social media pages.

We break Community Management down into four parts:

Monitoring: Listening in on and tracking conversations that relate to your brand.
Engaging: Keeping conversations alive and proactively engaging with customers, prospects, and influencers.
Moderating: Weeding out comments and conversations that don’t add value, and troubleshooting customer complaints.
Measuring: Analyzing how your brand is perceived and getting real, unfiltered feedback.