Social Media Community Management Benefits
In our previous post, Types of Social Media Community Members, we discussed the various types of community members you will encounter in your network and how to manage each.
In this post, we talk about the benefits of managing your community.
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Community Management Benefits
In addition to being an important role in just keeping the community functioning properly, there are a variety of other benefits to be had by having a community manager:
- Regular feedback from the community means more innovation — Your community is likely to have lots of good ideas for your business. If nobody’s listening — or encouraging — you won’t be able to capitalize on their innovative ideas.
- Continuously evaluate cost/benefit — You’re investing time and money into your community. A community manager can help you evaluate the benefits your enterprise is getting in return. Plus, the manager can help enhance the benefits by ensuring a smoothly-running community.
- Ensure your business is constantly forming new connections — A good community manager is not only tending to your community space, he or she is also out on the Web, visiting other communities and proselytizing for your business and your community. The manager may contribute guest blogs or invite experts into the community to share their expertise. Generating buzz within and outside of the community is a key community manager responsibility.
- Always remain relevant — Without care and feeding, your community can become stale and irrelevant. People will come if they can find you, and if they think you’re relevant to their needs and enthusiasms they will stay. The community manager tracks trends relating to your business and your cause and may introduce discussion topics to keep the community informed, and talking.
So the community manager is a critical role for your organization. Yet it’s amazing how many enterprises decide they can do without someone to manage their communities. It’s not amazing how few of such enterprises produce flourishing communities. Many enterprises try to manage social media and their own communities by committee or by making someone a part-time manager. If your organization can’t or won’t afford a full-time social media coordinator, perhaps creating your own community is beyond your reach. It’s good to be honest with yourself on the cost in commitment and dollars of creating your own community. Doing it poorly can do more harm than good.
Next up: Community Building Checklist
Social Media Community Management Benefits is the 161st in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’ve been doing this since 2011 and we’re just past page 401. At this rate it’ll still be a while before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 6WXG8ABP2
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Many people are involved in social media, it is not only for communication but also for entertainment and some sharing. Social media is quite powerful, many will share their knowledge not only about technology but also about health.