Community management is simply the nurturing of an audience, all of whom share a common interest.

1. Why is there a problem around community management?

Tough economic times call for tough action. Valuing the customers you already have has never been more important than in this hyper-competitive, recession-stifled world. Yet it seems that despite the importance that careful relationship management plays, few businesses have any kind of formal structure to adapt to the increasingly dynamic and viral aspects of the worlds that customers now inhabit.

Except that managing and nurturing relationships is nothing new. CRM programmes have been around for decades with the sole purpose of helping to understand and, ultimately, better serve the customer. The only problem with these systems is that they are designed for largely one-way, static communications. Direct mail, text, email – all are communications tools, which, by and large, are designed to say one thing at one time and hopefully generate a response.

2. Consumer behaviours are changing

Understanding the shift in consumer behaviour on any level will go some way to helping you recognize how you need to adapt your own community management processes. Consider the behaviours listed below when building your team structure or planning a campaign and ask yourself if you are resourced to handle them:

• Always-on – the consumer now operates at often unconventional hours. How will you handle the “out of conventional hours” interactions?
• Shares – consumers share experiences, good and bad, raising two key points: what are you doing to give them a positive experience worth sharing and how will you handle the feedback?
• Collaboration – consumers are working together to make things happen. Whether it is petitions or group-sourced purchasing decisions, are you ready for consumers working together?
• Creativity – the modern consumer has many more tools and a desire to be creative than ever before. Even simple applications like Instagram can unleash the creative flair of a customer. Are you allowing customers to be creative in a positive way and what is your contingency plan for when creativity works against you?

1. Audience

Community managers, through their daily interactions with consumers, instinctively know what topics drive most conversations. As a result, they are likely to have already prepared statements and responses that help resolve the most common issues.

Use a monitoring tool to continually find out which topics your customers are talking about in relation to you and your brand. It's also good sense to look outside of just your brand name. Look to see what people are saying about specific products, your competitors (and their products). Often, great insights (and opportunity) can come from seeing consumers' frustrations about rivals and their products.

All of these foresights allow the community manager to be ready for inbound complaints as well as prepare content to enthuse and delight your community.

2. Channels and timing

Again, coming out of the social media research comes an understanding of the places where customers are talking about you. From a community management point of view, this is crucial in knowing where you need to spend most of your time.

Charts like the above (from a monitoring tool called SM2) give a detailed breakdown of where the mentions of Brand X are. If there are, say, 2,300 mentions of Brand X per week, we can instantly see which channels we need to assign more time to.

By volume (1,533 mentions), we can see that in theory 65% of our time needs to be spent on Microblogs (Twitter) but the reality is that we perhaps only need to respond to, say, 15% of these comments (230 tweets).

Having broadly understood how much resource we need to handle the volume, we now have to understand when we need our community managers to be active and available to help. Most modern monitoring tools will indicate when, during the week and day, the majority of volume is created. This helps create a much more flexible but structured approach to your community management and enables you to understand whether a split-shift pattern works best versus a normal working hours approach.

Having understood where mentions are taking place (channels), we've been able to understand what is being said in each channel, the quantity of mentions we actually have to deal with and, finally, when these mentions take place.

3. Influencers

It is often the case that a small minority of users contribute the most noise in any given channel or community. It is the role of the community manager to identify these people and be able to develop a meaningful relationship with them.

Tools like Socialbakers (a popular analysis tool) go some way to achieving this, allowing you to identify who leaves the most likes or comments on Facebook or who @ replies or retweets you the most on Twitter. Naturally, whilst the most frequent participants aren't necessarily the most influential, the more they post, the more their content will be seen. If you're seeing their content, you can be sure your customers are too.

Having identified these people, there is also merit in trying to rank them to determine which of the most frequent commentators you need to spend most time with. Whilst the debate around the accuracy of Influencer tools like Klout, Kred and PeerIndex will continue, they can still provide a community manager with a useful benchmark score with which to evaluate each individual.

4. Content planning and performance

Albert Einstein famously stated that “insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” and in community management, this couldn't be more appropriate.

If you don't understand what content works, where it works and at what time, yet continue to post the same type of content day after day, your channels and community will remain flat and lifeless. Frustration will build both internally (your dreams of a world-beating Facebook Page are in tatters) and externally, as customers lose interest and go elsewhere to vent their frustrations. Or, worse still, they join and interact with a competitor.

Content planning may not be the most interesting part of the community manager's job, but it can be one of the most important. Without organized and relevant content, your channels are useless.

Use a content calendar rigidly (Google Drive shared documents are great) to filter down wider business plans into quarterly, monthly, weekly and/or daily themes. Divide up by business division and channel so you have an at-a-glance view of how your channels are serving the business. To this end, also consider inviting content ideas from around the business to contribute to the calendar so that there is a wealth of ideas from which to choose.

Take each theme and begin to craft your message. Be clear about when localization means changes need to be made, what multimedia assets need to be created or sourced (and their lead times) and what legal approval may be needed. If you already have a robust content creation process, get smarter by looking at content performance metrics to determine what type of message structure or media would work best and when.

Another important aspect of content planning is accounting for community “sentiment”. Without understanding, or at the very least, considering, what mood your community is in, you run the risk of doing nothing more than pushing broadcast content out via a social media channel. A sales promotion post at a time when you have delivery problems is likely to antagonize and upset your community.

Good performance metrics are essential. Look closely at things like reach, visibility and the engagement of each post. Consider testing content. Does your latest post have more reach with a video or an image? What types of content get the most comments?

Also, consider “stress-testing” your channels. Understand the peak times for brand mentions, and the times of the day you get the most engagement. See how many posts you can fit into your day without spamming or losing fans. Each week, look at these content performance statistics to understand how you can continue to be relevant, visible and ultimately helpful to fans.

With the increasingly algorithmic nature of content visibility in social media, you need to understand what works, when it works and where it works.

5. Moderation and triage

Moderation can often take on a negative meaning, but is an essential part of managing and maintaining a healthy community. As an admin, you have a responsibility to ensure the wellbeing of the fans of your channel so that they aren't misled, bullied or otherwise abused. You also need to adhere to the rules and regulations of the channel you are using. Be clear in your social media guidelines about the expectations of the community. Be clear by creating a rule book (that may be shared externally too) about the kind of foul language, content and behaviour that will not be tolerated and explain how abuses of this will be dealt with, including the conditions of expulsion from the channel and/or reporting to the appropriate authorities.

Triage is the process of assessing an incident and evaluating its importance and what to do with it. The principle used in hospitals can equally be applied to community management.

Create a workflow such as the one above to make sure you understand when and how to engage with any given issue, but most importantly, know who you need to go to for any given issue. Create an organizational chart based around the escalation topics and name individuals responsible for dealing with each issue.

The speed of response is as critical as the quality of the response.