Community Management Mistakes You Should Avoid

The examples of best communication practices on social media platforms that seem simple and clear at first glance are actually the result of thorough analysis, complex strategies, and great experience. Mistakes can happen to everyone, even the best community managers out there. We bring you an overview of the most common ones and how to avoid them.

Where is your strategy?!

We have online communities that function the same as communities in real life – they’re uniting under the same points of interests and following common goals. On the other side, there are clients who have all sorts of business goals that include, for example, increasing the number of likes on a Facebook page, increasing number of Instagram followers, increasing web page hits, increasing sales, etc. But, implementing the clients’ goals along with daily fan/followers interaction on social media platforms can be a little bit complicated for the community manager who can get lost and confused.

Therefore, creating great content & additional value for fans/followers requires a deep understanding of client’s business goals, as well as an understanding of the targeted audience in order to form a good social media strategy. If the strategy doesn’t exist, it’s impossible to meet the goals.

Crisis communication

The crisis is an event that occurs suddenly, often unexpectedly and requires a quick reaction. To avoid the stress that’s pretty common in such situations, it’s necessary, in consultation with clients, to develop a crisis communication strategy. This is mostly done by an agreement to simply delete or hide direct insults and curses (yes, that happens!), but the question arises what to do in cases where angry user leaves, for example, a Facebook comment that he is genuinely dissatisfied with the sold products or services?

The internet never sleeps and the news spread almost exponentially. In such situations use common sense, never attack, fight or insult the angry user or even the whole community. Depending on a situation, you should acknowledge the mistake, apologize and find a solution. Even if you don’t know the right answer the second the crisis occurs, let them know you’ll give an answer as soon as possible and then look for help from your supervisor or an account manager that communicates with the said client.

If you show your human side, community will appreciate it, no matter how angry it is. It is important to tell the truth because lies are often easily detected and potentially shared all over the Internet which is something you really don’t want to happen.

Lack of communication and interaction

Being a community manager is a demanding job that requires your involvement all day, but simple copy-paste of already formulated responses on common inquiries just isn’t gonna cut it. Your community wants to talk to people, not to robots. Even if you aren’t always able to have the right answer to a particular query, let them know you’ve seen it and you’ll respond with the optimal solution as soon as possible. It’s certainly better than ignoring it.

Additionally, working on social media platforms as a community manager means you need to constantly encourage conversations, exchanges of experiences and healthy discussions. In this way, you’ll get to know your community on a friendly level which will only help you to do your job more efficiently.

Communication with clients

If you’re working in an agency, there must be a person or account manager who will always be able to contact clients and get needed answers to users’ inquiries. Why? Because your community doesn’t need to know you aren’t a direct employee of a brand whose social media profiles you’re working on.

Successful cooperation with clients and a steady flow of information positively affects the efforts to build a relationship between you and your community & between the brand and its target audience. In the end, it contributes to building the overall image of the brand.

We shouldn’t forget to mention you’ll have an opportunity to find out more about community management mistakes, crisis communication and other pieces of advice on Kontra’s newest DigiTime webinar!