The ultimate guide to online community management: Types, best practices, strategy [2024]
What is online community management?
Online community management is the practice of overseeing and nurturing a group that forms around a common interest in a digital space. When managing an online community, the goal is to create a safe, engaging environment where your tribe can feel at home and interact in productive ways. Online community management benefits a business as well, allowing business leaders to drive product awareness and sales, get feedback, give support, develop the brand, and more. It also involves managing content and discussions to align with the community's purpose and goals.
After all, as social creatures, humans naturally organize around shared interests, goals, and habits. This connective impulse has flourished even more in the internet age, and it’s never been easier to grow a successful online community. In fact, according to a report from Forrester, 60% of businesses own a branded online community.
In this blog, we’ll discuss what online community management is, what an online community manager does, the types and principles of online community management, and how to build an online community management strategy. We’ll also talk about best practices, tools, and how to overcome the challenges of online community management. Let’s dive in!
The 5 types of online community management
No matter the platform, the goal of online community management is always to provide your audience with value while ensuring that discussions remain collaborative, encouraging, and respectful. Let’s discuss the five types of online community management.
1. Support and success of community management
Customers want a place to go to find answers and solve problems. Support community management creates these spaces, which can take a few forms:
Forums
FAQ documentation
Community websites (ex: www.community.domain.com)
Businesses with technical products, like software companies, often maintain support communities. The Sendbird Community, for example, provides all users with self-serve access to documentation, tutorials, and expertise from more experienced users in a collaborative, solution-oriented space.
2. Product and feedback community management
Product and feedback community management allows customers to share thoughts and offer feedback about your products or services. Every business can benefit from this type of community management. Listening to customers and incorporating their feedback is essential to product improvement and innovation.
Product community management is essential to software businesses that want to find and fix bugs that diminish the product experience. Newegg, for example, hosts a forum-style chat on the social platform Discord.
This allows Newegg to collect and address bug reports from one place while hosting various conversation threads. The content moderator is crucial to keeping the discussions positive and respectful.
3. Acquisition and advocacy community management
Acquisition and advocacy community management involves engaging with people, such as leads, customers, and brand advocates, who are excited about your brand. These communities are a chance to nurture the relationships that drive brand awareness and promote your products via social media, word-of-mouth, or affiliate marketing. The community manager keeps discussions on these forums relevant and aligned with the goals of the digital space.
BeeHiiv, for example, runs a partner program on its website where brand advocates can refer new users to BeeHiiv for a 50% revenue commission. This drives acquisition by turning affiliates into advocates, attracting more customers.
Acquisition and advocacy community management is ideal for retaining your top customers, boosting brand loyalty, and driving awareness.
4. Contribution and content community management
Content and contribution community management is at play whenever a business solicits content from customers on a platform. For example, marketplaces like Airbnb host user-generated content (UGC) on their site in the form of user listings and reviews.
To protect the user experience and brand, all UGC is screened for quality and appropriateness before publication. The community moderator is dedicated to screening UGC in real-time to ensure it meets your community guidelines.
5. Engagement in community management
Engagement community management allows you to create a courteous space for people to connect around your brand, product, or services. Social media accounts are a prime example of this type of community management.
Social accounts are meant for customers, though, and you may also want a community to connect your employees, management, partners, and vendors. Platforms like Slack, for example, enable teams to organize and communicate around varied personal and work-related topics easily.
Now, let's talk about the significant principles of online community management that you need to know.
7 core principles of online community management every community moderator needs to know
Online community management involves various strategies and tactics to drive engagement, ensure a positive atmosphere, and promote the well-being of community members.
1. Community building
Members may struggle to connect and feel a sense of belonging at first. Encourage interaction by introducing yourself, suggesting conversation topics, and hosting activities like icebreakers. This can help create a feeling of camaraderie that evolves into organic engagement.
2. Content moderation
Your community needs a space where members feel safe and at home. The online community manager monitors, reviews, and deletes any UGC that violates community guidelines and degrades the user experience.
3. Conflict resolution
To keep the atmosphere harmonious, your community moderator may need to resolve the occasional dispute between members. Moderators are effective communicators, ready to mediate and resolve issues diplomatically.
4. User engagement
Growing a vibrant community requires a regular infusion of content, discussion, and group activities. Try a variety of engagement tactics — polls, challenges, gamification — and audience-specific content to encourage participation.
5. Feedback management
Soliciting and implementing member feedback is the best way to improve your online community management efforts. This demonstrates your responsiveness to members and your commitment to improving the community.
6. Technical support
Digital community management often aims to provide customers with support for product and technical issues. By addressing concerns promptly, you can enhance the user experience, deepen brand loyalty, and demonstrate to customers that you care.
7. Community growth
Attracting new members is crucial, especially right after you launch your community. You can experiment with various marketing strategies, outreach, partnerships, and incentives to discover what your audience wants in your community.
If you want to be successful at launching and growing your online community, you must base your efforts on a comprehensive online community management strategy. How should you do this? Let’s find out.
Your app is where users connect.
6 tips on crafting your online community management strategy
Here’s an action plan for creating value, engaging, and growing your online community.
1. Pick a community management channel
Start by choosing a channel or platform where you’ll manage your online community. This might be a social media site, a community-centric platform like Slack, or a custom support forum on your website.
Consider your target audience to find your best option. For example, Discord is home to the gaming community. TikTok is popular with younger audiences, and Instagram has wide appeal. You can collect user feedback to double-check your choice of platform.
2. Find your digital audience and understand what they like
The next step is to identify your audience on a given platform and what they interact with. Who do they follow? What content do they engage with? How are their brand interactions? Once you understand what resonates, you can tailor your online community management strategy to your audience’s preferences to drive user engagement.
3. Set goals for online community management
Setting goals allows you to reach objectives and measure success, but goals can be hard to define initially. Fortunately, you’ll have engagement metrics to review — likes, comments, mentions, etc. — within a month of launch. Average your total engagement across these metrics to get a baseline for your community engagement efforts. Next, use those numbers to set attainable goals around brand awareness, follower count, and customer satisfaction for coming periods to develop a model of success.
4. Define your online community guidelines
Community guidelines establish the types of content and conduct that aren’t allowed in your online community. It is recommended that you publish your community guidelines for all to see. The online community manager will refer to these ground rules as they monitor and remove unwanted UGC.
5. Interact regularly with your online community
Online communities thrive on consistent two-way engagement. You should publish content periodically and promptly respond to all member questions and comments.
You might want to plan how often you post new content and respond to members. Following a schedule helps people anticipate your next post and ensures you can reply authentically to all questions and concerns.
6. Measure your online community management results
Your online community management efforts will generate lots of data. To understand your performance, you can use tools like:
Platform analytics: Most social platforms include built-in analytics for assessing engagement data and content performance (e.g. Instagram Insights, Twitter Analytics).
Analytics tools: If your chosen platform doesn’t include in-depth analytics, you can seek outside help from Google Analytics or social listening tools.
It’s also a good idea to regularly A/B test your content to identify what types resonate most with your audience.
What does an online community manager do?
An online community manager is responsible for fostering and growing your online community. This dynamic role requires a mix of interpersonal skills, strategic thinking, and flexibility. An online community manager helps to:
Maintain your brand voice and tone in all interactions
Engage your audience with regular posts and prompt replies
Ensure a safe space for all by moderating user-generated content (UGC)
Enforce community guidelines and remove inappropriate content or users
Resolve conflicts between users to maintain a positive, respectful atmosphere
Build your community by fostering conversation and a sense of belonging among members
Depending on your community size or your business goals, you may want to work with multiple community managers or reach for automated content moderation tools.
How to overcome the challenges of digital community management
For many brands growing an online community, content creation, and moderation can be recurring challenges. The fix is being proactive.
Ask your audience for their favorite content
The first challenge of online community management is finding what content resonates with your audience on a platform. To skip guesswork, ask people what they like. Use a chat thread, social media poll, or email survey. Community members will see that you care and respond with honest insights.
Prioritize community content moderation
Content moderation is the most persistent challenge in online community management. After all, if community members often feel unsafe or annoyed by your content, there won’t be a community for long!
What is community content moderation? Community content moderation is about identifying and removing UGC that violates your community guidelines in real time to protect your members and brand from harmful and unwanted content. For businesses with limited resources, automated moderation tools like Sendbird’s Advanced Moderation can be a cost-effective alternative to hiring human content moderators.
So, you’ve launched and grown your online community. Now, let’s examine some best practices for sustaining that growth!
6 best practices for online community management
Effective online community management allows you to foster a positive, engaging space that creates value for your members. Here are some best practices for creating an online community.
1. Be your authentic, branded self
As you grow your online community, remember that authenticity attracts. You set the vibe. Use a consistent brand voice with each community member—human, genuine, and interested—to create a welcoming atmosphere and a memorable experience. Over time, as your brand personality develops, your online community will become an ever more interesting place.
2. Engage proactively with your online community
Building a vibrant online community where members feel they belong takes consistent effort. Regularly check in on your community, share new content, and ensure members get help. The more visible and engaging you can be, the faster you’ll gain new online community members and their trust.
3. Set clear community guidelines
Communicate your expectations on what behavior, content, and interactions are prohibited in your online community. Publish your community guidelines for all to see. When coupled with timely content moderation by your community manager or content moderator, the ground rules will allow you to maintain a productive, safe environment that upholds your ethical standards.
4. Listen to your online community
Listening is the best way to understand your audience and deliver more value to them. This can include responding to DMs, routinely reviewing your forum or FAQ pages, or using social listening tools. If community members feel heard, they’re more likely to come back.
5. Show your followers appreciation
Be sure to acknowledge all your members regularly, whether they’re excited newcomers or long-standing pillars of your community. After all, members will be some of your most devoted fans, and meaningful recognition will only reinforce these feelings of trust and advocacy.
Engage each new member who joins as soon as they arrive (“Welcome, Blair, we’re happy to have you here!”)
Monitor your accounts and pages for mentions, keywords, and hashtags. Respond to these directly.
Keep track of your most engaged community members and find ways to reward them for their commitment (e.g., swag, meeting the team, rewards points).
6. Remove inappropriate content through effective content moderation
A key aspect of online community management is protecting members from harmful and inappropriate content — spam, scams, trolling, harassment, bullying, abuse, explicit material, and more.
An online community manager is responsible for monitoring, reviewing, and removing any content that violates your community guidelines before it negatively impacts your members or brand. The manager may need to suspend or ban repeat offenders to maintain a respectful and inclusive atmosphere. Be firm but respectful; most members won’t intend to overstep your guidelines.
A note on online community management services
You can hire an online community management services company to grow and manage your online community experience. Outsourcing to experts is a way to gain new growth strategies, ensure consistent engagement, and free up time to focus on your core competencies. The service provider oversees every aspect of your online community for you: content moderation, engagement, support, and feedback.
Community management services can be costly compared to managing your community in-house. However, this can be an appealing option for companies looking to optimize experiences, recover from bad PR, or scale growth quickly with new and innovative strategies.
Finding the right online community management platform
Online community management platforms offer a variety of tools to help you manage, measure, and streamline your community management efforts in one centralized hub. When evaluating these platforms, consider factors like:
Integrations: Your community software should talk with the apps you’ll use for community management, like customer relationship management (CRM), marketing automation, help desk, and social media management software.
Customizability: Members will feel more at home if your platform design is aligned with your branding. Customizable software allows you to tweak the look and feel of the user interface so it feels true to your brand and ultimately enhances user engagement.
Scalability: Community management software should be scalable and ready to handle a growing number of members so you can grow your community seamlessly.
Prices typically range from $20-$60/month or more for enterprise products or those with premium features such as surveys, gamification, reward programs, or a built-in CRM.
Sendbird’s Advanced Moderation for content moderation
Sendbird’s Advanced Moderation is an automated chat content moderation tool that everything you need to create a comprehensive rule-based content moderation system — complete with advanced chat moderation features and proven online safety tools. With Sendbird’s Advanced Moderation, you can fully automate and customize your management of UGC from a single unified dashboard.
Designed for efficiency and consistency, this automated, scalable tool allows you to detect, evaluate, log, and execute on inappropriate content in real time from one place. Meanwhile, future-facing features like a review queue, rule-based auto-detection, and moderation records can help you multiply the accuracy and impact of your community content moderation efforts.
The future of online community management
Looking ahead, AI and automated tools are set to enhance the speed, accuracy, and precision of online community management, especially concerning content moderation. Automated tools trained on AI will continue to improve at spotting and removing unfit content without human oversight. Human content moderators will still be required, but have more time to focus on growth-related aspects of community management, such as content creation, or handling nuanced situations that automated content moderation tools cannot understand.
As AI evolves into its own distinct platform, AI chatbots may soon be an embedded feature across community platforms. Powered by natural language processing (NLP), these GPT-like bots could allow members to query the AI canon from inside your dev forum, website, or Facebook page. This would represent a huge uptick in user value for any online community. Going forward, online spaces are set to become safer and more interesting as technology steps up to augment and replace human efforts.
Next steps for online community management
Like gardening, online community management rewards consistency, positivity, and regular weeding. Your community will initially grow slowly, so use this time to understand your audience, create unique content, and foster a safe, productive environment.
In community moderation, you can enlist outside services or automated content moderation tools to support your internal efforts. Both can help you protect your people, gain efficiencies, and grow your community faster. Sendbird’s Advanced Moderation tool can help you seamlessly elevate community trust and safety with minimal effort.
Start a free trial today, or contact us to learn more!
