Why Your Business Needs Community Management

Your customers are the backbone of your business and form part of your broader business community. Managing the needs and preferences of your customers is a full-time job so you need to have the right tools and resources to keep your customers engaged. This is where you get community management.

Community management is defined as the action of building, managing and nurturing strong online community relationships amongst your customers, partners and employees.

The growth of community management is because more and more people are using social media. In South Africa, 26 million people are social media users with 83% of users leveraging social media for finding information.

For smaller businesses, community management is vital to marketing the business and building the trust between you and your customers. In this article, we take a look at the various ‘characteristics’ of this topic and give you tips on how to improve your own.

Community Management vs Social Media Management

Community management and social media management are terms which are used interchangeably, however, there are differences between the two. In their similarities, community management and social media management are tools used to enable engagement with and between members of the audience.

Community Management

Community management differs in many ways from social media management. The first difference is its objective. The purpose of community management is to facilitate the relationship between members of the community and improve the sense of community the members have with each other.

Another aspect of community management is that its key tasks are to initiate discussion, create content and sometimes even host events.

Social Media Management

With social media management, the purpose is to help your audience with any problems they might have and improve their attitudes towards your brand. In social media management, the key tasks are to create and share persuasive marketing materials and respond to any questions your audience might have.

While there are clear differences between these two concepts, how you approach them is not too different. For example, a community manager can facilitate engagement on social media platforms.

Basics of Community Management

Community management can be broken down into 4 parts: Monitoring, engaging, moderating and measuring.

Monitoring

Monitoring your social media engagement is a big part of community management. Community management is not possible without an ongoing effort in social media listening. Amidst all the noise on socials, you will have opportunities to turn customer complaints into public compliments or go viral.

Engagement

Your digital footprint is ever expanding and vital to the engagement you get on social accounts. The more positive comments you generate, the stronger your brand becomes on social media. It’s important that you start conversations and keep them alive, especially because social media algorithms use engagement signals like comments to determine what to show on news feeds.

Moderating

Moderating is an important function of community management. Moderating involves keeping your social profiles clean from spam and ensuring that any negative feedback is addressed quickly and efficiently.

Measuring

Measuring is the key strategy you use to filter out conversations that happen online. Because you cannot be everywhere on the web, you need to know what you are measuring and when to measure.

Figure out which channels your community uses the most and where your brand is most likely to fulfil its main objectives. This could be anything from building awareness, driving traffic or maintaining your reputation.

Does Your Business Need Community Management?

The short answer is yes. Any business operating in 2025 should have a social media manager or community manager at least. Some of the reasons why you need community management include:

Builds Trust and Brand Loyalty

Having a community manager (or doing it yourself), is vital to building trust and loyalty between your target audience and your brand. This trust and loyalty leads to higher visibility for your brand and can eventually lead to sales.

Creates a Valuable Feedback Loop

Community management can help you keep in conversation with your audience. By engaging with consumers on social platforms, you create an environment where they trust you to respond quickly to any queries or issues. This sort of relationship creates a feedback loop.

The feedback you receive in this loop can help you improve your customer service, and you can use the positive feedback to boost your brand to potential clients.

Humanises Your Business

The whole point of building a brand for your business is to give it personality and humanise it. Community engagement is crucial to humanising your brand because you can engage in authentic conversations that contain humour and empathy. Doing this will show the human side of your business.

Drives Traffic and Conversions

This is the most important aspect of community management. Organic interactions with your audience create natural opportunities which direct them to your website, blog, or landing page. Community management ensures your brand is humanised to your consumers to build that trust needed to drive conversions and eventually sales.

These points showcase the benefits of having community management within your business. Remember, your audience won’t stay loyal to your brand just because you have nice products. They also need to be nurtured through marketing, product development and community engagement.

For more information on adapting to your customer’s needs, read our article about adapting to changing customer needs. Get your ticket today for the SME South Africa Funding Summit!