Online communities have become increasingly important in our lives. They’re where we connect with our colleagues, peers, and advocates, providing safe spaces to engage in important conversations and share valuable insights.
But building a thriving online community is no easy feat, and keeping members engaged is hard work. The rewards are immense: Loyal members, vibrant conversations, and a trusted space that drives meaningful connections and growth.
Get it wrong and your community can quickly devolve into disorganized, disengaged spaces that damage your brand’s reputation. This is why community management is so important.
But with a little time and effort and by proactively setting up a space your members will enjoy, you’re already taking the right steps to create a thriving online community.
Below, you’ll find a complete guide covering everything you need to know about community management, including best practices, tips, and strategies to manage your online space.
What is community management?
Community management involves the creation and regulation of an inclusive community through effective communication with the members, staff, and partners within a company.
It involves creating and managing online spaces where audiences can interact and build relationships with each other and your brand.
Companies use this increasingly popular method to foster customer relationships and create meaningful conversations, while individuals can use communities to build their own influencer brands.
Community management has several key benefits, including:
- Offering assistance to the community
- Increasing brand and product awareness
- Gaining insight into what consumers are looking for
- Collecting reviews and ideas through direct interaction with members of the community
At this stage, you might be wondering if social media management and community management are the same thing, but they’re actually quite different.
Why is community management important?
So, why is community management so integral to your brand’s success?
With a growing number of online consumers, brands need an effective way to understand their audiences’ needs, opinions, and motivations. This helps brand leaders to meet their expectations and find potential gaps.
With thousands of community members on Whop (and growing every day!), community management is especially important to us. We know first-hand that it can:
📞 Ensure customer concerns and queries are dealt with quickly and promptly, helping build a positive image for your brand
📈 Help to provide valuable community insights, specifically related to your audiences’ preferences, allowing you to refine your strategies and the products you’re offering
🤝 Create a liaison between the brand and the consumer, helping to foster trust and build meaningful relationships
🛡️ Protect the reputation of your brand, by moderating content to prevent any potentially harmful interactions
💸 Increase conversions by building rapport and trust with audience members, leading to better customer retention and more sales
Community management can transform indifferent and cynical audiences into enthusiastic and engaged proponents of your brand. Keep reading for 12 ways to create a thriving online space for your community.
12 best practices for successful community management
While you may be new to community management, it’s very much a learnable skill, and with the right framework, you can master it quickly. To unlock the power of successful community management, check out these game-changing tips.
1. Create clear guidelines
The first and most important step in establishing a thriving online community is creating clear, tangible guidelines for your participants to follow. These should be written, reviewed by an attorney, and available for members to access digitally from the start.
Members should feel like their online community is a safe place where they can express their thoughts and ideas without censorship. Having guidelines set up ensures both you and the community are protected.
Your community guidelines should:
- Be clear about the community’s purpose, including who it’s for. This will ensure you attract the right people to your online hub
- Define prohibited behavior, such as spam and solicitations common in online communities
- Ban inappropriate behavior, such as bullying, intolerance, hazing, and hijacking. When a member’s behavior has failed to be moderated in other ways, issuing a ban can help maintain the integrity of the community
- Instruct how to handle complaints, providing clear guidelines on how to report fellow members so that issues can be resolved as smoothly and seamlessly as possible
- Outline unacceptable material that isn’t welcome in the community, such as pornography, graphic violence, etc
- Direct how to navigate the community, including instructions on how to use and access each of its different features
While you’re drafting your guidelines, it’s helpful to keep in mind that most people don’t have the time to read a lengthy document. Keep it as short and emphatic as possible, clearly outlining the rules in an easy-to-follow format. Lists, bullet points, and bolding keywords allow people to easily access the most important points.
Need more help on what to include in your community guidelines? Read our guide to creating clear and accessible guidelines for your Discord server.
2. Identify who you want to attract
Next up, you’ll need to develop a clear idea of the kinds of people you want to attract to your community.
To do this, it’s a good idea to come up with what’s called a consumer persona. A consumer persona is a fictitious person that a marketer creates to better understand their target audience.
When imagining your core community members, you should consider everything from their age to where they live and even how much they earn. These demographics will help you to market your community to the appropriate individuals.
Along with this, there are some other strategies you can adopt to fully understand your audience, including:
- Examine existing networks: Before getting started with your online community, take a look at some others that are thriving. Though they might be focused on a different niche, how do they provide the best possible experience for their members?
- Analyze the available data: Take the time to compile data and statistics that are relevant to your community. This will help shape your strategy, providing a sound basis for your community.
- Engage in conversations: Don’t guess at your audience’s needs - use all the available tools at your disposal to create a better engagement strategy. Once your community has been established, talk to them to find out more about their challenges, priorities, and goals. This can help you to fine-tune your community’s preferences and continue to thrive.
3. Set privacy rules for your community
Next up, you’ll need to set up the community privacy rules. As a manager, you don’t need to share everything with your members. Managers have complete control over who can access certain content on the website, as well as creating sub-communities within the main group.
This is an important step in maintaining confidentiality and privacy, allowing your members to engage in private conversations, and feeling safe enough to share information online.
4. Establish a clear path of consequences for misbehavior
Effectively laying out the consequences for misbehavior (and following through when an individual engages in such behavior) is an essential component of successful community moderation. This is necessary to ensure others in the group feel uncomfortable.
There are a few options for disciplining unruly members, and every space will have its own policies regarding how they handle these situations. Usually, communities follow either a zero-tolerance rule or a three-strike rule.
The zero-tolerance rule is pretty self-explanatory and basically means members will be kicked out immediately following ‘banned’ behavior.
The three-strike policy, however, gives the individual in question two opportunities to rectify their behavior before they are removed from the community. These are:
- First warning: Managers will attempt to educate the member by providing a written reminder of the community guidelines, and how they’ve transgressed them.
- Second warning: If the individual doesn’t heed the initial warning, a second strike is made. They will receive a second notice detailing their violations, as well as a potential suspension from contributing to the community for a few hours or several days.
- Third warning: At this stage, the individual will be excluded from the community. A final notice will be sent, and a decision will be made whether or not the ban is temporary or permanent.
5. Lead by example
A good community manager understands the role goes much further than simply enforcing rules. You should be setting an example for others, encouraging them to practice the same level of respect and care for the forum as you do.
There are several ways to do this, but the simplest is just allowing the community to manage themselves. Instead of swooping straight in after spotting an inflammatory remark, give your members the chance to respond to it.
If nobody takes the appropriate action, you can take the lead by intervening and setting the correct example.
Another tip for practicing good leadership is actively listening to your members’ questions and concerns, showing them you are willing to work with them to solve problems. This will help cultivate a level of respect among your community.
Establishing respect and authority in your community is just one way to create a safe and flourishing space for your members. Take a look at our guide that takes you through key steps for building a successful online community hub.
6. Choose the appropriate channel with your audience in mind
Next up, now that you’ve identified who you want to attract to your community, you’ll need to choose the appropriate channel to manage your audience. Consider some of the key demographics you’ve identified and use these to select the best online spaces for your community.
These could include:
- Social media groups on Facebook and Twitter/X communities
- Platforms dedicated specifically to community management, like Slack and Discord
Bear in mind that community management is still in its infancy, so there are no real rules about where you choose to set up your hub. What’s most important is identifying a platform that you think your audience is most likely to engage with.
For example, Facebook is great for parenting communities, providing a personalized space to share information, find support, and provide community care, such as childcare and group school rides.
Discord, on the other hand, tends to be more geared toward entertainment and gaming communities, with convenient features such as real-time communication, screen-sharing, and gaming system integration.
If you’re looking for the best platform to manage and build an online community, no matter your brand’s niche, Whop is easily the best choice. It’s an all-in-one solution for engaging community members, offering new types of content, and extending your reach.
Plus, if you’re new to community building, Whop has every resource you can think of, including guides, courses, and how-tos that will get you started in no time.
Find the best community platforms for growing and monetizing your brand with Whop’s list of options you can start using today.
7. Consider vetting new members
If you have an open community forum and you regularly receive a hoard of applications, it can be difficult to keep track of everyone you’re letting into your online space.
This can prove to be particularly challenging for managers, especially those just starting out and moderating affairs themselves. There are, however, ways to prevent unwelcome trolls from entering your safe space. Take a look below:
- Supply a questionnaire: Many online forums, like the ones found on Facebook, allow group creators to supply potential members with short questionnaires before joining. Asking a question that’s as basic as why they want to join the community gives you a better sense of who you’re dealing with.
- Ask them to provide social media links: Asking prospective members to supply their LinkedIn profile, for example, allows you to confirm their identity and turn away spammers.
- Make sure posts are approved in advance: If you have a new member, having a moderator check their first post on the forum can help affirm you’ve made the right decision in allowing them to join.
8. Employ a team of moderators to manage your day-to-day operations
When you first start your community, you’ll more than likely be able to manage it successfully yourself. However, as it expands, you might find it difficult to maintain order without the help of a trusted ally.
You’ll probably need to hire one or more community moderators to do it for you. You must select these individuals carefully, and check that they clearly understand the community guidelines should they need to enforce them.
They should also share your vision for the brand and its community, and be able to interact well with the other members.
The dedication they’ll need to have for the community will depend on its size, as well as the level of activity; however, most communities are active 24/7, meaning they’ll need to be checked several times a day.
If you lack the budget to appoint a specific person for this role, there’s a good chance you’ll be able to find someone in the community who will do it voluntarily.
But, if you are making a profit from your online community, appointing a paid moderator helps “professionalize” the role, and ensures the appointed person takes their responsibility seriously.
If you’ve chosen Discord as your community’s home, you’re going to need a team of moderators. Read our guide on how to make someone a moderator on Discord.
9. Listen to the community
It’s inevitable that in any community with a diverse mix of personalities, conflict is sure to arise at one point or another. But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Not everyone will agree with the rules you’ve laid out, despite your best intentions. But rather than shutting down and refusing to hear any criticism, listen to your community instead.
This doesn’t mean that you need to alter the guidelines every time you receive a complaint, but if enough people are stuck on a particular issue, you might consider revamping the rules.
For example, if one of your community guidelines states that self-promotion is prohibited, you could create a subsection within the forum where posts like these are allowed, rather than banning them outright.
Don’t just supply disingenuous, stock responses that will irk your members even further. Instead, try to find a real, tangible solution to their problem.
10. Make regular updates
To prevent your online space from becoming a stagnant and stifling atmosphere for its members, regularly updating your hub can help keep things fresh.
After all, your community rules were never meant to be set in stone. What works today might not necessarily work tomorrow.
Regularly reevaluate your community’s guidelines, norms, and goals, which will evolve as time passes and with the growing needs of your members. So, if you need to make some alterations to your code of conduct, don’t be afraid to do so.
However, you should make sure to inform your community of these changes through emails and announcements, so that everyone’s on the same page going forward.
11. Measure the success of your channel
There are several ways you can measure your brand’s success using your community channel as an indicator. These include:
🌱 Audience member growth
👍 Amount of content liked or shared by followers
🌟 Increase in your brand’s awareness
🗣️ Number of participants in live discussions and chats
🚦 Traffic directed to your website
📈 Growth in conversions and sales
It’s important, however, not to get completely hung up on the data. Though this can be a good starting point, the numbers don’t always accurately reflect the rapport you’ve built with your community members.
Community engagement helps you understand if your community is happy with what you’re offering - but how do you measure it? Learn more in our guide on measuring community engagement.
12. Host events
Hosting events can be another great way to successfully engage your online community.
They don’t necessarily need to be real-life if this is geographically impossible. Instead, webinars, live Q&A sessions, or even virtual game nights are all great options for strengthening your community.
They’re a chance for members to network, bond, learn, and share their experiences.
Did you know you can organize digital and real-life events right here on Whop? Read how to use our Events app and start planning your next community get-together.
Create, manage, and monetize your community on Whop
Building and growing an online community is no easy feat. It takes a great deal of time, dedication, and planning.
But, with a platform like Whop, it doesn’t need to be hard. Whether your community is just getting started or it’s already up and running, Whop has everything you need to take your digital venture to the next level.
Easy to use and providing you with complete flexibility, Whop is your new home on the internet. It lets you design your community’s hub from start to finish, including adding elements such as chat channels, video calls, forums, and giveaways.
On top of this, you can also sell your digital products on your whop, monetizing your online community with:
- Coaching
- Consulting
- Online courses
- Ebooks
- Downloadable content
- SaaS
- Templates
- One-on-one calls
And much more.
With a powerful API and a range of helpful features designed to simplify the process, like seamless payments and customer support, Whop is here to help you grow your online community.
Sign up to Whop today and start creating and monetizing your community platform. It’ll only take you 10 minutes to get started.
FAQ
How do you become a community manager?
Community managers come from many different backgrounds and don’t always have academic qualifications to support their expertise. If they do have a bachelor’s degree, they’re usually related to English, marketing, journalism, or communications.
More importantly, community managers should have sound social media capabilities. Maintaining and growing social media accounts is a good way to develop skills in this arena. Furthermore, analytical reasoning allowing you to assess the failure and successes of social media campaigns is also beneficial.
Finally, creativity allowing you to create engaging and original content that grabs your audiences’ attention is also important to the role of a community manager.
What is the goal of a community manager?
The community manager is to act as the contact between a brand and its audience. They moderate the community and are in charge of content distribution, support, and digital engagement. This ultimately helps to build the brand’s presence and create trust among online consumers.
What are the risks of unmoderated behavior on social media?
Unmoderated communities can run into a number of risks, including:
- The publication of offensive content that damages the reputation of your brand
- Offensive two-way interactions between group members
- The spread of misinformation
What’s the difference between a community manager and a community moderator?
The roles of a community manager and moderator are often spoken about interchangeably, but they have some distinctive differences.
A community moderator is responsible for overseeing the day-to-day functions of an online community, providing updates, monitoring behavior, and starting conversations.
A community manager, on the other hand, has a bigger role in the company. They will focus on implementing and executing growth strategies to help the company and community flourish.
What’s the difference between community management and social media management?
Social media managers, as you may have already guessed, focus entirely on social media duties. They will have strategies in place for each of the different social media channels in a company and will monitor the results accordingly.
A community manager, on the other hand, has a more diverse role. They will interact with the community via DMs, comments, and online spaces designed for members to discuss the brand. They will then report back with their findings, providing feedback to the rest of the team.
Community managers tend to have more intimate relationships with audiences, engaging in one-on-one discussions that are usually on a first-name basis.
