DIGITAL GLOSSARY

Community Management

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What is Community Management?

Community management is the process of building, nurturing, and engaging with an organization’s online or offline audience to foster relationships, encourage meaningful interaction, and support brand loyalty.

It typically involves:

Scalable The programmatic approach lets you craft campaigns to your specific goals and budget, then easily adjust and optimize them in real time based on performance.
Precise Programmatic ad platforms allow you to reach your exact audience by targeting users’ behavior, geographic location, and even what context they see your ads in.
Multi-Channel Reach Campaigns can be run across a huge variety of digital platforms simultaneously to ensure your messaging appears where your audience will see it.
Cost-effective The improved placement and targeting options of programmatic advertising help you lower costs and improve ROI by filtering out paying for only high-value impressions.

Community management happens on platforms like LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Slack, forums, and even in-person events or meetups. Social media managers, community leads, forum moderators, and customer engagement specialists are all “community managers.”

About Community Management

When you’re building relationships with your audience (and potential clients!) online, you need to think beyond one-way communication. That’s where community management comes in.

Great community management turns passive audiences into active, loyal advocates. But earning this type of engagement takes more than just posting content. A successful community presence is all about starting real conversations, listening closely, and showing up consistently.

Most brands still treat community management as an afterthought, which means brands that invest their resources here have the chance to stand out—not by following the crowd, but by building genuine, two-way connections that people actually care about.

Challenges

Managing an online community isn’t all witty brand replies and opportunistic memes. It takes strategy, patience, and constant attention. One of the biggest challenges is striking the right tone: you must balance your brand’s voice with authenticity so your community feels heard, not marketed to.

Community management is also time-intensive. Meaningful engagement can’t be automated, and conversations don’t follow a 9–5 schedule. From moderating tough discussions to responding quickly and thoughtfully, community managers must always be on, constantly canvassing for relevant posts to respond to, current events to comment on, and new directions to take content creation.

Another challenge in community management is that as your audience grows, so do their expectations. Managing feedback (both positive and negative) requires strong communication skills and a thick skin. But when done well, overcoming these challenges builds lasting trust and long-term brand loyalty.

Tips for Programmatic Ads

Successful community management is part art, part strategy. Here are some proven tips to build your community:

Be Consistent and Present: Create a content calendar and schedule your posts across social media platforms in advance, with consistent uploads to all relevant channels. This builds trust and keeps your community active. Need some help tailoring content to the appropriate platforms? Check out our social media cheat sheet.
Don’t Just Talk… Listen: Your community is a rich source of insight. Monitor sentiment, track recurring questions or concerns, and use that feedback to guide content, product development, or support priorities.
Encourage Member Contributions: Create space for your audience to share their own content, ideas, or experiences. Highlighting user-generated content boosts engagement and makes your community feel valued.
Measure What Matters: Track engagement metrics (comments, shares, sentiment) to understand what’s working and where there’s room to grow. Use those insights to refine your approach over time.

Great community management is all about cultivating connection. When done right, it transforms followers into loyal advocates that continue to grow your community for you. Your community presence online should represent your organization while driving growth and creating brand champions.

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