Social media has become much more than just a space that brands can flood with the latest promotions or the occasional competition. Instead, it should be approached as a channel for two-way communication. Followers will leave comments (and not always positive) — neither of which you should ignore.
When users engage with your brand online, it’s an ideal opportunity to identify your most loyal fans and turn them into brand advocates and analyze the negative comments to determine areas where there’s room for improvement. This, though, quickly becomes a round-the-clock job.
Even if you have a community manager, it’s a good idea to invest in some type of software that can help you to automate many of the routine tasks. In fact, many of the tools listed below double up as social media management tools. Here are the top 10 tools, in no particular order, that you can use for community management.
Top Community Management Tools for Growing Brands:
What’s Community Management?
One of the main goals of successful community management is to create a platform for two-way communication and a space where members feel like they belong. In short, you want to create a large, active community, while at the same time building authentic connections.
To do this, your community manager will:
- Add and remove members
- Moderate the content and users’ interactions
- Respond to comments and engage with customers
- Offer support
- Organize brand events for members
- Write and implement community guidelines and policies
Best Community Management Tools
For help building and managing a community of influencers, you can check out Creator.co. Based in Vancouver, Canada, they’re trusted by well-known global brands like Walmart and Colgate. They can help businesses to tap into conversations about their brand, competitors, and market, helping them to improve their engagement with potential customers. Alternatively, if you want to leverage the power of influencers to build and manage a community, they can help you to get immediate exposure to over 100,000 registered creators. And, if that doesn’t deliver results, you can filter their database with millions of social profiles that include detailed insights about each creator. Key Features: Search/Discovery, Automated Recruiting, Influencer Relationship Management, Influencer Marketplace, Content Review, Content Library, Campaign Management, Campaign Reporting, Influencer Analysis, Audience Analysis, E-commerce Tools, Product/Gifting Tools, Fake Follower/Fraud Detection, Payment Processing, Social Listening, Competitor Research, Creator Marketplace, Channels: Instagram, YouTube, TikTok Responding timeously to mentions of your brand is key if you want to build and manage a community. Though, that’s not always enough. If you want to be viewed as one of the thought leaders in your niche, you’ll also need to participate actively in relevant talks. Enter Brand24. Trusted by leading names like Twitch, Stanford University, and Uber, Brand24 can help community managers with tracking brand mentions and industry-related talks in online conversations. All brand mentions get organized into a single feed to reduce the time needed to respond. Then, to help you get a better context of these mentions, you can use the mention analytics to evaluate the quality of the source who posted it. NapoleonCat offers a number of features that community managers will find helpful. If you have a team that supports you, you can also use it to keep tabs on the performance of your social media management team. Being a social media management software solution, it will collect all your comments, reviews, and messages in real time to which you can reply via a single, intuitive dashboard. What’s more, if you find that you receive a lot of repetitive questions, you can use ready-made templates to answer these automatically. It also offers a few other handy auto-moderation features that you can use to hide spam messages (like comments with links) or delete offensive content on Instagram and Facebook. Founded in 2014, Grytics creates intuitive social networking analytics tools to help businesses create better communities. Trusted by brands like WWF, Chevron, and ABInBev, their goal is to help their users get an immediate insight into the mood of their community so that they can create that sentiment into actionable insights. You can, for example, use it to identify inactive members, use targeted content to boost engagement, and connect influencers with community members. Keyhole automates social media analytics for marketers and agencies. To date, they’ve analyzed more than 6 billion posts. Emplifi (previously called Socialbakers) is one of the top AI marketing tools and offers end-to-end community management tools to help you get to know your audiences better and deliver an improved customer experience. It offers a unified inbox that streamlines social listening and helps you to improve customer care and workflows. All your inbound messages, mentions, comments, and direct messages from different platforms get grouped together in one place to centralize all communications. Then, to streamline communication further, it also offers an AI chatbot that takes care of all the common inquiries. This way, you can free up time so that your community manager can zoom in on conversations that require more attention. Founded in 2015, Sociality is one of the newer social media management platforms. When it comes to managing online communities, it can help you to complete various activities in an organized manner. It will collect all your social media content like your Instagram messages, YouTube comments, Twitter replies, and Facebook comments and organize it in its unified inbox. Another useful feature is its Engage module that you can use to monitor brand mentions and comments which you can organize into categories to be analyzed further. This is a useful tool for gaining a better insight into the needs of your target audience. If your community is mostly active on Instagram and TikTok, you can check out Qoob Stories. It’s an all-in-one downloader that you can use to save various types of media that get shared on these social media platforms. Sprout Social offers a Smart Inbox and engagement features that can help community managers streamline the monitoring process of social communities. You can, for example, add message tags to make it easier to keep tabs on relevant themes and identify FAQs and common complaints. If your community is mostly active on Twitter, you can use its Trends Report that lists trending hashtags and topics which you can use to figure out which topics can help to drive more engagement. It also identifies which brands and users are most often mentioned when there’s a discussion about your brand, helping you to find potential brand ambassadors. Similarly to Qoob Stories, Combin Growth is aimed at brands that mainly focus on Instagram for community building. In short, it’s a powerful Instagram marketing tool that can help you with audience targeting, management, and engagement. To help you manage your audience, it will identify accounts that don’t follow you back. If you’re worried that you’ll accidentally unfollow a key account, it can help you to prevent that from happening too. 1. Creator.co
2. Brand24
3. NapoleonCat
4. Grytics for Communities
5. Keyhole
6. Emplifi
7. Sociality
8. Qoob Stories
9. Sprout Social
10. Combin Growth
Wrapping Things Up
There are many other things that your target audience wants to find out about in addition to your product or service. Once you broaden your focus to other topics that resonate with your audience, both your member count and engagement rate will improve. What’s more, you might even be able to win over a few brand advocates.
That being said, online communities are more than the sum of its parts (or its comments). Sure, having thousands of followers can help you to boost the credibility of your brand, but once you really tune in to the conversation, you’ll learn a lot from your members. After all, isn’t the secret to designing a successful product is to know what the real pain points and needs of your audience are?
Frequently Asked Questions
What tools do they use to manage their communities?
These are the best community management tools:
- Brand24
- NapoleonCat
- Grytics for Communities
- Keyhole
- Sprout Social
- Emplifi
- Creator.co
- Sociality
- Qoob Stories
- Combin Growth
What are the tools for community engagement?
Use a wide range of powerful tools and techniques for effective community engagement:
- Stakeholder meetings
- Focus groups
- Planning forums
- Door knocking and surveys
- Newsletters
- E-voting
- Roundtable network events
What are community building tools?
5 popular online community building tools for your platform
- Discussion forums
- Subgroups
- Course platforms
- Live streaming
- Member profiles
What are types of community management?
The different types of community management include:
- Customer support
- Content and programming
- Product feedback
- External engagement
- Community club
- Acquisition and advocacy
