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Can a joke sell? In our quick poll of 119 people on LinkedIn and Instagram, 61% admitted a brand’s humor pushed them to try or buy something. Another 17% said maybe. Only 14% said no, and 8% couldn’t remember. That’s nearly 8 out of 10 people open to being converted...
Sep 11, 2025
If you want to improve brand perception and customer loyalty in 2025, build a community. But that doesn’t mean creating a Facebook group and posting sporadically. You need a clear community management strategy to generate active engagement.
A strong community management plan can transform silent online spaces into vibrant communities full of brand advocates. With the right approach and tools, growing a loyal audience can get a whole lot easier, especially if you’re managing multiple social media accounts.
In this article, I’ll explain what a community management strategy is, why you need one before you even begin building a community, and the tools you need to make it work for both your brand and your community members.
A community management strategy is your roadmap for building meaningful relationships with your audience. It defines how you’ll bring people together around your brand, keep them engaged through genuine interactions, and develop the kind of trust that turns community members into passionate advocates.
Your strategy should clarify who you’re trying to reach and why they’d want to connect with you. It guides your choice of platforms and shapes how you communicate, ensuring every interaction feels authentic and purposeful rather than promotional.
The ultimate goal is creating a space where people don’t just consume your content, they actively participate, support your mission, and naturally recommend you to others.
An effective community engagement strategy will answer these questions:
Shortly, bringing a community management strategy to life means encouraging and facilitates conversations, creating shared experiences, and making sure members feel valued and supported.
An online community management strategy is the foundation for building personal relationships with active members and staying on brand with every social media presence and interaction.
Here are the main benefits your community management efforts can generate:
The brands that strategically approach community engagement by knowing their audience manage to foster connections, brand loyalty, and trust with their community members.
When people feel that a brand genuinely cares, they’re more likely to join that brand’s community. They’ll also actively engage and encourage others to try their products or services, helping to improve profit margins.
Bubble Skincare, for example, fosters loyalty by engaging its audience in various aspects, from product testing to feedback loops, making its community members feel like part of the team.
<=”editor-heading-h3″ dir=”ltr”>2. Drive community growth and retention
When your community manager (or team of community managers, if your budget fits) replies to DMs, joins comment threads, or creates content that answers real questions, they’re fueling business and community growth.
92% of brands agree that community building has positively impacted their engagement, retention rates, and customer lifetime value. Another survey of over 1000 respondents, highlights that investing in relationships with your consumers drives real business results. When customers feel connected to a brand, 76% will choose it over a competitor.
Peloton is an excellent example of this. Its official Facebook group and in-app community encourage interaction, offer support who brings more meaningful relationships, and boost retention, who leads to a higher customer lifetime value.
To fully understand that impact, you need to track the right engagement metrics. As Spark Social founder Kait Shiels explains:
We track ROI through a blend of quantitative and qualitative metrics: share of voice, community retention, chatbot conversions, repeat engagement on nurture content, community sentiment, and more.
All of these key performance indicators circle back to customer loyalty. Loyal customers will stick around and help grow both your revenue and audience size.
One of the best parts of managing a community is that you’re right in the middle of the conversation. You see what your audience cares about, what they’re talking about, and why.
As Kait Shiels explains:
If you’re listening closely, your community will tell you what they want from you. These insights fuel not only our editorial calendars but also empower us to experiment and test new approaches.
Get your community members talking, then listen. Their feedback, both intentional and offhand, becomes a real-time focus group, helping you refine your messaging, uncover pain points, and even spark new product ideas.
Monitoring consumer sentiment is crucial, and community management plays a key role in surfacing consumer opinions and needs in real time.
A community management strategy also serves as a valuable “feelings barometer,” using sentiment analysis to gauge how your audience truly feels. It helps brands to stay in tune with shifting perceptions, emerging concerns, and emotional triggers.
When companies engage meaningfully with their communities, they empower members to become brand advocates, which means people who not only support the brand, but actively promote it to others. These strategy help extend your reach organically, add credibility through word-of-mouth, and shape brand perception in ways that traditional marketing can’t match.
A well-managed community strategy can soften the blow. A community manager’s job is to listen to complaints, respond humbly, and act on feedback. Your audience will notice and often rally behind you.
During a crisis or challenging moment, your online community can serve as a valuable support system. They’ll protect your reputation and help you recover, even coming out stronger. Just as important: they’ll feel heard, and that’s what builds loyalty.
To create a thriving online community, start with a single platform and a few engagement tactics. Then, follow these 7 strategies for effective social media community management:
For a clear example of how community management can support marketing goals, consider King Arthur’s Threads presence. They often share posts promising recipes when followers engage. It’s a simple but effective way to spark interaction and build loyalty.
It may seem like small talk, but a thriving community is actually a growth engine in disguise. Active members provide valuable feedback, improve brand perception, and foster loyalty.
Set clear objectives that align with your business goals to implement this strategy. Do you want to gather feedback? Improve customer satisfaction or retention? Drive sales?
Once you’ve set your goals, use an analytics tool to monitor and moderate your community, uncovering valuable insights. Use this data to track key performance indicators, such as audience engagement, sentiment, and customer lifetime value, and identify top-performing content.
Supernote’s presence on Reddit is an example of how to use your online community for audience insight.
Their subreddit gives community members a space to share tips, troubleshoot issues, and interact directly with the brand.
These interactions reveal the small yet crucial details that make your community unique, but to uncover them effectively, you need the right tools. Social media management platforms help you track conversations, monitor sentiment, and analyze engagement trends across channels.
Use these insights to build detailed audience personas and tailor your content to match their interests and preferred communication styles.
Not every social media platform is the right fit for your community, and trying to be everywhere at once can quickly burn out your team and drain resources. Instead, focus on where your audience already spends time and choose platforms that align with your brand’s goals and content style.
For example, visual-driven brands like fashion or skincare tend to perform well on Instagram and TikTok, while B2B companies often find better engagement on LinkedIn. If your business relies heavily on customer support or real-time updates, X (formerly Twitter) might be the right choice.
Once you’ve identified the best platforms, establish concise guidelines for each to ensure your messaging stays consistent and compliant.
Managing multiple channels is complex. Use a social media management tool like Planable to plan, schedule social media posts, and publish content from one place. It also allows your team to collaborate in real time, reducing back-and-forth and keeping posts consistent and on-brand. So basically it saves your team time while keeping engagement high across platforms.
Planable lets users filter posts by approval status, content type, and scheduling.
Fitness brand E2M uses Facebook’s group rules feature to set clear community guidelines that promote respectful interactions and create a supportive environment. By enforcing these rules, E2M strengthens their internal engagement community and ensures conversations stay positive and on-topic.
Kait Shiels of Spark Social suggests being proactive, not reactive, for effective community management:
Too often we see brands treat community management as an afterthought—your audience will notice and you’ll see the impact in declined brand sentiment.
Establish internal workflows and create a community management team to handle moderation. Using tools like Planable to manage approval and escalation processes helps your team respond quickly, stay on brand, and avoid potential missteps.
On Threads, Beyond Meat does more than post about their products. Their offbeat, human tone helps create an emotional connection with community members.
Strategic marketer Kat Shiels suggests you to:
Start by creating low-lift initiatives and entry points like question box prompts in Stories, creating feedback polls, and UGC challenges with a giveaway component. For example, for a baby product client, we asked their audience in Stories to tell us the most ridiculous thing they cried over while pregnant, and then we featured our favorite submissions in a carousel. The more you spotlight audience voices in real content, the more likely they are to step forward as co-creators.
Questions, challenges, and open-ended prompts drive comments and shares, providing your community with a reason to engage and stay. Feature top responses in your Stories to encourage user-generated content and show your online community/online audience that you value their voice.
Effective community management requires your community managers to respond with purpose and in a timely manner. Clear response guidelines ensure your team stays consistent and on-brand across platforms.
Here’s how to set those expectations clearly:
Aim to reply to comments and direct messages within 24 to 48 hours. With Planable’s Engagement feature, you can reply to comments, react, and interact with your community in real time — all without leaving the platform. This approach saves time and helps your team stay on top of online community interactions efficiently.
Define your brand’s tone for different situations. For instance, use friendly and casual language for everyday questions, but adopt a more professional and empathetic tone when handling complaints or sensitive issues. This ensures your team speaks with one voice that feels authentic.
Establish which types of inquiries need to be escalated to senior team members. Complex issues like policy disputes or public complaints should be flagged for a coordinated response. For example, if a customer posts a serious complaint publicly, your community manager should know how and when to involve higher-ups to address it appropriately.
By setting clear guidelines and providing examples like these, your team can respond quickly and effectively, building trust and showing your community that you genuinely care.
Regularly review engagement, such as comments and responses, to understand your community’s interests and shape your content themes. Track essential social media metrics like:
For example, if you notice many questions about a product feature, create content that addresses those specifics to better meet your community’s needs.
Using Planable, you can monitor these interactions across all social platforms in one place. Planable helps you:
Planable’s collaboration tool enables team feedback and real-time replies on campaign content.
These metrics reveal how your online community generally feels about your brand, how your content addresses their needs, and how well you manage to forge true connections. Leveraging these insights allows you to refine your content strategy, improve community management, and find new ways to engage meaningfully with your audience.
Whether you’re launching a new online community management strategy or scaling an existing one, here are practical actions your community managers can take. These steps will strengthen your community management efforts and improve community health:
Consistent, thoughtful community management creates a positive environment and ensures your audience feels supported and valued.
Social media community management tools help optimize your workflow, strengthen customer relationships, and track engagement across content planning, real-time engagement, and cross-platform coordination. Here are the top platforms to consider:
Planable’s calendar view helps teams organize campaigns across multiple platforms.
Planable helps your team plan, review, and approve any type of content. Supporting 9 social media platforms, Planable also makes scheduling, publishing, and analyzing content quicker and easier than doing everything manually. It’s a powerful tool for optimizing both content workflows and community management. Every post goes out polished, consistent, and on-brand, and you can assess top-performing content in just a few clicks.
Here’s what community managers and marketers can do in the Planable collaborative workspace to boost active engagement:
Planable’s engagement features help social media teams launch or maintain a community management strategy, while also creating a consistent content loop to stay top of mind.
Pricing: Free plan available. Paid plans start at $33/user/month.
Drawbacks: No direct message management yet.
Hootsuite is a social media management tool that helps community managers monitor engagement across platforms like X, LinkedIn, YouTube, and TikTok, all from one dashboard.
Its collaborative workspace allows you to assign tasks, tag conversations, and avoid duplicate replies. Automation tools like saved replies and autoresponders help prioritize what requires a human touch.
Pricing: Plans start at $99/month, with limited seats and features on lower tiers.
Drawbacks: Hootsuite’s interface can feel clunky for beginners, and its pricing jumps with team expansion.
Buffer is a community management platform that simplifies publishing and engagement across various platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and TikTok. It’s a clean engagement dashboard that lets community managers reply to comments without switching tabs.
Also, its built-in collaboration tools, such as user permissions and approvals, help teams stay aligned and on task.
Pricing: Free plan available with limited features. Paid plans start at $6/month per channel.
Drawbacks: Buffer’s community management and reporting tools are somewhat basic unless you upgrade.
Zoho Social is an online community management tool for agencies that handle multiple brands. It supports platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Google Business.
Real-time monitoring, keyword tracking, and social CRM integration help teams stay on top of conversations and connect those insights to broader marketing efforts. Users can assign tasks, tag teammates, and manage everything in one place.
Pricing: Paid plans start at $15/month.
Drawbacks: Some of the features that make this tool worthwhile are only available behind higher-tier plans.
Agorapulse is a community management tool designed for teams handling high volumes of messages across multiple platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, and YouTube.
Its unified inbox means no comment or DM gets missed. As part of a integrated social media management workflow, the task assignment and internal notes keep teams aligned, and its advanced social media listening and reporting tools enable users to tailor content and track community sentiment in real-time.
Pricing: Starts at $69/month.
Drawbacks: Agorapulse can be pricey for very small teams or solo creators.
An engaged online community gives you real-time insight into what your community members care about. An effective community management strategy gives managers a framework for using audience feedback. This helps shape messaging and keep members actively engaged.
Start by defining your growth goals, then align your community strategy to support them. Select community management strategy tools that enable your team to accomplish this more efficiently and intentionally, transforming daily actions into strategic community-building opportunities.
With Planable, you can manage your content and community efforts in one place. Your team can plan content months in advance, seamlessly coordinate with teammates on content and replies, and respond to customer queries faster.
Sign up for the free trial to kickstart your social media community management strategy.
Cassie Clark is a freelance marketing strategist and content writer for B2B SaaS brands. Built lead magnets that convert at 49% and content engines that actually convert. TikTok gardener. Loves a good hook, hates content that wastes time. SaaS nerd and marketing generalist with a sharp eye for strategy.
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