Online Community Management For Dummies®

Chapter 6

Communicating with Your Community

In This Chapter

• Being available to your community
• Keeping in touch in various ways
• Posting answers to common questions
• Answering e-mails from members
• Sharing news in newsletters and blog posts

For a community to truly be successful, the community manager has to be accessible. Being accessible means more than showing a regular presence in the various online networks. It also means being responsive on the many different communication channels. Your members enjoy finding out news about your brand. They especially appreciate knowing that if they have any questions about your brand, products, or services, their inquiries won't go unanswered.

In this chapter, I discuss the various ways community managers communicate with their communities and why that communication is so important.

Making Yourself Accessible

Nothing is more frustrating than wanting to reach out to someone at a brand or business and not being able to find any kind of contact details. Because you're considered to be a spokesperson for your business, you're the person your community will want to reach out to. Thus, you need to post contact information where your members can easily locate it.

Here are a few ways to share contact information with your community:

• Blogs: Post contact details on About or Contact pages, which should be listed in tabs at the top or in the sidebar of each blog page.
• Forums: Create a sticky, which is a geeky term for a forum folder that doesn't move ...