Activities of a Community Manager: A Guide
The next phase of this writing challenge focuses on the actions you would carry out as a Community Manager. A roadmap if you will. (moment pause to say woo for getting to this point).
I already spoke about the activities of a community manager in this article on Community Management and Community Managers. However, that would better serve in knowing what can be done in this field.
This article is the guide I wanted when I began and is more “step-by-step” to show how the various pieces fit together so you can start building. Let’s begin.
You’re a Community Manager. A link has been created to the community and you’ve sent out this invite. People are joining and trooping in.
First, you welcome them — onboarding
- Let them know the rules of the community and
- The purpose of the community
- And what they can expect from the community
Then you have to keep them engaged in the community
- Typically, you’d have your channels already created
- You send in prompts for them to reply and spark conversations
- You can also have rituals that you do at recurring times like sending in your plans for the week
Having more conversations and more people joining the community means you’d need moderation
- You’ve stated the rules (or you do so now) and then enforce them
- You also direct conversations away from harmful/unhelpful speech
- At this point, you could have people whose responsibility is the above on the team — the moderators
Communities have goals and plans that direct the activities you carry out — this is your strategy
- There are different types of strategies for business goals, community activities, tactical decisions and actions (day-to-day execution)
- These also determine your equally industry-specific programs. For example, NFT communities could have opportunities to win whitelist spots. Managing these various programs would be a testament to your project management + industry experience.
- You’d report and present these various strategies to the people you work with and the community.
After you’ve presented your strategies (gotten them approved) and started executing, you’d track their progress using metrics you’d choose.
There are also the tools you’d use to collect data for the above and carry out activities like hosting online calls.
Your activities are for the benefit of the community and so you’d reach out to receive feedback on them and use that for decisions.
That’s a pretty good guide to what you would be doing. But —
You may have noticed this — I did not include the steps to deciding to create a community in the above. It’s common for CMs to begin by being a member, which is reflected above. However, knowing why and how to create a community is very important so we’d start from that.
Outside the above, there are several activities I want to draw some attention to especially since they cut across communities/careers.
- Hosting online events like Twitter Spaces
- Creating and managing content
Finally, not everything would go smoothly and you may have to revamp a static community.
I’ve taken the keywords from the above to summarize thus:
- Community Discovery: Why are you building this anyway
- Community Strategy
- Onboarding Flows
- Community Engagement
- Community Rituals
- Community Moderation
- Community Metrics and Tools
- Community Content
- Receiving Feedback
- How to host a Twitter Space and Online events
- Revamping a static community
P.S. I made a few changes to the Guideline (Remember, Constant Iteration 😂)
I’m excited to begin writing about all these. The articles would come out in the order above so follow us to receive notifications when they do.
Sit Aside with me…
Soft boiled, runny and raw eggs.
Korean and Japanese cuisine includes raw eggs or undercooked eggs and these are healthier. They [can] do this because the process of producing eggs is very strict which avoids the risk of bacterial infection. Certain good things require infrastructure or processes in place before they’re enjoyed.
Starting a new phase on Day 10 of this Challenge,
Bell…🖋️
