Community Management and Community Managers
What is Community Management? or more accurately who is a community manager?
A community manager ensures you have a community
A community manager acts as the liaison between an organization and its audience. Community managers are responsible for building and maintaining a brand’s community — both online and offline across various outlets — and public perception. Community managers do not actually “manage” communities — a more accurate term would be facilitating and empowering connections between community members and then with the brand.
Community management serves multiple constituents and is a multi-functional and cross-disciplinary role. Community managers mediate between customers and the business, delivering valuable customer feedback to the company while responding and reaching out to customers. At the same time, community managers must inspire community members to interact with each other.
Community managers are usually brought on board for one of three scenarios:
1. To build a community from scratch;
2. To maintain an existing community; or
3. To rebuild, recover, or resurrect a community that has abandoned a brand
Skills of a Community Manager
- Great writers and communicators
- Content Creation
- Industry knowledge
- Understanding of brand’s products and organization
- Adaptable
- Tech-savvy
- Strong soft skills online and in-person
- Background or skills related to Support
Activities of a Community Manager
Community Managers carry out several responsibilities and in fact, this can come as a shock especially when you think it’s being just active and sending the most messages and announcements (I did 🤣 and that’s a huge reason I’m writing this series). Your responsibilities would actually depend on the organization and won’t be the entire list below.
- Create content.
- Educate and excite existing and new community members.
- Organize events both online and offline.
- Increase online engagement (conversation, shares, clickthroughs).
- Integrate initiatives with other marketing campaigns and/or initiatives.
- Answer customer questions about products and services.
- Manage online forums and social networks as extensions of your existing customer service efforts.
- Validate product ideas, features, and use cases.
- Use forums, chats, and platforms to crowd-source feedback, requests, and complaints.
- Serve in a market research function.
- Coordinate with product managers, user experience (UX) designers, and engineers.
- Generate business development leads.
- Support prospects through the sales pipeline.
- Create more touch points and conversations with partnership and client prospects.
This infographic captures the various categories of activities you’d be engaged in as a Community Manager. Take a step inside the mind of a community manager.
Social Media Management vs Community Management
One reason for confusion about the activities of a Community Manager is the overlap it has with social media management. Social media is part of the tactical execution of a community manager’s role today, but it isn’t always the cornerstone of this role and function.
One easy way to differentiate the roles is to think of social media managers as channel managers, and community managers as people managers.
The main tasks of the social media manager can be broken down into three categories:
- All things content
- Listening and engaging with the brand
- Strategy and analytics
The community manager’s daily tasks are less about the brand’s social pages and more about the community. The main responsibilities of community management on social media include:
- Finding new users and answering their questions
- Replying and engaging current community members
- Strategy for developing the community
Conclusion
In your first couple of community roles especially as a junior, you’ll be very hands-on, spending your day talking with people, listening, connecting them with each other and giving them that sense of belonging that we all strive for. As you advance through the community industry, you’ll take on roles that explore more strategic-level responsibilities, building social systems, scaling up community programs to new cities or audiences, hiring teams of community professionals and driving the direction of your business.
Regardless of your role, you spend every day thinking about how to connect people together. That’s amazing and never forget that.
Speaking of advancement, our article tomorrow is focused on various specializations in the community space and also how your role changes as you advance so you can properly gauge your experience. Ensure to give us a follow to be notified once it’s released.
Sit Aside with me…
Open storage.
Usually (or sometimes for some people), if you can’t see something, you tend to forget it. Open storage helps that as seeing an object can help you remember it and also it can cause you to make more diligent decisions about purchasing it (dependent on other factors) and the actions you take concerning it. This is a story about metrics and news reporting.
Woohoo! We’re in Day 6 of this Challenge,
Bell…🖋️
