What is online community management

Gabe
5 min readSep 13, 2022

Introduction

Community management is a critical role in any business. With the right strategy, you can build a loyal following of engaged customers who are ready to buy your product or service. In other words, community managers play an integral role in building the communities they represent.

You would be responsible for building and maintaining your online community. Potential responsibilities include (but are not limited to):

  • You would be responsible for building and maintaining your online community. Potential responsibilities include (but are not limited to):
  • Setting and measuring goals for the community you manage.
  • Creating and implementing strategies for developing a loyal member base.

Set and measure goals for the community you manage.

Before you begin, set and measure goals for the community you manage. This will help keep your attention on what matters most: improving the quality of life for your members and followers.

Setting milestones is an incredibly important part of community management — but it’s also something most people struggle with. If you don’t know when to stop working, then how can you measure whether or not your efforts are successful?

To avoid this problem in future projects:

  • Define exactly what success looks like for your online community before starting (and make sure everyone agrees).
  • Think about who should be involved in setting these milestones — and why they’re important enough to warrant their own specific goals (this may include other staff members).

Create and implement strategies for developing a loyal member base.

Create and implement strategies for developing a loyal member base.

Communicate with the community manager.

Develop a plan for your community members, including their needs and expectations.

Use a community management platform to gather information from your members, as well as other sources such as social media channels, email lists, etc., so that you can make informed decisions about how best to serve them (and keep them). The platform will also help keep track of what’s working well vs not working well in terms of interaction between you and your users/members — and then adjust accordingly! This means less work on your end because all this info is readily available at hand when needed…and no wasted time looking through piles upon piles of data trying find something relevant!

Identify and track relevant community metrics (e.g. repeat attendance at events).

  • Identify and track relevant community metrics (e.g. repeat attendance at events).
  • Make sure you are measuring what matters to your audience, not just their activity on the platform. For example, if you’re running an online forum where people share advice on how to deal with a certain issue, then it would be important to measure whether people are posting more frequently or participating in discussion threads more often than other users do — even if only a small percentage of responses are positive! You should also measure how many times someone has visited your website or viewed its homepage over time so that you can see which pages have gained traction among visitors who have not yet signed up for membership but may be interested later down the line when they have time from work/school etcetera depending on where they live.”

Work with designers to improve user experience.

A designer’s perspective on user experience is unique, and they can help you understand how the community looks and feels to users. Designers may have ideas for how to improve your site’s appearance or make it easier to navigate through. If they’re not available at the moment, ask them when they’ll be available so that you can schedule something together in advance.

Designers will also work with content writers (like writers) who know about SEO best practices — so make sure you delegate these responsibilities as well!

Moderate all user-generated content in line with the moderation policy for each community.

Moderation policy is the set of rules that govern the behavior of members within a community. It’s usually created by the community manager and approved by upper management, but it must be consistent with your company’s overall policies and values. A good moderation policy should:

  • Be communicated to all users before they join
  • Apply to all content posted on your site (not just comments)
  • Contain at least one clear set of guidelines for what makes something appropriate or inappropriate

Create and maintain a regular publishing schedule.

A regular publishing schedule is important for several reasons. First and foremost, it helps improve engagement with your audience. If you’re not publishing regularly, they may lose interest in what you have to say and move on to other platforms or content creators who are more active than you.

Second, publishing regularly will help build a loyal following of readers who trust that when they read something from you, it’ll be worth their time and effort because there’s always something new coming out (or at least some kind of development). This can also help build trust with them — if someone trusts their favorite author enough not only know about new releases but also see how those releases are handled by the author themselves (and maybe even participate in discussions), then the two parties have already built up this level of mutual respect before anything else happens between them!

Communicate with followers, respond to queries in a timely manner and monitor customer reviews.

There are many social media management tools that can help you do this. You can use them to schedule posts, track your interactions with customers and monitor your brand’s reputation.

For example, if a follower asks about a product or service, you should respond in a timely manner. This is important because it shows that you care about what people think of your business: customers will want to buy from businesses who take the time to reply promptly when asked questions so they feel like they’re being heard!

Monitoring customer reviews is also important: if there’s something negative written on one of these sites then someone might not trust whatever company they bought from before buying again (which means lost revenue). It’s best practice therefore not only responding quickly but also making sure everything goes smoothly so future purchases go smoothly too.”

Community managers play an integral role in building the communities they represent.

Community managers are the face of their communities, and they can be responsible for building and maintaining an online community. They have a wide range of responsibilities, including setting goals for the community that they manage; creating and implementing strategies for developing a loyal member base; monitoring member activity to ensure quality content is shared; responding to feedback from users via social media channels such as Twitter or Facebook; managing comments on blog posts or forum threads; making sure all members feel welcome within the site by removing unruly behavior from its pages (e.g., spamming).

Conclusion

Community management is a difficult, but rewarding job. You’ll have to be well-organized and disciplined, but in return you will have the opportunity to work with people from all over the world to help them connect with each other and build communities. Community managers are expected to be creative thinkers who are able to think outside of their own comfort zone when solving problems for their clients.

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