How can AI help you manage your community better?

Author: Katerina, Co-Lead, TogetherCrew

The question is inevitable: Can AI help community managers do their job better? …and, will it replace them?

Let’s begin with the elephant in the room: Will AI replace community managers? In short: no. Community managers role is diverse and requires a lot of people management skills. Tasks like calming down a frustrated member, or developing a community strategy using inputs from marketing, product, customer support, and growth requires creativity and a deep understanding of a niche topic. AI cannot handle these situations better than humans.

Where I see AI take more of a strong hold is in low-level moderation tasks. For example: Tagging a post as spam, giving qualifying members access to a channel, linking the right documentation, or pre-filling a customer support ticket. These are all repetitive, manual tasks. In sufficiently large communities, an AI bot should be doing them.

This doesn’t mean large communities don’t need moderators. Communities still need humans to moderate specific language channels or provide support on niche topics requiring a deep understanding of an area or the product.

For writing content and creating images, some AI-tools already exist, and community managers should include them in their workflow to save time. Here are three more examples of AI-bots and how they can community managers:

• Customer support with Mava: Their bot pre-fills support tickets to make it easier for community managers to answer requests for help.
• Several bots exist that imitate a public figure. This is a great way to create fun conversations in your community.
• Buffer’s AI-bot generates an outline for your social media posts with easy prompts to modify the text (e.g., short/longer).

But community management is more than creating content and pictures. Here are three scenarios of where more could be done with AI:

AI for customized onboarding

The first place AI should be used is during onboarding. Of course, this should be welcoming and friendly. But many communities already send automatic messages to smooth the onboarding flow. This can be customized further! For example, community managers can collect information about new joiners via forms and connect that to the onboarding flow. Another nice feature would be to include recent relevant conversations or make suggestions for what channels to follow.

AI to find information

No matter the purpose of a community, thanks to members, a lot of information is created every day. Coupled with product documentation or how-to’s from the company, it can swiftly become close to impossible to efficiently find something. With an AI-bot that knows what is being shared in the community and knows the documentation by heart, it would be easier to find relevant information and contribute new knowledge.

This use case for AI excites us at TogetherCrew! We’re building Hivemind. Our bot will be able to answer questions about what is happening in a community and direct members to the relevant person, page or post. Follow us on X for updates.

AI for finding trends across platforms

Community managers need to pay attention to trends on X, Youtube, Farcaster, LinkedIn, Medium, Paragraph, Substack, TikTok, Lens and some more that I forgot. And then, of course, there is their own community on Discord, Telegram, Discourse, Circle, Mighty Network … Normally conversation from one platform (e.g., X) ignites conversation in another platform (Discord). By being one step ahead, community managers can prepare content and events that are aligned with what is trending and top of mind for their members.

Instead of checking every day what is trending on each platform, community managers need an AI-tool that provides them with a list of topics, with suggested titles and outline of a post or event idea.

Even after one year, AI applications for community management are only starting. Community manager’s diversity of tasks makes it hard to have one tool that does it all. A lot still needs to be built. Exciting times!

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