So you’ve decided to invest in building a community around your brand or organisation - smart move! But in order to reap the rewards of your community on business growth, you’ll need to commit to not just launching it, but investing in its ongoing success. For most organisations, that will mean allocating someone to manage your community. These folks are typically called a Community Manager. Ideally this would be someone’s full time role, but if resource is a challenge, you could initially explore a hybrid role where they take on some of the community responsibilities alongside another role, such as marketing. But what is a Community Manager? What do they do? What skills do they need to have? And what might a typical day in the life of a Community Manager look like? Read on to find out!
A Community Manager is an individual responsible for engaging with your community to drive member engagement, ensuring they receive value and keep coming back. They serve as the bridge between your organisation and community members themselves, acting as liaison, representing the organisation to the community, and representing community member’s needs, views and experiences back to the organisation.
One of the most common misconceptions is that if you set up a community right, it will run itself. This is not true! It is essential to invest in a Community Manager if you want to build a successful community that delivers business value. Without one, the community will likely lay dormant or stagnant and fail to realise its potential for your members and your business.
The specific remit of a Community Manager will vary from organisation to organisation, depending on the specific objectives of the community, but common responsibilities include:
- Delivering against the agreed community experience and operational plan e.g. organising and running events, creating or curating content, etc
- Facilitating interaction and dialogue amongst community members e.g. by starting conversations on your online community, or connecting individuals with shared interests
- Responding to member queries or feedback, either on your online community, via email or in person if relevant
- Developing and maintaining community guidelines and policies - ensuring that members adhere to the standards and behaviours you set
- Implementing strategies and programs to increase membership and engagement - this might include referral programmes and social media campaigns
- Defining KPIs, tracking results and communicating back to the business
- Building and maintaining relationships with relevant internal stakeholders such as product (sharing member feedback or insight on the product) and marketing (gathering member case studies or testimonials for marketing to utilise)
- Engaging with superusers to drive further engagement within the community and attract new members
- Moderating online discussions, respond, engage and report on any inappropriate content
- Managing the relationship with online community platform vendor (if relevant)
As your community grows, you may need to start considering hiring additional team members with more specialist roles to support your Community Manager. These might include Event and Content Producers, Operations specialists and Online Community experts.
As you can see, the responsibilities of a Community Manager are broad and varied, and they need to be able to wear many hats. Community Managers can come from different backgrounds, but typically have the following skills:
- Community Managers spend a lot of time communicating with community members and internal stakeholders, so must possess strong written and verbal communication skills to effectively convey information, address concerns, and foster positive interactions within the community
- Understanding the needs, frustrations, and perspectives of a diverse range of members is crucial for providing effective support and building trust within the community
- Community Managers should be adept problem solvers, capable of resolving member or operational issues and conflicts efficiently and diplomatically
- Community Managers must spin many plates at once, so the ability to multitask is essential. Given their role in responding to member needs, and requests from the business, they also need to be agile and responsive
- The best communities try new things, quickly testing and learning what works and what doesn’t to deliver maximum member and business value. Each community should offer its members unique value so it’s important to have a Community Manager who enjoys coming up with new ideas (in partnership with members, ideally!) and testing out new approaches
- You may likely also want to look for a Community Manager who has a commercial mindset and business acumen, given the need for communities to prioritise activity that delivers business value and growth.
- Community Managers must be able to effectively demonstrate the impact of their activity on the wider business, so a familiarity with data and ability to draw and communicate actionable insights from data is essential
Again this will depend on the organization, community and its objectives. Below is an illustration of a typical brand community that has a broad spectrum of community programming:
- The day begins with reviewing overnight activity within the community, responding to any urgent inquiries or concerns, and planning out the day's engagement and content strategies
- Throughout the day, the community manager engages with community members, provides support, and moderates discussions to ensure a positive and constructive environment. Perhaps they’d be checking in with volunteer moderators or superusers that are part of their Ambassador Programme, to see how referrals are going to bring in new members. They might be hosting an online event at lunchtime, so would spend a few hours doing last minute checks, running the event and doing any post event reporting and follow ups to attendees and speakers
- In the afternoon, the focus may shift to content creation, such as writing articles, producing videos, or planning further upcoming events for community members, or taking user generated content to create social media campaigns to attract new members. The Community Manager may also have meetings with colleagues across the business to share insight from the community e.g. product feedback.
- As the day winds down, the Community Manager wraps up any remaining tasks, evaluates the performance of community initiatives run that day, and prepares for the next day by reviewing analytics and feedback to continually improve the community experience.
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So there you have it - everything you need to know about a Community Manager! In conclusion, Community Managers play a crucial role in fostering engagement, providing support, and building lasting relationships between organisations and their members, in order to drive business growth. With a blend of communication skills, empathy, and creativity, they serve as the backbone of your thriving community.