What is a community manager?
A community manager is a marketing professional responsible for the management and development of a company’s online community. They are responsible for building, growing and managing the company’s community online and engaging with customers and fans through social media and live events. They use analytics tools to monitor social media, blogs and online forums to find out what people are saying online about a brand.
Some of their primary responsibilities include:
Planning and implementing social media campaigns that align with an organization’s marketing strategies
Sharing images, status updates and video content on the company’s social media accounts
Monitoring for any mention of the brand online and engaging with the customers or potential customers in a timely manner
Working closely with the marketing and PR teams to ensure brand consistency
Building relationships with customers, potential customers and industry professionals
Why is community management important?
There are a number of reasons community management is important. It allows your organization to:
Increase brand awareness
Gather ideas and feedback from customers or potential customers through real conversation
Learn about your customers and what they want, need and expect
Provide support for fans and customers when they need it
Develop relationships with customers and potential customers to increase brand loyalty
Provide value to your customers beyond the product or service you offer
Skills for community managers
Community managers must have a variety of hard and soft skills to succeed in their positions, including:
Communication skills: Community managers must be able to write well in order to communicate clearly with customers and other members of their audience in blog posts, emails and social media.
Organizational skills: They must be able to track feedback and manage the process of posting content across multiple platforms. Community managers must be able to multi-task and stay organized.
Data analysis skills: Community managers must be able to generate and interpret key metrics in order to get insight into the health of a brand’s community. They need to be able to interpret qualitative as well as quantitative data from projects.
Conflict resolution: They must have conflict resolution skills in order to diffuse tense situations with customers or potential customers online.
