What does a community manager do?

A community manager moves among the group sparking conversations, listening, encouraging, engaging and fostering a shared identity. They spot when content has got stale and create new content, they share in-jokes with the group and they seize natural moments for the community to rally around. Being a community manager is a social and human-oriented activity.

What is a community?

Community is not jargon. It is not a silly word social media people choose at random to build walls around their profession and make it harder to understand. It is exactly as its dictionary definition - a group of people with a shared geographical location, interest, characteristic or attitude who come together to share in that common experience.

In the same way that real life communities are diverse and fundamentally different in nature, so are online communities. You wouldn’t compare fishermen from a village in the south of Italy to a rowing club in London, and so you shouldn’t try to compare different communities online. They will vary in size, in content, in commitment of their members and in their activities. The only benchmark by which you should measure your community is whether it is helping you achieve your objectives.

What are the activities of a community manager?

It is the job of a community manager to highlight and strengthen the feeling of a shared experience within their community. There are a number of activities they should be engaging in in order to achieve that.

• Increase followers: A larger community is often a stronger community. The larger your community, the more people hear you and interact with you. It is tempting that number of followers becomes the only metric by which you judge success - this should not be the case. A larger community is only a good thing if your followers are relevant and engaged. Increasing your community by 10 interested people who are going to engage with and share your content is better than 100 bought followers that will never interact.
• Develop content: Interacting with the community daily means gaining an intimate understanding of who they are and what they want. This means the Community Manager is best positioned to develop new and adapt old content to meet their needs. If your community has developed an in-joke, expressed a desire or given feedback, you should respond with content. It’s important to show that you are listening and responsive.
• Customer support: A publicly solved problem is an advertisement for your company or organisation. Remember that you’re not just discussing to solve your customer’s problem, you’re showing the community watching that you care and bring value to their lives. This also encourages others to engage, and as a bonus - engagement drives reach, getting more people to see your posts!
• Channeling community feedback: This is one of the most important activities - and it can have a very broad definition. Fundamentally, it is interacting with the community to build a qualitative understanding of how they respond to certain products, messages or campaigns. However, it is not limited to this activity. It’s also using monitoring tools to use quantitative methods to judge their reactions. It can even mean engaging in activities such as surveys, quizzes or crowd sourcing, to get a more in-depth understanding of your audience.
• Staying ahead of the curve: A good Community Manager should always be on the lookout for new ways of engaging your community. Subscribing to newsletters and mailing lists, building contacts in the platforms, having a network of social media professionals - all of these things will help you stay up to date on what’s new and shiny in social media.

Pro-tip: Mixing online and offline

A good Community Manager will try to take their actions offline from time to time. An election was never won only with Facebook ads and a position never successfully lobbied through a tweet storm. It is intuitive to say that mixing the online and offline is important, but the real trick is figuring out why you’re cultivating an online community and how to combine it with your offline activities.

Below I lay out a few examples of the complementary ways that a Community Manager can use online communications to complement their offline work: