[Community] The Skills and Responsibilities that Make a Community Manager

Posted by Bradley Chalupski on May 31, 2018 10:25:54 AM

3 minute read

skills community manager

Hiring a community manager is a serious decision that no business should take lightly.

In a world where the focus is on maximizing customer experiences and customer journeys, it is by definition one of the most — if not the most — customer-centric role in an organization. The new hire’s decision-making and execution will have a huge impact on the way your brand is viewed by your target market audience from day one. That fact alone is enough to make it one of the most important roles as well.

Knowing the skills and responsibilities this position requires is crucial to hiring the right person. Below, we break down a community manager job posting which details the requirements for hiring the right person and elaborates on the necessary related skills.

1. Monitor the online conversation and become intimate with the brand’s target audience.

The role of the community manager is first and foremost to listen to the customer. Anyone who is hired to fill the role must have a deep sense of both empathy and sympathy so they connect with the needs of the businesses target market in a meaningful way. Without the ability to listen, the community manager will not be able to perform any of the other roles required to reach and serve that target audience.

2. Engage and participate in timely conversations on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram relating to the brand’s content to answer comments and amplify positive sentiments.

A community manager must use the tools of digital marketing effectively. This means having an understanding of social media which goes beyond recreational use into the way social ecosystems work in a business context. Knowing how to interact to manage the brand’s image and increase engagement at the same time is critical to reaching audiences online.

3. Identify and recommend opportunities through user-generated content around the brand.

What makes content viral? Your candidate better know. Its nature as an organic and impartial source makes content created by users one of the most potent ways to do this. Knowing not only where to go looking for this content, but also how do identify it and then leverage it properly is an essential skill set.

4. Be a lightning rod in culture and identify the latest digital trends your clients can leverage.

First and foremost, a community manager needs to actually be part of the community that they want to engage with. This means not only having a passion for the brand’s product or service, but also understanding the community in which that brand operates. The community manager must have a full understanding of what the target audience craves in their content in terms of medium and messaging.

5. Brainstorm with creative teams on opportune ideas to take advantage of these undiscovered trends or memes.

The community manager must be a team player with the ability to present and defend their ideas while still being open to criticism and change. A community's attention in the digital space is constantly changing; it takes a team to fully understand these trends and develop strategies to capitalize on them.

6. Build social ads within social platforms and liaise with media agencies.

Native social media reach is very important for community managers to cultivate. But it's also true that paid advertisements have a place in any brand’s digital strategy. Community managers must be adept at this side of the equation as well, building advertising messaging and working with other professionals to iterate and optimize on an ongoing basis.

7. Be able to evaluate work based on the data and suggest improvements and optimizations

Using data to perfect the use of social media is a must. Although community managers are generally not the strongest data people, they still need to understand the impact data has on their operations, and more importantly, how to respond to trends that they see. This ensures that a brand gets the most ROI out of the money they spend on community efforts.

8. Support the strategy team with culture, consumer and category insights based on observations from the community/online space

Being able to work across teams is essential. Although every department has its own role to play, they all constitute the efforts of one brand. Community managers must cultivate a culture of cooperation between the various organizational stakeholders, one where they can both share their insights  and integrate the insights of other teams to improve their effectiveness. Without this, opportunities for improvement will be missed.

Topics: Community

Related posts


Search this blog

Recent Posts

community playbook

Have an Article for Vanilla's Blog?
