Community Manager: Born or Made?

Do you want to become a Community Manager but don’t know where to start?

The Community Manger profile is one of the most demanded nowadays. And it is nothing more and nothing less than the person in charge of putting a face to a certain brand or company in the different social networks.

But is a Community Manager born or made?

What is a Community Manager?

It’s the person in charge of managing the social networks of a brand or company.

When we talk about managing social networks, it’s something more than putting new status or interacting with users, the role of this digital marketing professional goes beyond these activities.

A Community Manager is also in charge of:

✅ Preparing digital strategies

✅ Making reports

✅ Customer service

✅ Looking for influencers to get more attention to your brand in social platforms

In summary, the community manager is responsible for increasing and defending the image of a company in the digital world.

Community or Social Media Manager

Some people or entities differentiate the Social Media Manager role from the Community Manager.

The difference remains in that a Community Manager is the person in charge of carrying out a strategy on social networks, and a Social Media Manager would be in charge of creating that strategy.

This difference doesn’t always apply and normally both profiles merge into one.

• A Social Media Manager creates the strategy for all social channels and the Community Manager is the one to put it into practice.
• Social Media Managers choose the tools that will be used by CMs to develop their job
• One of the roles of a Community Manager is to implement the actions of competitions and promotions defined by a Social Media Manager.
• A Social Media Manager creates the SEO strategy that a Community Manager will carry out
• The CM directs the communications and actions to the audience that the Social Media Manager previously defined and segmented.
• A Social Media Manager organizes and manages the budget for the implementation of the strategy.

Skills that a Community Manager should have 

If you’re wondering what kind of skills you need to master social networks and become the perfect Community Manager, stop looking, we’ve compiled all the information you need:

✅ You should have certain knowledge of communication and marketing, and have the ability to empathize and connect with your users.

✅ You should know everything about the company or brand that you work for and always be informed with the latest news in order to advance ahead of your competitors.

✅ Patience combined with the ability to solve conflicts will be your best weapon.

✅ The more versatile you are, the better since it will play to your advantage having knowledge of digital marketing, journalism, advertising and public relations.

✅ Technology will be your best ally, so you will need to be up-to-date with all necessary tools that can help you to make your job easier.

Knowing all this, you can develop your work perfectly.

What Does a Community Manager Do?

Which tasks should this social network professional develop? Pay attention to all of them!

Monitoring a brand in different Social Networks

What are the users of a brand talking about? What are your competitors doing? What do your clients need?

As a Social Media Manager, you will have to be the company’s eyes and ears on the Internet. Monitoring tools will be your best ally and help you always be aware of what’s going on around your brand.

It’s indispensable to learn how to do competitive analysis or Benchmarking.

Informing the Company About Their Users Activity

As a Community Manager, you have to inform departments about complaints, suggestions or positive comments coming from the users of the brand. It’s very important to treat this info as something very valuable that will help you to improve your digital strategy and draw up an action business plan.

The best way to show your work as a Social Media or Community Manager is through a Social Network Monthly Report.

Getting to Know the Different Departments of the Company

What happens if a user asks you how a specific product works and you don’t exactly know the answer? It is useless carrying out the management and development of a social network plan if you don’t know how to give answers to all the doubts that your clients might have.

This is why, you should first establish a relationship with the different departments of the company in order to consult any possible doubt or inform about a complaint so you can adapt better to the needs and goals of your brand.

Company´s Voice and Ears

Yes, you will be the face of the company in the digital environment. So, it’s essential that you know every detail of the brand, and of course, it’s target audience.

However, how can you connect with your public? You will learn this with time if you keep paying attention to the publications that are better received and always give adequate answers in a personal tone.

Contacting Influencers or Opinion Leaders 

Do you want to boost the growth of your brand’s community in a short period of time? If you want to increase the number of followers and also the reach of your company on social networks, you should involve influencers in your digital marketing strategy.

How do you do it? Your role will consist of searching for opinion leaders or influencers that sympathize with your brand. For example, if you are managing a fashion brand, you should get in touch with bloggers, Instagramers or YouTubers that are focused on the same sector.

However, take advantage of these individuals only to carry out exceptional actions for your company such as a specific ad campaign, event or promotion.

Making Users Ambassadors of the Brand 

Which users make more comments and interact more often with your brand? Your role as a Social Media Manager consists on identifying those users and establishing a collaborative relationship with them so they become ambassadors of your brand. This will help to rapidly increase your company’s community.

Tools for Community Managers

As every professional in Digital Marketing, a Community Manager must know how to use a variety of tools to automatize and make easier his job.

It’s a thing of the past when a Social Media Manager spent endless hours trying to collect relevant info or publishing manually the different entries on each social network.

Keep reading!

Metricool

Can you imagine having all your social networks together in the same platform? Now this is possible with Metricool.

You can analyze, manage and measure your brand impact on social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. Besides, you can obtain all the metrics of your blog or website.

You will soon realize all the time and work you can save with this tool:

✔️ Consult all relevant stats related to your accounts on social networks and your blog or website.

✔️ Make your own reports in a matter of seconds.

✔️ Measure hashtags that you want on the company events.

✔️ Program publications and content to make your work easier and save time.

Metricool has a mobile App so you can always be informed about what’s going on in your client’s social networks wherever you are.

Slack

If you weren’t sure how to make more fluid the communication between the different departments of your company when small unexpected issues arose, Slack is the solution.

With this instant message tool, you can be in touch with the responsible person of each department at any moment. Best of all is that you can organize your chats by topics, categories, teams… and you can also add tasks or send files. Easy, fast and simple!

Canva

Is graphic design not one of your strengths to make your own creations on the Net? What can you do?

Don’t worry, Canva can save you a lot of trouble. With this tool, any person will be able to design and edit his own images. Canva offers templates with beautiful and professional designs.

What’s more, you can design your publications in Canva and schedule them in Metricool without leaving the platform: the integration between Canva and Metricool will be your new ally.

Easelly 

To put the icing on the cake to our list of tools, Easelly will help you with your infographics on the social networks. Simple and straightforward!

As you read in this post, a Community Manager is built with time, as long as you put interest into what you do, keep studying and do it with enthusiasm.

Are you ready to become a real Community Manager?

Sara Martín , 22 August 2021