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What is a Community Manager?
A Community Manager is a key marketing professional focused on the digital presence of a company.
They handle the creation, growth, and management of the company's online communities, engaging customers and fans via social media and live events. Key responsibilities include:
- Campaign Planning: Implementing social media campaigns that align with the organization's marketing strategies.
- Content Creation: Sharing images, status updates, and video content on the company's social networks.
- Competitive Intelligence: Monitoring brand mentions online and engaging in timely dialogues with customers or prospects.
- Collaboration: Working closely with marketing and PR teams to maintain brand consistency.
- Relationship Building: Establishing connections with customers, prospects, and industry professionals.
- Contest Management: Organizing contests to enhance online presence and website visibility.
Required Skills
Successful Community Managers possess a blend of skills:
- Communication: Strong writing abilities for effective interaction in blog posts, emails, and social media.
- Organizational: Proficient in managing feedback and multitasking across various platforms.
- Data Analysis: Capable of generating and interpreting key metrics for community health insights.
- Conflict Resolution: Skills to de-escalate online tensions with customers or prospects.
Path to Becoming a Community Manager
- Education: A bachelor's degree in marketing, communication, English, journalism, or related fields is often preferred. Courses in writing, media studies, ethics, social media, digital media, HTML, or information technology are advantageous.
- Experience: Gaining practical experience through internships, workshops, or personal projects is crucial. Familiarity with photo/video editing software and social media platforms is beneficial.
- Certifications: While not mandatory, certifications can provide a competitive edge. Examples include AMA Certified Professional Marketer, Google Analytics, Google AdWords, Facebook Blueprint, and HubSpot certification.
In conclusion, a Community Manager plays a pivotal role in shaping a brand's digital narrative and fostering meaningful online communities. Through a combination of strategic planning, creative content creation, and analytical insights, they drive engagement and brand loyalty.
Why is community management important?
There are a number of reasons why community management is important. It allows your organization to:
- Increase brand awareness
- Gather ideas and feedback from customers or potential customers through real conversation
- Get to know your customers and what they want, need, and expect.
- Provide support to fans and customers when they need it
- Develop relationships with customers and potential customers to increase brand loyalty.
- Offer added value to your customers beyond the product or service you offer.
Tools used by Community Managers
To finish, we are going to review some of the main social media management tools that community managers need to know.
They will help you monitor social networks, create content, respond to customers, and analyze the performance of your most effective content.
1. Hootsuite
If you've spent a bit of time working on social media, chances are you've already met Hootsuite.
It is the industry standard bearer for the simultaneous management of several social networks and profiles.
It's incredibly intuitive and one of the easiest platforms to use.
The main features of the tool are message planning, publishing, and tracking, as well as the performance of advertising and digital marketing campaigns.
2. Social Sprout
Probably the most popular alternative to Hootsuite, Sprout Social is even more pleasing to the eye and includes all the features typical of social network analysis tools:
- planning,
- programming,
- campaign analysis,
- aggregate message flow,
- etcetera.
Social Sprout also allows users to respond to incoming messages directly through the tool.
While its customizable reports are good and certainly give you insight into the effectiveness of your campaigns, we think Hootsuite has a slight edge when it comes to the depth of analysis.
3. TweetDeck
Think about TweetDeck like a global dashboard or a timeline of all the tweets from your followers.
It's a fantastic tool for keeping track of everything that's happening around your brand, your industry, but especially your community.
TweetDeck allows you to display selected tweets, retweets, and keywords in custom feeds, all from an easy to read dashboard.
This means that as soon as a relevant element related to your brand appears, you can react immediately. Whether it's a negative brand mention, a retweeted blog post, or a general question about the industry.
Another great feature is the flexibility with which you can organize the columns in your dashboard. You can set it up to monitor brand mentions, hashtags, followers, and more.
Honestly, it's one of the best tools for monitoring and growing your brand community.
4. Brand 24
Brand 24 is a tool that allows you to monitor all the information published about a brand, as well as keep an eye on what your competitors are doing.
This allows you to respond quickly to feedback or respond instantly to an unhappy customer before the situation escalates and gets out of hand.
5. Buffer
With Buffer, you can download and schedule posts on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
It also makes it possible to analyze statistics on account interaction and monitoring.
There is also a very handy graphic creation tool (called Pablo if I remember correctly) that is perfect for editing messages before programming them.
6. Canva
Well, maybe it's not Photoshop, but Canva is a handy little tool that has saved the lives of many community managers when a last-minute message needs a touch of creativity.
The main strength of the platform should be its ready-to-use templates. Community managers have access to a variety of pre-sized Facebook banners, cover photos, Instagram story templates, YouTube banners - almost any network format imaginable.
Plus, these templates can be customized quickly and easily. You don't need to have years of experience using the Adobe suite to navigate the platform.
7. Adobe Spark
Adobe Spark is the user-friendly graphic and video design platform offered by the creators of Photoshop, Indesign, and Illustrator.
Like Canva, it comes with ready-to-use templates for almost any social network, including Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter cover photos, Instagram and Facebook ads, Pinterest boards, and more.
Spark also allows community managers to produce an image slideshow that turns into a short video. Once the settings are set in the template, users are invited to upload their images and overlay the voice and sound onto the slideshow to create a short interactive video.
8. Animoto
Animoto allows community managers to create professional-looking videos quickly and easily.
It has a subcategory called “marketing,” which is extremely useful for businesses, that allows marketers to easily create videos, image carousels, and slideshows, all with custom templates for various social channels.
There is also a vast library of video and audio content that can be used to generate ideas for new articles or used directly in your content.
Videos are uploaded directly to your social media channels without having to be exported to your hard drive.
9. Trello
Remember we mentioned earlier in this post how important it is to stay organized as a Community Manager?
Trello is absolutely perfect for that.
This free tool helps you organize daily, weekly, and monthly tasks using the Kanban board method.
You can create calendars, tasks, and any task/project management tool that can be assigned to different members of your team.
10. NapoleonCat
NapoleonCat, one of the least known community management tools, completes the list.
This handy tool brings together all social media comments, brand mentions, messages, and reviews in real time. In addition, the community managers can respond directly to these mentions from the dashboard.
Another great feature is monitoring the performance of uploaded/shared content. You can identify what resonates with your community by comparing likes, shares, and comments, and incorporate this information into your editorial calendar, making the necessary adjustments.
There's also an automatic response setting (which we haven't tried yet) that allows you to program specific social media responses triggered by particular phrases.
FAQs
Here are some common questions about managing communities:
What is the average salary for a Community Manager?
Community Manager in France
The average salary of Community Managers in France:
Community Manager in Canada
The average salary for Community Managers in Canada is:
Advice on proposed salaries
The salary for this position varies considerably depending on the experience and sector of activity of the Community Manager.
What is the difference between a social media manager and a community manager?
A social media manager is fully responsible for the content that a brand publishes online, while the Community Manager focuses on the digital community that follows a brand.
Is the function of Community Manager in high demand?
La Expected growth for this industry from 2018 to 2028 is 6%- about the same growth rate as the total for all occupations.
The increased use of social media as a means of communicating with customers and prospects could mean that there will be plenty of work opportunities in the future.
However, due to the popularity of social networks, it is expected that there will be significant competition for these openings.
Who needs community management?
If you want to build a long-term business with a strong brand, you need to invest in community management.
Conclusion
If you are seriously considering a career change and you think that the Community Management would suit you perfectly, we strongly recommend that you follow online marketing courses, especially if you are new to this field.
Social networks, digital marketing and community management overlap so much that an overview of the main tools, knowledge, and methodologies will give you a considerable advantage over other candidates.
Add to that a willingness to master the soft skills listed in the middle of the guide and you'll be On track to become an effective Community Manager !
