The Good Community Manager

What functions does a Community Manager play in a company?

The CM plays different roles within the organization. First of all,  a corporate role (defense of the brand, representation, dissemination and evangelization), a strategic role (internal communication with departments, active listening to options and opportunities on social networks, monitoring, measuring and managing; adapting the corporate communication strategy to social media, saving costs and generating measurable benefits with its actions), and a participatory role (dynamization, conversion, creation, growth and moderation).

Also, they must carry out their functions under the culture of effort, with aptitude, commitment, ethics, leadership, education and respect, a global vision, and with great adaptability to changes (must be bold to answer on Twitter as we have seen before).

What is the daily life of a good Community Manager?

To build, manage and administer an online community, it’s essential to follow a 5 steps routine every day:

1. High-value content creation. No quality content, no long-term or stable relationships.
2. Planning, scheduling and publishing. They are great communicators and, therefore, they must define strategies beforehand.
3. Active listening. With an empathic ability to connect with our audience and add profit for free.
4. Networkin. Follow, manage and take part in the different conversations about the brand or company that occur on social media.
5. Measurement. We need feedback to improve.

Do you fit the profile of the good Community Manager?

To be a good CM you must know how to generate engagement, manage conflicts, know how social networks work, promote networking and be a very balanced person. But above all (here come the most important aspects): organized, decisive, leader, analytical, self-taught, addicted to social media, teamwork, with common sense, empathetic, moderator, creative, flexible, proactive, communicative, investigative, demanding, curious, passionate, sensitive, with a gift of knowing how to listen and patient.

But without a doubt, the key to being the perfect CM is trust, which is achieved by being transparent, stable and moderate. Trust is a quality that is in short supply today, however, it is a necessary condition to be a good communicator and great content creator, and for this, it is necessary to know about SEO positioning and online advertising.

“A bird sitting on a tree is never afraid of the branch breaking, because its trust is not on the branch but on it’s own wings.”

The Good Community Manager Tools.

To keep up to date:

• Google Alerts (detects content related to terms that the user chooses)
• Paper.li (creates a digital newspaper from selected sources and other links)
• Netvibes Dashboard Intelligence (web service that acts as a personalized virtual desktop)
• Feedly (content screener)

To schedule, monitor and measure:

• Hootsuite (social media management)
• Metricool (an analytical tool to manage social networks and online advertising)
• Creator Studio (brings together all the tools you need to publish, manage, monetize and measure your content effectively, on all your Facebook pages)
• HubSpot (inbound marketing)
• TweetDeck (to manage and control multiple accounts from a single control panel)
• Google Trends (to compare the search popularity of various words or phrases)
• Meltwater (business intelligence and media monitoring software)
• Socialmention (to analyze the content, comments, photos, videos, blogs and posts that are public, shared by users on the Internet)
• Semrush (online visibility management)
• Google Analytics (web analytics)
• Facebook and Twitter Analytics

The Digital Ecosystem – the storm that differentiates the good professional of Social Media and Digital Marketing

The CM must analyze the digital ecosystem of the company and define a strategy: the purpose of everything. They should examine the companies with the same target, even if they are companies from another sector, and see how they do things, why, how is their content strategy, if the post frequently on social networks, if they use LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter or Facebook, which design techniques they use on their websites, or about what they write on their blogs.

The Digital ecosystem can be organized according to:

• Owned media: what do I have?
• Shared media: social networks.
• Earned media: what I could earn without paying with PR or bloggers.
• Paid media: sponsored (and owned: affiliation)

The center of the digital ecosystem is usually the website since it is where the customer conversion and the purchase usually happen. The beating and dynamic heart of every ecosystem is the blog.

This purchase by the customer is the result of a conversation with the company, usually on social networks. Social networks are channels of communication, not sales. A social network must be a network of contacts, with profiles that interact with each other, and that offer its users social functionalities to interact with content (create, share and/or participate). The difference between users is going to reside in the quality of the content.

There are two types of ecosystems in the company: the corporate one, which brings together all the different logos or subsidiaries that it has under that brand (i.e., Amazon: Amazon Alexa, Amazon Prime, Amazon Gaming, Amazon Business, etcetera) and the digital one of social media and digital marketing.

In short, every good CM must bring together a bit of journalism, advertising, public relations, passion for the Internet and new technologies, marketing, sociology, SEO, analytics, video and photography, but above all, they must be good professionals.