Community Management
Many companies are embracing community management as a way to make the customer relationship ascend beyond the level of buyer and seller. Online communities are places where people build relationships with each other around a strong common interest— namely, your brand, products, people, or mission. Thanks to the Internet, you can easily locate and connect with others who share similar interests, and community management is a growing skill set to create a healthy environment for those passionate people to connect with each other and facilitate, strengthen, and encourage those relationships.
Community management skills have deep roots in behavioral and social psychology, with emphasis on guiding and influencing group behavior and initiating relationship development. Professionals in this area of digital marketing understand that building community is a long game and return on investment can take months, if not years, of consistent hard work. The name of the game here is relationships— not only between customer and company but also customer and customer. Relationships take time to develop, and they need a safe space to do so. Online communities serve many different purposes, from increasing retention rates to reducing customer support tickets to identifying product and content gaps, but the end result is the same: increased brand loyalty and advocacy, higher customer satisfaction, and a direct line to the experiences of your customers.
A position in this area is community manager, a job that entails bridging the gap between company and customer. Whereas social media marketers work to make the brand attractive and engagement-worthy on various platforms, community managers build and nurture the human relationships hidden in social media communication. Social listening and moderating online“ tribes” centered on the company and products are common responsibilities for this position. Community managers excel at advocating on behalf of the customer while also advocating for the brand.
So what personal attributes should you possess to be successful in this position? A community manager’ s first super power is empathy. The importance of being able to communicate empathy to the brand’ s community can’ t be emphasized enough. Social media can also be time consuming, so the community manager must effectively manage time and prioritize tasks. The community manager also needs to establish meaningful connections with community members and various members of the company’ s internal team to effectively advocate for customers. Community managers bring in $ 38,000 to $ 75,000 annually.