A community manager is a person who manages all of a brand’s social media channels. That means creating and curating content, writing posts, taking pictures, shooting video, responding to customers, monitoring conversations about the brand and its competitors, and measuring success of all these efforts every day. It is a big job. It is not a job for just anyone. We are lucky to have a great community manager on staff with Jillian Oyler, and she will be writing on this blog soon about her perspective on what it takes to be a community manager and share some of her experiences. In the meantime, I thought I would give our top five qualities we seek in a community manager:

  1. Strong communications skills, both written and verbal. A community manager must work with the brand manager to understand the brands and the tone of voice that each branch should use in communications with consumers.
  2. Active personal social media presences. A community manager who doesn’t actually use the social channels that we are hiring them to manager isn’t really interested in social media. We want people that are passionate about these communications channels and we want to see how they use them personally.

    3. Image source: Shutterstock

  3. Curiosity. We want someone who is constantly exploring and learning and likes to figure things out. With the pace of change in social media today, and in all digital communications channels, a person in the community manager roll needs to have the personal drive to experiment with each new tool.
  4. Common sense. Much of social media community management has to do with using common sense in how you reply to customers, the words used in posts, the types of pictures that are posted. We look for someone that knows how to do a gut-check before pressing the post button. Taking a good look at their personal social media profiles can give a quick impression of their ability to do this.
  5. Diverse technical skills. Because content is king and diverse content gets better engagement, we are looking for people that are comfortable taking pictures, shooting video and writing; almost like a backpack journalist. If they don’t have these skills, we are willing to teach if they are willing to learn.

There is an art to community management. And as the social spaces and digital world continue to grow and change, so will community management.