Posted by What life looked like before Community Marketing Manager was thing.
Picture this
It is the early 90s; traditional marketing methods are the only way to get to your customer. It was like sending your ad babies into the world with no supervision.
Did it do the job it was supposed to? Who knows.
Cut to Right Here. Right now.
Where both big and small brands are looking to get their hands on the holy grail – a thriving and engaged community that fosters two-way communication.
The person responsible for keeping this community in good spirits is a community manager.
“If you have a community, you can have an economy.” Jow Yang.
Let’s look at the essential skills that make a community manager a highly valued job in today’s social media landscape.
1. A Repository of Knowledge
As a community manager, you could come across any query. Time is critical with all opportunities that require you to maintain your online reputation. Your customers can expect a speedy response if you thoroughly know your business or brand. If not, you might have multiple mentions from the same person who expects you to get back while creating a stir online.
So if you’re working with a brand, read up! Because what they say is true, “Knowledge is Power!”
This almost instant reply from Lululemon stole the show.
2. A Customer Service Champion
Community management is essentially customer service on steroids. It’s no longer between you and your customer. It’s between you, your customer, and the hundreds of extra set of eyes online. You know the eyes, patiently waiting for a slip-up to be the next meme trend?
A background in customer service could be a game-changer for you. It might also be helpful when dealing with absurd questions such as
“Can I bring my three kids for free?”
or
“Do I need to bring my own toilet paper?”
No, I didn’t just make these up. They are genuine questions by genuine people.
And only someone who has been in customer service will know the amount of patience it takes to deal with questions like these with a big smile on their face.
3. A Master Content Creator
Are you thinking, “Do I have to be good at everything?”
Well, hear us out.
Ideally, a social media manager creates consumable content for a brand or a business.
As a community manager, if you have a knack for content creation, it will help you ‘delight’ your audience. Think about converting a simple resolution into a quirky response that brings a broad smile to your customer. Now that’s what you’re after, aren’t you?
4. An Effective Communicator
Let’s be honest; diminishing attention spans are the ‘icebergs’ to our ‘communication’ Titanic. So you’ve got to say what you want effectively, using clear, concise, and simple words.
It’s a much sought after skill right now. It takes years to practice and perfect it. Luckily, writing tools like Grammarly, are a boon. To quickly ensure that your content is accurate and error free, install their extension, and relax knowing your errors will be caught in time.
5. A Social Media Superstar
We’re not exaggerating.
If you want to smash your community manager goals, you have to live and breathe social media.
It will require you to be constantly ‘On,’ which can get a little taxing if you don’t already enjoy being on these platforms.
What will help you here is relying on the magic of automation.
Crowdfire has a ‘mentions’ tool that pools mentions from your connected social media accounts into one messaging dashboard. So you can be methodical about your responses.
That’s not all. We know how important it is to keep looking for communication opportunities, whether they directly mention you or not.
A fantastic feature on ‘Mentions’ lets you add keywords related to your brand and get mentions directly delivered to your inbox.
Want to know more about how this works? Read it here.
6. A Result-Driven Rockstar
Let’s be honest. People are more likely to talk about your brand online if they hated you than if they loved you. It’s true!
“Customers who have a bad experience are two to three times more likely to write an angry review than customers who had a great experience.” Online Reputation Management
Your job as a community marketing manager is to find quick resolutions. The turn-around time it takes for you to turn that frown upside down decides how hungry you are for resolutions.
The first and most crucial step to a resolution is to take the complaint away from the public eyes and slide into their DMs. While you do that, do drop a line publicly asking them to check their DMs. Taking a case offline gives you room to work one-on-one with the customer and explore opportunities for quicker resolution.
7. A Communication Channel Chameleon
Emails? You got it.
A customer wants to jump on a quick call? Hell yeah!
A sassy tweet has arrived in your mentions? Bam! It’s taken care of.
A community manager needs to be a chameleon. The channels of communication could be anything that the customer chooses. No communication channel should be a deterrent to providing extraordinary customer service.
There you go! These are the 7 most essential skills you need to have in your arsenal if you want to rock your career as a community manager.