Successful Community Managers Have These 7 Critical Qualities

Incorporate the following into your community management strategy to foster a healthy and engaged online community.

1. Be a Great Listener

Connecting with your audience is an important part of being a community manager. To form a connection with them, you will have to listen to understand your community’s wants, needs and desires. Knowing all of this and the community’s sentiment toward your brand and product is crucial so that your company can always respond to emerging concerns as they occur.

It’s also important to remember to make use of social listening tools to see what topics are of interest to your audience and what other pages or brands they are following.

2. Be Empathetic to Your Community

Realize the community isn’t all about promoting your company’s new products and service offerings. The community should be founded on helping its members succeed in their own endeavors that relate to the use of your product offering. So, remember to focus on showing them how your brand can help them win.

3. Be a Curious Information Seeker

The more you know about your company and its industry, the more helpful and valuable your content will be to your online community. Keep up with industry trends and best practices so that you can represent your brand well when conversing within its community.

Social networks are always changing, so it also behooves community managers to keep up with new platform features and innovations. Knowing where and how to best produce content for your community is key.

4. Be Creative

The content you choose to share should captivate and encourage your community to engage with one another.

Being a rational creative thinker is also important for this role since you will need to work to understand why certain engagement strategies did or did not work.

5. Be Organized and Flexible

Being a community manager requires that you wear a lot of different hats each day so being flexible is key. You will likely have to manage communities on different platforms, track relevant KPIs, then report your findings and optimization strategies for future campaigns.

To stay on track, it’s important to develop or have good organization skills so you can easily adapt to your brand’s fast-paced digital environment.

6. Maintain a Positive Peace-keeping Vibe

Squabbles and disputes can frequently occur in the digital world. It’s the community manager’s job to promote a healthy digital space for their community.

There will even be times when a bit of customer service skill will be required as the community manager will have to resolve issues or complaints that are brought up in community discussion.

7. Be an Exceptional Communicator

Community managers should also have strong networking skills to effectively grow their brand’s community.