Website Magazine Special Contributor Matt Goulart, Founder of Ignite Digital
What is Community Management?
Community Management a term that refers to a range of important activities, all related to building relationships and communicating with your customers, clients, and target audience. Community management takes place on several fronts, including message boards, blogs, comments sections, discussion groups, and social media feeds. Community management is an emerging and constantly growing field, and is rapidly becoming one of the most important aspects on content marketing and brand development
What Is A Community Manager?
A Community Manager fills a complex and absolutely vital role within your brand. They are the public voice and face of your brand online, and often form the front lines of communication between your brand and your target audience. They are responsible for presenting your brand's social face to the Internet, and representing your brand in all that they say online.
Community Managers are responsible for a wide variety of tasks, including:
- Updating social media feeds with announcements, promotions and news about your brand; circulating links to content marketing campaigns and blog updates; responding to issues and current events with your brand's official positions and opinions; interacting with your audience by responding to queries, complaints and other feedback.
- Scheduling updates to your brand's blog and other website content, and responding to any comments that come in about that content.
- Representing your brand on message boards and discussion groups, responding to questions and queries, and serving as the voice of your brand in online conversations.
- Guiding the flow of conversations about your brand online.
- Serving as the primary line of communication between your brand and target audience, reporting feedback and complaints back to the brand and providing clients with solutions when they become available
- Generating business by developing relationships online.
The Qualities of a Great Community Manager
- deep appreciation for and understanding of your brand identity
- flexibility and dynamic energy
- exceptional communication skills
- a desire to constantly learn new online tools and systems, and to keep up with the ever-changing online world
- great writing skills and a sense of humour
- creative problem-solving abilities
...and a Not-So-Great Community Manager
- unwillingness to be on call (the Internet doesn't close at 5pm)
- short-tempered or easily stressed out, and therefore less able to handle sensitive issues with grace
- poor writing or communication skills
- an interested in sameness or predictability in their work
About the author: Matt Goulart is the founder of Ignite Digital, a Canadian Digital Marketing Agency. Through Ignite Digital, Matt works with Fortune 500 companies and advertising agencies around the world. He can be reached at Matt@ignitedigital.ca.
