Community Managers: What They Do & How to Be a Great One

If the internet has proven anything, it’s that there is a community out there for anyone. Companies with a product to sell or a service to offer can increase awareness of their brand using any number of channels such as email, SMS, and social media outlets like Facebook, Instagram, and X. An effective community manager can take those customers and form a community which can help further the brand’s awareness, helping to acquire new customers.

But how do community managers accomplish this and what are the qualities of a good community manager? This article will explain the responsibilities of a community manager and what qualities an effective community manager needs to nurture and grow a brand’s audience.

Understanding the Role of a Community Manager

A community manager wears many hats and their responsibilities go far beyond just blasting content out to whoever will consume it. Let’s look at what defines a community manager and how they differ from other roles.

What Is a Community Manager?

A community manager is an individual who is responsible for building, managing, and eventually increasing a community for a company’s product, service, and/or brand. They serve as a liaison between a company and its audience. A community manager’s primary responsibility is to create a sense of connection between its members, nurturing a common thread of positive response to the product or service.

They can act as both the face and voice of a company, setting the tone for the brand’s communications to its community members, as well as acting as a moderator of community support and digital engagement. The goal of all of these roles is to build trust between the brand and its customers whether the interactions are done digitally or face-to-face.

Community Manager vs. Social Media Manager

Community managers and social media managers are often confused because their roles at first glance appear similar. After all, what is social media but a large community made up of smaller communities? But the two positions have significant differences in their areas of focus.

A social media manager creates content by posting it on their brand’s social media feeds. Their primary role is to be the voice of the brand to the brand’s social media audience. They disseminate news about the company’s product or service across multiple sites in the form of Facebook posts, tweets, Instagram stories, etc. They notify the audience about topics such as product releases and new features and offerings.

A community manager creates content for the benefit of their community as well, but a community manager’s focus is on interacting with the audience rather than just giving them content to consume. Rather than being the voice of a brand, they are seen more as an advocate for the brand. Community managers are often responsible for promoting discussion among the audience and taking the audience’s responses to those discussions as feedback which can help improve the brand’s products or services.

Key Responsibilities of a Community Manager

Being a community manager is a multi-faceted role. Their duties within an organization are part technical, part public relations, part marketing, and part analyst. Let’s look at some of the key roles of a community manager.

Building and Maintaining Communities

To build an audience around a brand, a community manager must meet the audience where they are, which requires engaging an audience on digital platforms such as social media, discussion forums, and Slack channels. It also means meeting audience members at in-person events such as trade shows and company-sponsored events. Regardless if the environment is digital or in-person, the messaging and content delivered by the community manager must be aligned with the tone and message of the brand.

Managing Public Relations and Crisis Situations

Because they are dealing with the public across numerous forums, public relations is a large part of the community manager’s role. Public relations is particularly important because along with the accolades of satisfied customers, the community manager also has to handle negative feedback, both from customers and in the press.

Public relations skills are one of the most important skill sets in a community manager’s tool box because mishandling a delicate PR situation can severely damage the way a community perceives the brand. How community managers navigate these situations can be the difference between a brand’s success or failure. 

Content and Event Strategy

Creating an effective strategy involves thinking about trying new tactics to expand your audience and how those tactics will affect the brand over the long term. To develop your strategy, a community manager must define the goals of the community. Community goals might be increasing brand loyalty, growing the community’s awareness of a specific product or service, or increasing the amount of user-generated content produced by the community. 

Whether your strategy is applied to online content or a community event, it’s about more than just grabbing your audience’s attention. It’s a strategic move with the objective of strengthening the community’s internal cohesion and brand loyalty.

Tracking and Measuring Success

Before a community strategy is implemented, a plan must be in place to measure its success. A community’s health in general and a community strategy’s effectiveness in particular, is determined by measuring the engagement of the community. But how do you quantify engagement?

Tracking engagement in the digital realm is made a lot easier by the reporting suites that many digital community platforms offer. Social media platforms have built in analytics that allow managers to quantify posts and responses to community manager prompts and community manager responses to member questions and input. In-person community engagement can be measured by member engagement on event-related apps, sign-ups for future events, and new customer conversions.

Essential Skills for Community Management

A community manager needs a wide variety of skills and traits, some of which are innate, and some that can be developed. All of the skills listed below can be applied to a variety of situations.

Empathy and Emotional Intelligence

The ability to walk in another person’s shoes and the ability to control your emotions while at the same time understanding the emotions of others are two skills whose value cannot be overstated. Both empathy and emotional intelligence are a recognition of the shared humanity of the members of your community, and create a trust and comfort level that encourages members to engage.

Problem-Solving and Conflict Resolution

Communities are dynamic environments, and sometimes problems arise with member dissatisfaction with a product or even with how members engage with each other online. A community manager needs to listen to all parties involved to determine the root cause of the issue, have open lines of communication between all involved, and encourage good faith collaboration to reach a resolution satisfactory to all parties..

Communication and Leadership

There’s no doubt that being a community manager involves a lot of communication, whether that be in-person or communicating online. Communication is central to a community manager’s role because you not only have to understand the nature of the communication going on within your community, you have to have the leadership skills to drive those conversations in a direction that benefits your brand, and also to initiate new conversations.

Adaptability and Perseverance

There’s an old adage in business that the only thing that stays constant is change. Change is what drives new trends and innovation, and community managers need to not only be aware of changes, but have the ability to adapt to it. When change occurs, the needs of your community can shift with it. To preserve and grow a community through such constant change, a community manager needs the perseverance to navigate the community through the change without losing the focus on the community’s goals.

How to Become a Community Manager

Community managers need a variety of skills to be successful, but like many other positions, they also need a good educational foundation, relevant experience, and a path for advancement into the community manager role.

Educational Background

Most companies require at least a bachelor’s degree in a related field to hire an individual in a manager’s role. For community management, relevant majors would be communications, English, or marketing. Even foreign language skills would be relevant depending on the community you would be managing. 

Gaining Experience

Once you have gained a proper educational foundation, the next step is to accumulate experience that will build a skillset translatable to being a community manager. Experience as a social media specialist will give you experience with communities where interaction isn’t necessarily a requirement. Working in marketing can show you how consumers behave based on the content you provide to them. Copywriting can develop your language and written communication skills. Sales can build your in-person communication skills.

Career Advancement Opportunities

Once you have developed the requisite skills, you can move into a community manager position. While being a community manager can be an interesting and fulfilling position, it can also be a stepping stone to other more senior level positions such as community director, where you manage community managers, or lateral moves into corporate communications or marketing.

Tips to Be a Great Community Manager

Being a good community manager involves more than just developing an audience. The following are things one can do to excel at the community management position and develop healthy and vibrant communities.

Foster Inclusivity

Every member of a community wants to feel welcomed into the fold and appreciated for their contributions. Creating an inclusive environment will create a diverse membership that will feel encouraged to share their experiences and produce content that elevates your brand’s visibility.

Maintain Brand Voice and Authenticity

Being a community manager means striking a delicate balance. The balance involves making sure your communication to the community maintains the brand’s voice and the content the community generates reflects the brand’s authenticity. The brand’s voice is the tone and style of communication a community manager displays as they are a representative of the brand online. Community managers are as much the public face of the brand as salespeople because they interact with customers and foster a relationship with them. Unlike a salesperson, a community manager needs to ensure the brand’s messaging is consistent across all channels.

Build and Reward Loyalty

A community manager builds loyalty by actively engaging with members and providing a space where members feel valued for their contributions and feel their opinions are being heard. The goal of fostering this type of environment is to not only to keep members as customers, but to also have them become advocates for the brand to others. Community managers can achieve this by acknowledging members when their contribution to the community proves valuable to the brand.

Embrace Continuous Learning

Community managers must be adaptable to succeed in their role. And the best way to be able to adapt to change is to never stop being a student. There is always something new to learn about your community members, about the technology that drives them to contribute content, and about the products and services you want them to talk about. Embracing continuous learning ensures that your information and skills are always on the cutting edge of your industry.

Community Management Trends in 2025

Community management trends change as the preferences of community members change. Technological advances drive changes in products and services that try to address community members’ wants and needs. Let’s look at some trends that will drive community management strategy into the future.

Hyper-Personalization

Members of a community want to feel a connection with the products and services that they support. What they don’t want is to provide personalized user-generated content, but feel that they are part of a crowd that’s being fed the same message by the brand. Personalized content can make each member of a large community feel like their voice has been heard in the wilderness and can create a sense of belonging for those members. 

Data-Driven Decisions

A key part in determining a community’s performance is analyzing member engagement and satisfaction. As a result, it’s imperative that a community manager has a strong understanding of analytics and how to produce and interpret those numbers. A good analytics suite helps community managers monitor the effectiveness of the strategies they implement in real time as well as over the long-term. It also helps identify areas that need improvement and strategies that need adjustment.

Balancing Automation and Human Touch

In our ever-evolving technological world, it is tempting to automate as much as possible. While automation and technological advancements like AI can create efficiencies and streamline operational duties, it’s important for a community manager to maintain a human touch with their community. Automation technology like bots can handle tasks such as content moderation by scanning for certain keywords. This can free up a community manager’s time which can be allocated to tasks like conflict resolution, crisis management, and member recognition… areas where human empathy and connection are essential.

Measuring Success in Community Management

In order to make effective decisions about your brand, you need to be able to measure the health of your brand community. Let’s look at several key metrics to consider when measuring the vitality of a community.

Key Metrics to Track

Some key metrics to look at that are quantifiable are engagement rate, member growth, conversion rate, and member retention. Engagement rate shows how frequently members interact in your community. Member growth is the change in membership over time. Conversion rate is how many members become new or repeat customers, and member retention measures how long they stay in the community.

An example of a metric that is more subjective is content quality. This is where member content is evaluated to see how it compares to other member content and the usefulness of the content to the brand.

Aligning Metrics with Business Goals

When aligning community management metrics with business goals, it’s important to identify key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with the brand’s objectives. For example, if a main objective of the company is retaining customers, then looking at metrics like engagement rate, conversion rate, and member retention would give a company numbers that can let them know if that goal is being met.

Liaisons Between Customer and Brand

Community managers are a vital link between a brand and its customer base. They interact with customers encouraging them to be advocates for the brand while providing the brand with vital information that they need to make decisions and drive growth. When a community manager builds a thriving membership, it’s a win-win for both the company and the customer.