How to Hire a Good Community Manager [Social Media, NFTs, or Discord]
Marketing teams have necessarily evolved with cultural shifts, adapting to new media and new communication platforms and styles to remain relevant and accessible to consumers. Fifteen years ago, social media manager was a new title; today, social media management requires an entire stable of talent, not just to broadcast messages on social media platforms, but to develop and nurture communities among followers.
Community Manager is a relatively new title on social media teams, one that is distinct from social media management and social media coordination.
Brands have wisely started to hire community managers for their social media efforts over the last few years, but what are community managers, what do they do, and why have they become increasingly important to brands and the marketing agencies that support them?
What is a Community Manager?
A community manager is responsible for helping a brand develop, increase, and oversee its online communities. Of course, different communities require different engagement styles, and community managers must be fluent experts for each. In fact, brands often employ multiple community managers to own particular online communities, which can include Discord, Twitch, NFTs and social media.
Community managers are great friends of analytics, monitoring outlets, forums, blogs, etc. to find insights into a brand’s engagement and resonance with consumers. What are people saying, in real time, about a company’s new product rollout on a given platform? It’s a community manager’s job to find out.
They are also great friends of live events, both online and IRL, because bringing communities together around a brand is, at the end of the day, a community manager’s bread and butter.
Social Media Manager vs. Community Manager
Since they both relate to social engagement, and both have the word ‘manager’ in the title, it is oftentimes easy for people to confuse social media manager and community manager. What is the difference between social media management and community management?
The truth is, there exists some overlap between the two roles, and different companies organize marketing teams differently. Yet, there are some clear distinctions between the two, and one very big one.
Though it’s not foolproof, here’s a good rule of thumb: If a person is posting to social under a brand’s profile, they are a social media manager or coordinator; if they are posting as themselves and serving as a brand ambassador, they are a community manager.
Make sense? Here, try this. As part of its work with IMAX, Lemonade manages IMAX’s social media accounts, posting in real time under the IMAX profile across social platforms (actually, it’s this really cool guy named Josh who makes most of the social media management magic). From Josh’s fingers to IMAX’s lips to followers’ hearts—he communicates with IMAX’s fans as the brand itself.
Meanwhile, as part of our work with Iskra, Lemonade helped build out their branded Discord server, where community managers engage consumers on a brand’s behalf, using their own handle and PFP. They are there to generate hype, to facilitate engagement, and to help with any issues users/consumers may have. They are a face of the brand, not the brand.
What Does a Community Manager Do Day to Day?
Ok, but what does that all look like, being a face of the brand? What is a 9-5 day in the life of a community manager? Again, this can vary widely from company to company, but there are some core competencies and commonalities to be found.
In terms of big picture responsibilities, community managers are expected to set and execute campaigns to support marketing strategies. These campaigns can be in particular communities (i.e. Discord or NFT), can be across different platforms, and can include IRL events. But, at the end of the day, it is this work that community managers are judged on.
In order to succeed, community managers must quickly produce engaging and exciting text, image, and video content to support their campaigns, and must be prepared to respond to community members in a timely and thoughtful manner.
They also must organize and participate in events (IRL and/or online) to inspire brand engagement and support broader marketing initiatives.
A lot goes into being a successful community manager and brands are increasingly finding them indispensable.
Why Do Brands Need a Community Manager?
One big reason brands need to hire a community manager has to do with data. As third-party tracking options from Google and Facebook both dwindle, brands need to find new avenues of insight into their consumer base.
A properly managed community is an invaluable data stream, almost like a real-time focus group for the modern era. Products can be soft launched among a brand’s most ardent fans, reactions and engagement can be monitored, and brands can quickly learn what works and doesn’t before branching out into the mainstream.
Another big reason comes down to content. Think of them as a subject matter expert on a particular community, one who understands the type of content and engagement best suited for it, and who can move fluidly through it as though they, too, were a member.
The unique, exciting, and authentic content and conversations that emerge result in greater brand engagement, and more passionate and loyal consumers and fans. If your social media manager is your digital-era spokesperson, think of community managers as your modern-day hype machine; people who know how to engage communities on your behalf. This also makes them ideal customer service representatives, there to assist people in terms they understand and also to spread goodwill during frustrating outages and service disruptions.
Where Should Brands Use Community Managers?
There are multiple platforms and spaces for which brands should hire a community manager. Three of the biggest are Discord, NFTs and social media.
As we pointed out in a previous marketing blog, most brands should hire a Discord community manager as soon as possible. Discord is an ideal space to build a community of a brand’s most smitten fans, and a community manager brings order and personality to the server. A poorly organized Discord server gives users a bad impression of a brand, and a community manager who doesn't know how to engage its members threatens a brand’s credibility.
Brands that are pushing into Web3 and the metaverse should also be looking to hire an NFT community manager. This person would be responsible for engaging a brand’s users/fans around its NFT offerings, hosting events and serving as a subject matter expert for the company and its online communities.
Finally, and perhaps most obviously, brands should hire a social media community manager, not to replace their social media manager role but to supplement it and to support it. Working together, a social media manager and community manager can help drive one another’s initiatives and content, bringing new depth and flexibility to a company’s social media operations.
How Lemonade is Staffed to Help
For companies looking to build out their social media teams by adding dedicated community managers, it can be difficult to take the first steps—how do you fit this new role into existing structures and, more importantly, how do you hire for a position that nobody in the building has ever done before?
That’s where marketing and advertising agencies like Lemonade come in. Lemonade helps companies like IMAX fill out their marketing teams with dedicated social media coordinators and managers, as well as community managers. With resident experts in video games, media and entertainment, Web3, and most every other exciting topic, Lemonade can quickly find the right person or people for the job.
At this point, it’s not a question of if companies should hire community managers, it’s a question of when (it should be now). When brands are ready to take the leap, Lemonade is here to help.
Want to learn more? Check out our case study about our social media work with IMAX.