Today did you get up wanting to leave that mediocre job that does not contribute anything to your life? Do you need a job that fills you with satisfaction, requires the least effort and gives you the opportunity to be your own boss? Do you want to belong to the JetSet 2.0, which with very little effort achieve dream salaries? And do you consider that the easiest way is to become a Community Manager? Total, you manage Facebook and Twitter daily and nobody pays you for it. Time to get a slice.
In reality the job of the Community Manager is anything but glamorous and even less is an easy task. On their shoulders is the weight of a brand's image on the internet and its good offices depends on whether its followers feel comfortable with its products or services.
Below we explain part of the interesting but hard work of those who, like us at Sigue Marcas, are dedicated to being Community Managers.
The Community Manager has countless tasks and his work doesn't end when the rest do it nor does he have a fixed schedule. It has to be flexible and resistant, since the Internet really does not have schedules either.
Once you arrive at the office, you must know how to respond to all the questions that users make in any Internet medium, being the answer on numerous occasions, contacting the customer service department. Let's take an example: the Community Manager or someone on your team discovers a comment from a user that damages the image of the brand, this user has had a problem with the company and their first action is to post it in a forum. This is devastating for the company, since it could cause mistrust in other users. The Community Manager should take several actions from our point of view:
- Identified as a member of the company 2.0 team, indicate to the user by posting a message on the same forum with which department of the company to contact to solve the problem. If, on the other hand, he could write an email to the user, he would have to indicate the solution and call him to post it in the same forum. If you don't want to, you don't have to insist. You could talk to the forum administrator so that in the title of the forum post you insert the word Solved in brackets if it has finally been solved.
- Write down in a document what type of problem the user had and classify it since perhaps more users go through the same problem.
- In the event that the problem is recurring, reply in the forum with a link to another forum in which the problem was solved or to a corporate page of the company that also solves the problem.
- Weekly make a compilation of cases to present them to the appropriate department to look for a global solution if it really is an internal problem.
- See, if it exists, the news channel on the website and update it.
On the other hand, the Community Manager will have to create alarms that indicate when someone talks about your brand through an article, comment, message on the forum, etc. There are a variety of tools that cover this function well. At the beginning of your day, you will review the alerts and see what actions you should take. Likewise, with searches on Twitter and Short URL readers that link to the brand's website, we can know who is talking and what they are saying about it. Likewise, a search in Del.Icio.Us about the company, for example, will give us a clear image of user preferences. Also, we can visit certain tags in WordPress, specifically one that is the name of our brand, of course.
The Community Manager will monitor all the threads in forums in which your company has already been discussed to see what people are saying, if there were any negative or positive comments they could respond, always identified as a member of the 2.0 team behind the brand and always saying the truth. It is not necessary to answer everything since that causes rejection in the user. You must always act in the right measure, taking into account that the user is the king of the Network.
Once the “surveillance” work is finished, the Community Manager should manage the Twitter account, a great job that requires time and dedication. It is recommended to always respond to all those who have replied or sent a DM; if it was not possible due to the large number of messages, one could be made general for everyone. Twitter has to be used in an intelligent way, not much by tweeting more goals are achieved, moreover, if you tweet a lot, some will stop following the company account because it is considered somewhat intrusive. Similarly, the Twitter account could be used to give news about the company, both serious and somewhat more banal. The objective of Twitter is both to inform and to involve the user in the daily life of the company.There is always the question of who should the company follow? There are many versions and opinions, personally, we believe that the ideal would be to follow all those users who can contribute information about the sector in which the company operates, it does not matter if we follow more people than they follow us, but Let's take one thing into account, if you follow someone read their tweets, if you don't follow them more, this is not politics, it is a conversation.
Another of the strengths of a Community Manager is managing the brand's presence on Facebook, if applicable. For example, a company that dedicates itself to paving roads does not paint much on Facebook. Facebook has millions of users and is a very good place to expose our brand, being able to be present through a page, group and events.
As multimedia output of the company, channels on Flickr and YouTube could be created. We do not recommend creating these channels if there is not enough material to provide it with quality content or a regular creation, since if we create two phantom channels (without content) the image of the company would fall apart.
If the company requires it, it would be ideal to create a company page on Linkedin and / or a Tumblr. The idea is to generate traffic to the company's website.
On the other hand, it seems clear that the creation of a blog that brings together all the acts of the Community Manager and serves as an operations center is necessary. The articles could cover both the company and the sector in which it is located, preferably. On the blog there must be links to all 2.0 elements of the company: Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and the rest.In general, blogs are usually indexed by Google optimally, so it would be smart to also create posts with the "problems" that users have had with the company to solve them, for example: a user has had a problem with the company payments on the Internet, before which he writes an article in a blog or forum saying "Payment Problems in the Company XXX". The Community Manager could write an article such as "Payment Problems in Company XXX, how to fix it" and Google search for Problem + Payment + Company XXX will make our article on how to fix it appear earlier. Blog comments can be left open we recommend. The essence of the blog is that the user, by means of comments, completes the content of the article, which will make it richer.
Additionally, the Community Manager is in contact with the users, dialogues with them because they provide him with invaluable feedback that few market studies could achieve. Therefore Community Manager is the one who really knows the latest about the company, the latest about the sector and it is he who must communicate it to the appropriate person within the company and propose lines of action.The Community Manager must have a proactive role in the company, listening and conversing, seeing how certain campaigns evolve, in short, a large list of information that the company is eagerly awaiting. In addition, all the activity described above could lead to the creation of events, talks, interviews and appearances on TV, radio or other media, since the Community Manager carries the image of the company on the Internet. Let's return to the initial idea that for all this there is no schedule and it can certainly be exhausting.
This is all just a brief summary of the Community Manager's task. Easy isn't it? If you think so, leave us your comments, we want to know your opinion.
