7 Simple Tips for Every Community Manager Out There

Every community manager knows that,  sometimes, handling several clients’ profiles on different social media platforms can be a little bit overwhelming. So, if you want to start your career as a community manager, you need proper bits of advice, right? Discover the magical world of social media with these tools, tips & tricks coming directly from my experience at Kontra agency!

#1 Organization is your friend

As a Community manager, you’ll probably have several clients’ profiles on social media to handle yourself daily. The key to success is to be organized. I’m a total all-must-be-online person, but I realized it’s better for me to write down my assignments and tasks in a notebook first and then make a plan of daily stuff I need to get done. After that, I use an online calendar to set my plan on a monthly basis and set up reminders for them. Personally, I use Social media content template from Hootsuite. It’s really helpful and makes my job a lot easier.

#2 Shortcuts, shortcuts, shortcuts!

Well, different social media platforms you get to use daily requires another piece of the successful organization. You have to make sure you have an access to all the important bookmarks in your browser quickly. I use Google Chrome and have all my default bookmarks lined by their importance. For example, in my agency, and many other agencies, Business Manager for managing Facebook pages is an essential tool for handling clients’ profiles. Tweetdeck and Sprinklr also. Not to mention Active Collab for handling tasks and discussing it with colleagues and also Slack for quick messaging. I have put them in bookmarks and named them really shortly; Business Manager is BM, Tweetdeck is TWdeck, Sprinklr is SP just to name a few. I would like to show you all my bookmarks in a screenshot, my fellow reader, but I won’t show all of them to because some of the bookmarks are related directly to Kontra’s clients. But check this out:

#3 Set up your goals

In a magical world of social media, it’s easy to get lost and forget your goals. So, my advice to you is to make goals for each client you work for. Do you want to get more followers on a certain Facebook page? Ok, how much exactly? How are you going to achieve that? Who is your target audience? What content is going to make people like your page? See, a lot of questions pop out in a second. So, be smart and set up your goals. It’s totally up to you which ones and in what time those have to be done, but, in my opinion, you need to have them. That way, you’ll be really proud when you meet the goals in a specified period, or you’ll have a personal insight on how much goals you can meet in a certain period of time. Don’t worry if you can’t meet your goals at first, it’s all about getting to know yourself and your work habits.

#4 Now the fun part

As a community manager, you have to make daily content in form of pictures, videos, gifs, etc. What if I tell you that we have an entire list of best free photo & video sites here at Kontra? You can check it out here! As you probably know, each and every social media platform has its own requirements for photo dimensions so they look good & sharp once posted. Personally, I follow the tips from this awesome blog post by Buffer Social, where you’ll find the best dimensions and explanations for every social media platform. This blog post is like a secret weapon of mine, as everything in it is regularly updated and accurate.

Now that you are introduced to best free photo sites and know the right dimensions for photos, it’s time for the fun part – manipulating them! If you have Adobe Photoshop skills, you’re good to go. But, if you’re a beginner as a community manager, you’ll need easy tools you’ll learn to use in a heartbeat. I have a special bond with Gimp, free photo manipulating software, as I learned to use it pretty quick and gives me great results. It’s the best alternative for Photoshop out there, so give it a go. Another software dear to my heart is Photoscape, the simplest of them all, but just for really basic editing. For even faster results, try using Canva, free online photo editing tool that has nice features & all the right dimensions for pretty much every social media platform. As for online tools, try Pixlr as well. It’s an online editing tool that works surprisingly well, has great features and makes your life easier.

#5 Save your work

As a community manager, you’ll have a bunch of documents/photos/videos, etc. to save and use whenever needed. My advice to you is to keep everything online, so you can access your important files from anywhere. Here at Kontra we use One Drive to keep our files in one place, but Google Drive is another great solution, so is popular Dropbox, depending on how much files you need to save. The great thing about these tools is that you can work on documents online and have your colleagues check them out or work on them with you in real time.

#6 Be there!

It’s really important to have a good communication with fans/followers, no matter the social platform your clients have. Some would say it’s crucial to answer on messages, comments, etc. and be active on pages in real time. A perfectly natural thing is that you can’t wait by the laptop all day for people to message and/or comment on client’s Facebook page, for example. There comes an app called Facebook Pages Manager which will make your life easier and ready to answer on all of the comments, messages, etc. on the go. Personally, I use tablet which is always by my side to keep a good communication with fans/followers. Also, I have created bookmarks or downloaded apps on tablet from #2 part of this post, so I can always be on track with social media platforms my clients have and to communicate with my colleagues on the go.

#7 Measure everything

As I mentioned before, you have to have certain goals in some period of time to know if you’re successful. In order to see if you’re successfully managing your clients’ social media platforms well, you need some insights and analytics. For example, Facebook Insights gives you a lot of information on your page. Once opened, Facebook Insights will give you lots of graphs how your client’s page is performing. Also, you can download insights in .xlc format to open in Excel and calculate, for example, an average daily total reach of your posts in one month period. Helpful, right? Instagram also provides some analytics in the app itself, but pretty basic ones. As for other social media platforms, you’ll need third party apps to check out their analytics. For example, Keyhole, Hootsuite, and Buffer are great tools, but using them depends on your agency and/or type of clients it has. I shouldn’t forget Google Analytics for more advanced community managers out there, but these one are quite enough if you’re a beginner.

And that’s it! These simple tips give you a closer look at community management on social media so you can prepare yourself for all the challenges you’ll be facing once started your career in community management. Good luck!