Community Manager What is it, what is it for and how can I train in this digital profession?

The social networks have definitely become an indispensable element for the development of any marketing strategy for the companies. In fact, nowadays we usually say that If a company does not have a profile on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or any other social network, it simply does not exist..

Thanks to this scenario a new professional profile was born; the community manager or community manager. This is extremely important in the organization chart of any corporation, since it will be the one in charge, among other things, of managing the social profiles of the company in question.

Whether you are interested hire a good CM or want to become one Due to the great demand for these professionals that exists today, In this guide we will teach you everything you need to know about them. In this way you will be clear about what type of person is qualified to assume this position in your company, or simply you will be able to know the knowledge and skills that you must know to become one.

What is a Community Manager and what are these professionals in the digital sector for?

A community manager is a person who is in charge of managing the social profiles of a company or public figure. In theory it is just this, but the background of what this means is much broader than you think, since you must have a series of specific skills to be able to perform this function in the best way. That is, a plumber is responsible for repairing the pipes in your house.

This may sound simple but in order to do your job You must know well the tools you are going to use to solve each situation, know what are the different types of pipes and measures that exist and then recommend what is indicated to repair a leak. This is how the CM work also works. You must be more prepared than people think to be able to do your job efficiently, and that is precisely what we are going to teach you in the sections of this article in question.

Functions of the CM What are the tasks that you must perform daily?

Now you know what is a cmbut What exactly are its functions? Well, the answer is much more complex than simply sharing content.

The most important tasks that it must perform are the following:

• Know the strategies of the company: obviously you cannot be efficient in a job if you do not know in depth the methodology of action that our company uses, that is why before even starting, it is important that we know each and every one of the marketing strategies that our company has in mind. brand.
• Keep account active: this is the basics, what we have been telling you so far; You must share content in the form of posts or stories/states so that the account remains active and its followers consume something from it on a recurring basis.
• Interact with the audience: Once the posts are made, it is possible to receive several comments from the followers. It is at this moment that the CM You should try to respond to as many comments as possible efficiently, thus creating a connection between the brand and the consumer since they feel that they are really being paid attention to.
• Interpret to the audience: this is where the real work that differentiates a CM competent from an incompetent one. Once we have interacted with our audience, it is important to learn to interpret it in order to know their needs in a more detailed way. This information is vital and will be useful to other professionals such as the Social Media or the marketing expert to develop much more efficient strategies.
• Identify influencers: a secondary task of the CM is to learn to identify the most influential profiles of your company’s niche. This will allow collaborations to be established with them that translate into a growth in its relevance in their sector, allowing in turn the scope to increase.
• Identify the competition: It is important that you can navigate through the different profiles to identify those that represent greater competition for the company in question, so that these can later be studied to create strategies that allow you to overcome them in the short or long term.
• Create weekly/monthly reports: all the information that a CM obtained from its audience and its competition must be reflected in a report that will later be delivered to the other members of the company’s marketing department, who will be in charge of interpreting it to develop new strategies in the future.
• Propose ideas: Finally, it is important that you are 100% involved in the growth of your company, so you must devise your own strategies and communicate them to your “superior” so that you actively participate in the development of future actions that will be executed in the profiles.

This may sound like a bit of an exaggeration, but the reality is that to be a competent (and well-paid) community manager, you must be able to do all of this, so that you are a valuable element for your company’s organization chart and become someone indispensable to your bosses.

CM skills What are the skills you should have?

you already know everything must be able to do a CMbut what are the skills you must have to perform all these tasks efficiently?

Then you will know all the skills you must have to be a true expert in your work:

• basic marketing: although it is not necessary that you be an expert in the whole rule, you must handle certain marketing concepts such as the target audience, market niche, engagement and, above all, sales funnel.
• Drafting: a CM You must be able to correctly write the descriptions of each and every one of the publications that you share on social networks. A spelling or semantic error can be considered blundering at a professional level.
• Management of online tools: you must be quite skilled handling the different online tools you need to schedule publications, configure multiple posts on different social networks, photo editing and retouching, as well as the platforms of analytics to know how your audience interacts with each publication.
• Analysis and interpretation: You need to be very good at interpreting and analyzing the signals your target audience is giving you as you interact with them, so that when you make the relevant report for the social media or marketer, you do it as accurately as possible.
• Organization: Finally, it is necessary that you be a person with a high organizational capacity, so that you can perfectly comply with the content planning that the brand in question is applying.

How to learn to be a Community Manager? 5 Online courses to train you for FREE

At this point you already know what it is, what it is for and what are the most important skills that a community manager should have.. If you don’t have them, you may be wondering where you can get them. From the outset we tell you that you will need perseverance and dedication to be able to master this profession perfectly.

So that you can do the following online courses that will equip you with the necessary knowledge to succeed:

Google Activate Basic Marketing Course

Google Activate is possibly the best free digital marketing academy you can get on the internet. Although his course is not 100% community manager, it will give you the basic knowledge of online marketing that you need to know to function in this medium with the greatest possible ease.

Also, being from such a well-known company, you can be sure that any employer who notices this certificate on your resume will be seduced by your profile. To do it, you just have to have an account. Google and enter Google Activate to start your online course.

Social Media for IEBS Beginners

The IEBS business school has an excellent social media course in which they will teach you the most important concepts that you must master to understand and create your own marketing strategies on social networks. Undoubtedly an ideal course for those who seek to start in this world of management of RRSS.

Coursera Social Media Strategy

Coursera is by far one of the best elearning platforms in the world. In it you can find hundreds of high-level courses on digital marketing, this being one of the best. In it you will learn the most essential to understand and carry out your own sales strategies on social networksso that in addition to being a community manager you have social media strategist skills.

Facebook Blueprint

Facebook puts at your disposal the most complete course you can find to understand how everything works on its platform. As this is the largest social network in the world, it is inevitable that you carry out its learning program so that you know what are the best practices to grow any profile or fan page like foam.

Online marketing strategy and community manager of Miríadax

This is an all-in-one program where you will learn about digital marketing and strategies in social media, so that you can be a CM as complete as possible, that can even perform much more complex tasks than just posting content and responding to followers.

5 Tips to make your personal brand as a Community Manager and find a job

At this point you should already have all the necessary skills to be considered a fairly complete CM., which will allow you to be one of the main options for companies looking for a professional with these skills. However, it is useless to be trained if you cannot corroborate it with something more convincing than a certificate, so you should also start working on your personal brand.

To do this, you must follow the advice that we share below:

Take care of your social networks

A social media professional cannot afford to neglect their own profiles. These will be your main cover letter, so you need to start working on them and take care of them, so that when someone sees themnotice immediately that you really are a true professional who knows exactly what he is doing.

Ideally, you should share a lot of content related to your profession, with tips to increase followers or to better interact with your audience. Publications in which you share your knowledge and others notice that you master the subject perfectly.

Create your portfolio

Surely it bothers you a lot when you see a job offer that expressly asks that the applicant have experience. Well, this refers to having experience managing profiles and what you must do to jump this barrier is to create your own portfolio.

It never hurts to create a fan page on Facebook sharing memes or one on Instagram about health and lifestyle, or miscellaneous news. With a couple of accounts of this style that you manage to position with a few hundred followers with good engagement, you can consider yourself a CM with experience to spare.

Join online communities

Make yourself feel among your colleagues. On LinkedIn and Facebook you can find hundreds of groups on social media and digital marketing that are full of community managers and social media specialists.. Being in these groups will allow you to keep abreast of the latest trends and debate with other professionals to demonstrate your points of view and show that you are a capable person.

learn copywriting

We already told you that one of the basic skills of a CM is knowing how to write, but if in addition to knowing how to do it you know the exact words to persuade your audiencethen you become a very important element for any company.

Learn Graphic Design

Another skill that will give you an extra is knowing about graphic design. We are not talking about being a full-fledged artist like true designers are, but we are talking about learning to master bitmap and vectorization programs like Photoshop either illustrator, so you can easily create nice layouts for the posts of the company you work for.

10 essential tools that every Community Manager should know

now we want that know what are the main tools you should know and in most cases to master perfectly, in such a way that they facilitate your work considerably.

Let’s see below:

Trends.Google.es

This is a tool that allows you to be aware of the main trends. If you don’t know yet, trends are topics that most people are talking about on the internet. and social networks. If you know the trends and participate in them, your profiles will gain greater visibility and will increase their audience almost automatically.

buffer.com

This is one of the most powerful tools when it comes to managing multiple accounts. With it you will be able to program publications in different profiles regardless of whether they are from different social networksin addition to being able to program them to leave the tasks of several days done and focus on other tasks to grow your brand.

trello.com

An application that stands out for its organizational value. With it you can coordinate tasks with other departments of the sales funnel, as well as create personalized calendars and create alerts so you don’t forget anything. Although it is not directly related to networks, it will help you a lot as a professional to do your homework and not skip any steps.

hootsuite.com

The most basic for a CM. It is impossible not to have it among your tools since it will allow you to program publications on all the social networks that are in your caresuch as responding to direct messages in multiple accounts from the same interface, which makes it an element of the highest value for a manager.

Slack.com

Other Organizational Tool that will allow you to keep in touch with all your colleagues, so that it is much easier to coordinate all kinds of joint actions. If you are in a large company, it is more than likely that your bosses will ask you to install it to make things easier.

brand24.com

This application has a fairly simple operation but is extremely useful for a CM. What it does is monitor everything that is published about our brand, the competition and the sector in generalso that we can keep a complete record of how our actions influence the audience.

BuzzBundle.com

A free website similar to the previous one. It allows you to find conversations in which your brand is mentionedas well as establishing keywords to search for comments on the sector of this, which gives you important elements to analyze the impact of your strategy and even those of your immediate competitors.

CrimsonHexagon.com

A website similar to the previous one but much more powerful since it offers you more data on the way in which they are talking about your brand or the sector. Also, allows you to follow profiles of the competition and your own company in all existing social networks.

canva.com

This is an image design and editing platform, where you can find hundreds of templates with the exact measurements to post on all existing social networks. It will save you a lot of work and the level of the compositions is quite high, so everything you do will look like it was done by a true professional. If in addition to that you have knowledge of graphic design, you can retouch them in another bitmap program such as Photoshop to create your own templates.

Picktochart.com

A practically identical tool to the previous one, so it can be considered an alternative to it. In it you will find hundreds of downloadable and editable templates with the exact measurements to create flyers, posts, states and other elements in social networks.

5 Best job portals to find a job as a CM or hire one

You already have the knowledge, the tools and, more importantly, a clear concept of what what is being a community manager. Now is the time for you to look for your first job with a company that requires the services of a professional as qualified as you to manage their profiles.

To do this, you will have to start searching on the following platforms:

facebook.com

Facebook allows us create groups on a specific topic in which entire communities with these interests meet. Our first choice should be those groups about marketing Y social mediawhere they are owners of advertising agencies or even entrepreneurs who want to learn about the subject, so that these are our main potential employers.

freelancer.com

This is one of the most important platforms in the freelancer world. In it we can find job offers from various sectors, among which social media stands out, so you may have plenty of job opportunities as a CM. Ideally, you should take advantage of its free trial for one month as a VIP user so that you can find a stable job as a social media manager.

Twago.com

Twago is one of the best platforms to find remote work. In addition to having a huge number of users, the average income in it is quite large since, being paid, it is in most cases large companies that want to hire the best trained professionals in their sector.

upwork.com

To use this platform, it is convenient that you learn to speak English since most employers are American, but this has its advantage since they usually pay salaries above the 800 euros by a really trained CM with all the skills that we have mentioned in this post.

Workana.com

This is the most important freelance work platform in LATAMso in it you can find hundreds of companies that They want to hire a Spanish-speaking community manager to manage your profiles. However, it is one of the most competitive, so at first you may have to sacrifice your economic expectations to find your first customers.

How much money can I earn working as a Community Manager?

Between the professional profiles related to digital marketing, CM is one of those less charge, but this does not mean that it is poorly paid. However, this essentially depends on the country in which we develop our profession, being Spain Y USA the two nations where it is most worthwhile to carry out these tasks.

Here is a list by country:

• Spain: 25,000Eur-30,000 a year.
• USA: 30,000Eur-35,000Eur per year.
• Mexico: 15,000Eur-18,000Eur per year.
• Rest from LATAM: 10,000Eur-15,000Eur per year.

It should be noted that these data are taking into account that you are a 100% professional CM, and not a simple manager who obeys orders from your boss and only posts content, since if this is the case you could even charge below 500 Eur per month. You will understand then that preparation is the real difference to live from this profession and have it as an extra income.

What to keep in mind when hiring a good CM to manage your social networks?

If you are on the other side of the table and instead of being CM Are you interested in hiring one? then keep in mind the following tips so that you find the best professional to manage your company’s social networks and make them grow like foam.

Let’s see:

• Make sure the person you hire has a professional-level social media profilein which you can see that he applies his knowledge to his own personal brand.
• Have demonstrable experience It is another important aspect, especially if you know how to work as a team, since at some point when your business grows, you will have to work together with other members of it.
• Make sure it is a trained person who has all the skills we have discussed in this post, so that it is someone who adds real value to the human resources of your business.
• Finally, you must be open to paying him what he deserves. Many employers try to find a scholar and pay him crumbs, which is a mistaken vision since if you can be sure of something, it is that the person who is able to offer you a high level of work, will know exactly how much his work is worth. and will not give it away.

CM vs Social Media Manager. How are these professionals different?

Many people tend to confuse these professional profiles, but there is a big difference between both; the social media manager is a strategista person who is in charge of devising the roadmap that must be followed in social networks to grow in them, while the CM is an executorhaving to follow the strategy to the letter planned by the SMM.

Also, there is a big difference in skills too, since the social media manager must have deeper knowledge in relation to digital marketing.