What does a community manager do all day, hour by hour?

I agree that community management job descriptions are vague. It's because community management involves an overlap of multiple duties and responsibilities.

As a community professional with experience of working with enterprises and startups; here's what I do almost on daily basis.

1. Engaging with the community

I engage with community by replying to comments, direct messages (DMs) and even on social media. I actively find new topics or pain-points to create new conversations and make sure that they align with our business goals.

All my efforts are logged-in so that I can keep track of the conversations that resonate better with our members.

2. Content creation

I create posts, creatives, graphics and even videos to encourage interaction. Now with AI-tools, video and image creation has become easier; but you still need to be very creative.

Crafting newsletters is another task I undertake monthly. It's turning out to be more challenging than I thought. But I'm enjoying it. No complaints!

3. Moderating discussions

I am on the moderating team of a large community. Our community attracts spam and trollers every day. It's our job to keep our community free of spam, trollers and build a positive environment.

Sending warning to users and sometimes banning them - are a part of my job that I do not enjoy much.

4. Analyzing community trends

As a community manager, it's my job to keep an eye on the latest trends in the community-world. As a part of my job, I gather feedback from our community members. You cannot build a thriving community if you do not listen to your users.

5. Organizing events

Keeping community active is always a challenge. I love organizing events, challenges for members and campaigns to boost engagement. We recently experimented with Reddit-style 'AMA' sessions with micro-influencers in our niche. It turned out to be a banger!

Community management is a multi-faceted role. You have to balance between building trust, encouraging engagement, supporting members and ensuring that the community keeps growing.

My advice to you is to discuss the responsibilities and set clear expectations before you accept any community management role. Be prepared to wear multiple hats. All the best!

Excellent, Paula! I'd like to point to a few articles and discussions relevant to the topic:

1. Skills for community managers
2. KPIs for community managers
3. Community moderation guidelines
4. Is community building difficult?

These discussions will give you an insight on what community managers have to deal with on daily basis. I hope it helps. Happy to answer any questions you may have.

Update: I had an opportunity to discuss the tasks and responsibilities of a community manager with a SaaS company. I made a few suggestions to them. These are based on my experience in running large-scale online communities for the past 18 years.

A community manager wears many hats. The role aways centers around one thing: building relationships - between members and between the brand and its audience.

1. Onboarding Member Journeys

Community managers spend time ensuring that the new members feel at home and welcomed in the community. They send personal messages to the new users, tag them in relevant discussions and motivate them by liking their content. We have a discussion about this topic: best ways to onboard a new community member

2. Strategy and Growth

Beyond the day-to-day engagement, a community manager has to think long-term. This would mean defining and refining community goals, set community KPI like monthly member growth rate, engagement, content creation etc.

Community is not just a support function. It drives product feedback, brand advocacy and SEO

3. Internal Alignment

An underrated part of the job is being the community's voice within the company. This means, the community manager shares the community insights with the stakeholders - founders, marketing and sales team and even the customer success teams.

4. Tools and Tech

Managing tools like moderation software, analytics dashboard or community platforms (like Jatra ;) ) is a part of a community manager's job. They often experiment and test new tools.

In short, a community manager is a connector, strategist, and caretaker.

Here's an interesting discussion that Paula has created: Can AI replace community managers?. If you are looking for insights from fellow community managers, do go through it.

Update. Coming back to this because I found my old notebook with my own schedule from 2016! The handwriting is so bad, so I'm going to share all the entries from my daily life as a community manager. Do let me know what you think.

• 9:00 am: Read and respond to new threads and replies contributed overnight. Avoid the temptation to reply. Tip: How to Boost Community Engagement: Respond. Don't Answer | Jatra Community

• 9:45 am: Track the KPIs. This used to be super hard back in the days. I'd track community health, returning members and DM campaigns I used to run.

• 10:30 am: Publish a thread or an article. I used to publish threads daily. It kept the community alive and immediately create an opportunity for new and old members to contribute something. I'd religiously tag people.

• 11:00 am: Respond to DMs and send personalized messages to new members. I mostly follow a template and added a line or two to personalize it based on user's username or location.

• 1:00 pm: Meetings with customer support, engineering, marketing or leadership. These meetings were about sharing community's feedback, feature requests and new ideas with the stakeholders. I highly recommend these meetings to every community manager.

• 3:30 pm: Planning for quarterly events and initiatives. We'd run interviews, online meetups and sometime offline gatherings for our members. I'd spend about an hour to do this.

• 5:00 pm: Last hour was flexible. Learning new things in the community world, reading blogs, watching relevant YouTube videos etc. Sometimes I'd join a sales call to understand what potential customers are looking for.

I hope this is helpful.