An amazing community manager is usually the easiest way for new and small businesses to make the biggest impact possible with their marketing online.

As small businesses move forward in 2013 it should be clear that every business needs some form of community management and strategy in place in order to succeed with internet marketing.

On the smaller end of the spectrum, a community manager may simply be an in-house employee donating a few hours a week to basic Twitter “upkeep”. Large businesses with active content on multiple networks such as Instagram, Vine, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube and other platforms often outsource the entire function to specialists. Regardless of where your business may fall on this spectrum, your success will definitely depend on an effective content marketing strategy through these 10 requirements.

Why is community management essential? It drives your placement in search engines (SEO) and results in increased traffic, more leads, and more customers.

Here are our 10 commandments for being a great community manager & strategist:

1. Write extremely well: Think community management can be left to a green intern? Think again. Excellent college-level writing skills are essential for broadcasting your brand in marketplaces. Altimeter recently concluded that writing ability was the number one requested skill for a community manager. The best writing fascinates, welcomes, and envelops readers and customers.
2. Pay attention to the daily details: Strategy building requires that a community manager be in constant communication with all departments of an organization, and must be proactive in gathering valuable feedback from stakeholders. A real-time awareness in all directions is at the core of community management.
3. Keep your finger on the pulse of everything related to your industry: These days, content can come from anywhere: blogs, news, and even moment to moment conversation. As a community manager meant to essentially control each of the social aspects of your brand, it’s important that you are constantly in touch with other individuals and tastemakers online. As a result, your organization will not only be extremely cutting edge, but a major part of the conversation online as well.
4. Build great analytics tracking and reporting: Quantitative documentation is what drives credibility in the online world. The community manager’s role within the company is partly that of educator, and a structured analysis of content marketing outcomes will support good budget decision-making with stakeholders as well.
5. 

   A great community manager keeps their finger on the pulse of every social aspect of a brand.

   Think visually: As you can imagine, a piece of content can definitely entail much more than some typed words. Design carries a huge amount of information about your company, so working with professional creatives to develop images, video, and other media content that’s expressive of your company’s brand is essential.

6. Innovate constantly: The field of community management is evolving rapidly, and responding quickly to new platforms or features and developing new approaches to content placement on established ones, such as the case of Facebook and image-based posts, is essential. By actively joining the conversation surrounding the tasks that make up community management–an easy thing to do for a community manager–and even broadcasting your own innovative ideas into the community, you’ll quickly elevate both your brand and your own professional clout as well.
7. Expect to take on many roles: As widely acclaimed community manager Jeremiah Owyang points out, we really are in the “wild west of social” with no rules for internet marketing. In this pioneer environment, it’s essential that you remain super-adaptable as a community manager, taking on roles from detective to therapist to cheerleader to damage control to analyst, all within a single day. While some may liken modern community management to PR, we can definitely attest to the fact that a community manager maintains much more varied and adapted roles.
8. Be goal oriented: The social media world can be noisy, so guarding against distractions is essential. Make a list of goals for a set period of time, and stick to them. Divide and maintain the social channels that you’re “listening in on,” and try to avoid the latest cat meme or video! Goals can include features such as reducing support costs, increasing customer acquisition and retention, and driving product innovation.
9. Manage your time as well as your community! Social Fresh surveyed community managers in its 2013 “Community Manager Report” and found that the majority of managers put in more than 50 hours per week! The good news is that this time is often spread into “free time” when the greatest new idea may pop into your head, or you think of a witty tweet that just has to be written down before you fall asleep. Community management is fun, fulfilling work, so think work/life harmony, not “balance” or “exclusion.” Here’s the hourly breakdown from Social Fresh:
   • 6% were at less than 10hrs
   • 17% spent 11-20hrs  14% spent 21-30hrs
   • 21% spent 41-50hrs
   • 26% spent more than 50hrs
   • 2% didn’t know
10. Love the toolset. Be the toolset. Streamline your Twitter marketing with scaled solutions such as Buffer, Tweetdeck, Topsy and Little Bird, and use fascinating analytics systems like PostAcumen and Curalate to compose and present your data depending on your budget.

And as if you needed any more convincing that the role of a community manager and strategist is an increasingly important one, salaries for this type of postion are continuing to rise! Social Fresh reports, “The first year we surveyed we got back a salary range of $30k to plenty of folks making 6 figures. That range continues to hold true, even internationally. But the average salary has gone up from $49k to $51k to a larger jump this year.”

What kind of community management work do you think your business could use to increase revenue and traffic? Need some assistance nailing these details down? Give us a shout!