The 5-Hour Community Manager

If you only have 1 hour a day to spend managing a community, how should you spend it?

This is not an ideal situation. It reduces your community’s speed of development. It increases the risk of failure (not reaching critical mass).  Yet, it’s the reality for many organizations that (lets face it) don’t truly support their community.

What’s the best way to use that hour each day? It depends where your community is in the lifecycle.

If you’re just getting started, spend 10 minutes measuring what worked yesterday, 30 minutes inviting new members, 10 minutes initiating new discussions and the final 10 minutes responding to discussions/reaching out to existing members.

This represents the most direct approach to boosting activity in the community in the early stages.

However, if your community is in the mature stages (i.e. surpassed critical mass and then some), it makes more sense to pick one process you’re going to optimize each week and work on that. Over time, you optimize everything (then you can start again!) 

For example, increasing the newcomer to regular conversion ratio, or recruiting people to volunteer/create content for the community. You want to undertake actions that you perform once but keep paying dividends for the community. 

Comments

[Ella Pearson]

It's a matter of time management to deal with an online community. Maintaining an online community involves a lot of effort. It is not merely administering a site. It involves becoming a mediator and customer support for any inquiries. Determination and consistency is essential for an online community manager.