1. What Is A Community?
Let’s begin with a question which sounds deceptively easy to answer.
Traditionally, a community is the people living in your neighbourhood or an activity group you met up with. And these are still fantastic communities today.
However, for most people who do community management at a professional level, community is about something slightly more abstract. So we need a slightly broader definition. The definition we’re going to use is:
This is a broad definition that, as we’re about to find out, lets us incorporate a lot of different types of community work.
Broadly speaking, every community has four distinct layers. They have a common interest, a means of engagement, some form of relationship between members, and a purpose.
You can see an illustration of this in the four layers of community model below
The top layer is the ‘common interest’ layer.
Every community shares some kind of common interest (sometimes they only share a common interest). For example, when a journalist refers to ‘the scientific community’, they’re not usually referring to any specific group which meets in any particular location for a unique purpose.
They’re simply referring to people who identify themselves as scientists. That’s their common interest.
Many organizations use a similar definition when they refer to their customer base as a community (or talk about their employees and customers as a community).
These interests fall into four broad types of communities
Every community must have some interest that connects them. The stronger the interest, the stronger the community.
What is the common interest which connects yours?
Every community needs a means of engagement.
How else would you find out about what’s going on in the community?
These means of engagement are usually many-to-many tools like social media or a dedicated forum platform where everyone can speak to everyone.
Sometimes however they’re also one-to-one (like meeting a person in your community) or one-to-many such as a following of a major influencer or media publication.
How will your members engage with one another?
The relationships members form with each other vary from one community to the next.
Some believe a community only becomes a community when people form strong relationships with one another. This is what separates a community from an audience, crowd, or even a mob.
We’re taking a more flexible definition in this guide. The community must facilitate some kind of relationship between members. That might be friends, peers, colleagues, acquaintances, or even just members who occasionally visit to get useful information.
If your community is successful, what kind of relationships will members have with one another?
The final element is purpose. This is the core value of the community is to members. It doesn’t mean everyone needs to be united in a singular, shared, objective. But it does need to be clear what value members get from the community.
The four major purposes of a community here are
The purpose of the community should match the community type.
What is the purpose of your community?
2. What Is Community Management?
Now we’ve got the pesky definition out the way, we can answer a simpler question; what is community management?
On a day-to-day level, it typically involves initiating and responding to discussions, welcoming newcomers and nurturing volunteers, creating and curating content, and ensuring members have a safe environment in which to participate.
An amateur might manage a community for a hobby or even run a successful group on WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook, or any other channel. You might have a successful group you run today.
A professional community manager is someone who is paid by an organization to manage a community (or several communities) for a living.
The biggest difference between an amateur and a professional is a professional has to work within the constraints of the organization they work for.
As an amateur, you can usually do almost anything you like without having to seek permission. A professional has to represent the brand to members and the members to the brand.
Professionals usually have to ensure the brand benefits from having a community (and they’re aware of the benefits they do receive). This is a far more difficult juggling act than simply managing a community for a hobby.
3. What Do Professional Community Managers Earn?
Community management salaries range from around $60k to $250k depending upon factors like experience, job role, location, industry, organization, and size of the community.
Many of these factors are related (i.e. the highest salaries are typically for senior roles at major tech companies based in the Bay Area of the USA).
Salary | Type of role |
---|---|
Below $40k | Hourly moderator-level work. Moderator |
$40k to $75k | Entry-level role with emphasis upon hands-on engagement with members. Community manager |
$75k to $120k | Senior community manager or a specialist in a particular niche. Community lead, community manager |
$120k to $180k | Community professionals who manage a team. Head of community, Community Strategist |
$180k to $250k | Community professionals working in senior roles within an organization. VP of Community, Chief Community Officer |
One of the most important things to remember is the community manager represents the organization to the community and the community to the organization.
They play a vital role in facilitating information exchange and ensuring both understand each other. It’s not always an easy thing to do.
Are you earning what you should be?
4. What’s The Difference Between Community Management and Social Media Management?
Is community management the same as social media management?
Not exactly, but there are a few similarities.
Both use tools that enable engagement with and between members of the audience.
Social Media Management | Community Management | |
---|---|---|
Objective | Helps members with problems Improve member attitudes towards the brand. | Helps members to help each other. Improves members' sense of community with one another. |
Key Tasks | Creates and shares persuading marketing material. Responds to member questions. | Initiates discussions, creates content, and hosts events. Encourages members to respond to questions. |
Direction of interactions | One to many. | Many to many. |
Role | Broadcaster | Host |
Importance | Social media manager is the key person. | The top members are the key people. |
Group dynamics | Builds an audience | Hosts a community |
While there are clearly differences, it’s worth noting the approaches aren’t mutually exclusive.
As you will learn as you progress through your career, there are plenty of overlaps.
Often the same people are engaging on both platforms. Sometimes a community manager might facilitate engagement across social media channels. Other times a community might promote activities happening on social media.
We don’t need to have a rigid separation of the two roles. Just an understanding that they typically support different organizational goals and require their own unique approach.
5. Types of Community Management
This isn’t intended as a comprehensive list and the types of community management aren’t mutually exclusive. Some community managers undertake all roles simultaneously. Others have a narrow remit focused upon moderation. But it does highlight the key types of community management today.
What model of a community are you building?
6. What Does A Community Manager Do?
A community manager harnesses powerful psychology to bring communities to life and sustain them. Community managers turn strangers into allies and allies into fans. Every day, community managers forge new connections between members and build their community.
While the tasks a community manager performs can vary greatly from one role to the next, there are five common categories of tasks that are undertaken in the majority of communities.
These are
Frequency of Tasks
There isn’t a fixed rule about how anyone should manage a community.
However, we can share an example of the kind of tasks a community manager will undertake.
Some tasks are designed to be performed once a day, some once a week, some once a month, and a few once a year.
Once a day | Once a week | Once a month | Once a year |
---|---|---|---|
Initiate and respond to discussions. | Create content for and about the community. | Collect measurements and metrics. | Review and update the community strategy. |
Outreach, engage, and collaborate with top members. | Help organize and facilitate member events. | Highlight the best of community content each month. | Evaluate platform needs and remove outdated or unnecessary areas of the community. |
Remove bad content. | Read the latest topic-related content. | Organize monthly gatherings for guides to engage with one another. | Ensure stakeholder alignment on goals and targets for the year. |
Promote and feature good content. | Tweak titles for SEO optimizations | Review internal search queries and update for answers. | |
Welcome newcomers to the community. | Review a sample of support-created posts and adjust training material. | ||
Publishing monthly community insights reports and meeting with key product managers to gather feedback. |
One of the most important things to remember is the community manager represents the organization to the community and the community to the organization.
They play a vital role in facilitating information exchange and ensuring both understand each other. It’s not always an easy thing to do.
What is the common interest which connects yours?
7. Do You Need A Full-Time Community Manager?
Yes, if you’re building a community you probably do need a full-time community manager.
This doesn’t mean every community is managed by a full-time community professional. There are plenty of examples of thriving communities managed by part-time community managers.
But it does mean you significantly increase your odds of success if you have a full-time community manager at the helm.
Asking what percentage of time is required to make a community succeed is like asking how much time an artist should spend practicing. Generally speaking, the more the better. There isn’t a magic number of hours per week that suddenly flips a community from unsuccessful to successful.
Commitment matters as much as time
This isn’t as much about time as it is about commitment. Someone trying to juggle the community role around other tasks is trying to be efficient.
They tend to give shorter, quicker, responses to questions. They don’t check back in previous discussions to see if the problem was resolved. They don’t reach out and build relationships with and between top members. They don’t put in the extra mile of effort that makes the community succeed.
The rapid decline in commitment makes calculating the minimum amount of time required problematic. Someone who splits community with another job role is probably only 25% as good as a full-time staffer.
It’s not always easy to have a discussion about increasing headcount to support a community. However, if the community is truly going to thrive, that’s the discussion you need to have.
8. What Are The Different Kinds of Community Roles?
The name given to the person with responsibility for the community has evolved significantly over the past twenty years.
In many of the earliest communities, it was common for the ‘webmaster’ to be responsible for the entire website – including the community. Later, as ‘community’ began to be seen as its own specialism, the title of ‘community manager’ was created for the person responsible for the community. This remains true today.
However, many in the community industry, feel ‘community manager’ is an increasingly outdated term which covers far too broad to cover the unique specialisms and types of jobs we take on. Today the term community manager can be used to cover anyone from the ‘VP of community’ down to the humble moderator.
More specialized terms are becoming popular which relate more closely to the individual tasks the community practitioners will take on.
Brian Oblinger, SVP Products at Commsor, shows that roles are increasingly specialized to particular tasks within broader teams.
9. Why Do Organizations Build Online Communities?
There are plenty of great reasons why your organization might create a community.
These tend to fall under two buckets:
We’ll tackle each of these.
A community can drive a remarkable ROI for organizations (reduce costs and drive greater revenue).
You can see the common benefits shown below:
Value | How Is This Value Achieved? |
---|---|
Reducing customer support costs (scaled support) | Customer support staff don’t need to answer questions if other customers are doing it for free. Every answer can also be found via search. A single good response might be seen by thousands of people. Every person who finds a solution in the community doesn’t need to call customer support. |
Learning what customers want/need | A community keeps you close to the pulse of what members want and need. Not only can members suggest ideas, but you can also track data to see which topics are most popular, and what members are struggling with. This saves a lot of time compared with running a focus group. A community is also a great place to test your products and marketing campaigns before launching them to the public. |
Increasing customer loyalty and satisfaction (satisfaction, NPS, retention) | As members learn more about the products and get to know their fellow customers, they’re less likely to move to a competitor and more likely to keep buying from you. They’re also likely to become more satisfied with their purchase. A community can significantly increase Net Promoter Score (NPS), customer satisfaction (CSAT), and the lifetime value of a customer (LTV). |
Attracting new customers | Community members might advocate for your brand, share your content, publish reviews and provide case studies. You might also identify members as sales leads through behaviors in the community. Community content can also be integrated into the sales path which increases conversions. You might also benefit from visitors who found you via search engines signing up to be a member. |
Membership fees and Advertising | Some organizations charge a membership fee to be a member. Others sell advertising. A handful let third parties run campaigns or host focus groups to gather research. All of these directly generate revenue. |
Reduced recruitment costs | You can post adverts and recruit members from the community instead of traditional channels. This is less common than other benefits but still happens. |
Saving staff time and improving results | An internal community can help staff both share and properly document content. This stops them from duplicating work and lets them build and improve upon the knowledge within the organization. It also helps members collaborate with one another and saves a lot of time. |
Stakeholder | Benefits |
---|---|
Executives / CEO |
|
Marketing |
|
Sales |
|
Marketing |
|
Success / Loyalty |
|
PR |
|
What is the benefit of your community?
If you’re a business, many benefits of a community might seem similar to things you’re already doing.
Your customer support team is already answering customer questions, and your customer success team is training and guiding them through the product. You’re probably already doing research to learn what your customers want.
So why bother with a community? What makes a community approach completely unique?
Two things.
By turning your audience into a community, you’re creating an environment that motivates members to do things they would never usually do – things that are incredibly valuable for you and to each other.
Few of us get home from work and volunteer to do customer support or start documentation on how to use our printer. Why would we? The effort is too high and the rewards are non-existent. But an online community flips the scales in your favor by creating powerful rewards to do these kinds of things.
By creating a community, you’re creating opportunities for members to feel useful, important, and liked by other members. You’re giving members the opportunity to become leaders in their field and feel like they’re helping hundreds, even thousands, of people every single day. This is only possible within the social dynamic a community creates.
In a community, every single person who has solved a problem can help the next person with that problem. Every person who spots a gap in your documentation can fix it. Anyone with ideas for your organization can share them and see if others agree. They can vote and collaborate on implementing them together too – and they do this to feel part of a team. The best communities even have members advocating for them, tackling every possible customer problem, and collaborating on future products they want to see.
Only a community can create the social dynamic for this to happen. No one in a community is working for free, they’re working for things which they value even more than anything you could pay them. They’re working to better themselves and feel better about themselves by helping others.
What is the unique value of your community?
10. Why Do People Participate In Online Communities?
However, the reason why people join is different from the reasons why people stay engaged around. It’s far easier to get people to participate once than persuade them to stick around.
People participate in communities over the long term when they have a genuine interest in the topic, enjoy participating in the community, and get satisfaction from helping others. This happens as their sense of competence, autonomy, and connections to others within the community begin to grow.
An important thing to remember here is only a small % of your members will become regular participants.
The majority of people will visit, find the information they need, and leave. And that’s totally ok. Just be mindful that a huge proportion of your work will be spent supporting your top members.
What is the primary reason why someone will participate in your community?
11. How To Engage Your Community Members?
Let’s break down the more frequent tasks into specific activities and go deeper into how to do each of them incredibly well.
This sounds rather simple, doesn’t it? But then so is a paintbrush. It’s mastering how to use the paintbrush which really sets the great artists apart.
Each of these five skills have hidden techniques you should master to properly lead your community.
If you’re running a large community already, you probably don’t need to ask too many questions or start too many discussions yourself. Your members should be doing this for you. But it can still be handy to edit and guide their questions.
However, if you’re launching a new community or managing a small community, you’re going to spend a lot of time asking questions and initiating discussions. And if you want to receive a good number of quality responses, there are some clear principles to follow:
If you’re not sure which kinds of discussions to initiate, browse for existing discussions about your topic on social media, see what kinds of topics are being spoken about at events, or pull together a list from your customer support and success team. You should be able to quickly build up a list of 50+ discussions.
Another option is to invest in a search engine optimisation tool (or try AnswerThePublic) and try to understand the most common questions people are talking about related to your topic.
Remember it’s always better to try to solicit specific pieces of information which could be useful later. Don’t ask people what they think about a topic, ask for their experiences and expertise.
What are the discussions you will initiate in your community?
There are six great principles to abide by when engaging with members of a community.
We can see the differences between bad, ok, and good responses below.
Bad | Ok | Good |
---|---|---|
Hi @name, That’s a good question. Hopefully, some of other members can chime in and respond. | Hi @name, Good question. I suspect some of our top members might know the answer. You might want to check out this resource too: www.linkhere.com. It will be interesting to see if @person1, @person2, and @person 3 can also share their experiences here. | Hi @name, Welcome back! I haven’t seen you in a few weeks. Are your exams coming up soon? You ask a great question. I don’t think it’s come up before. Can you share a little more context? What have you tried already? What is the ideal outcome you want to achieve? Just browsing through some previous posts on this topic, I’ve noticed some good responses from @person1 and @person2. I’ve shared these below. [quote 1] [quote 2] They might also be able to chime in here and help. If we get a good response, do you mind if I added this to the community newsletter? I think it will probably help a lot of people. |
Can you see what Colleen is doing here?
She noticed it was the member’s first post and welcomed them to the community. She made a personal connection with her own experiences. Then she ‘@mentioned’ six other members who she felt could also participate in the community. Finally, she asked a further question to encourage the member to come back and participate in the community a second time.
Colleen’s response seems dead simple, but it showcases the amazing power of what a great community manager does.
You’re not expected to master all of these skills tomorrow. But you can gradually practice them and get better at sustaining discussions and engaging with members. You don’t even need to wait to have a community to begin practicing it. Practice it in your responses in your emails today and in responses to your messages. You will notice a rapid improvement in the quantity and quality of responses you get from your friends and colleagues.
If you’re managing a community, it’s quite likely at some point you will be tasked with creating content for that community. By content, we’re talking about almost anything which you publish in a one to many medium. For example, a news article is content, but a discussion post is not.
Technically, anything that’s published on a website is content. But I’m going to adopt a slightly narrower definition for our purposes here. Content is any static, non-discussion, form of media authored by you or a member on your site. The intent is typically to inform and entertain rather than start a discussion (although there are some exceptions).
Unless your community is on a platform which only allows discussions, like a WhatsApp group, you probably have several tools for creating community content. These might include.
If you want your content to be read, watched, and heard, you have to make it worthwhile to your audience. This is such a simple rule, but it’s staggering how often it’s ignored.
There are two types of content in an online community. The first is content which is designed to inform. The second is content that is designed to entertain. Both have their unique benefits.
Informative content is content that helps members achieve their goals. The best examples of this kind of content include the following:
If you’re short on ideas, the easiest thing to do is to community your existing content. Here are some examples:
Traditional Content | Community Content |
---|---|
News Announcement | Get the opinions of 10 members on the announcement and post them for others to read. |
Announcement of the new CEO | A live community discussion with the CEO. Summarise the major question and answers in the newsletter for the community. |
Guide to solving a technical problem | Live demonstration as an engineer solves the problem and takes questions from other members. Record the video and publish the results to the community. |
Product release notes. | Let the community guess what’s coming in the product next and give rewards for the right answer. Take suggestions for the next product releases. |
Optimization tactics | Invite the top 10 members to share their best tips for getting more out of the product and post this as an article in the community. |
Entertaining content is designed to keep members coming back out of interest. When you see organizations publish humorous content, you’re seeing content that is designed to entertain.
However, there is one particular type of content members find most entertaining; content about themselves. People have a craving to know what people like themselves are doing.
The best content for a community is content about the community.
This might include interviews with members, the latest updates about the lives of members, people on the move, and even a gossip column would work in some communities.
If you treat your community like a notice board, your members will ignore it like a notice board.
Communities were little more than a notice board of new articles with no debate, discussions, or any exciting activities. You shouldn’t post the same content in the community as you would anywhere else. I’ve seen press releases posted in some communities, it’s a terrible waste of the community’s attention.
An easy way to stimulate activity is to initiate an event.
An event doesn’t have to be a grand-scale conference, it can mean any time-limited activity which is hosted by your community.
Note there’s a difference there between hosted by your community and hosted on your community. While your platform might enable you to host some kinds of events, it’s quite likely you have to use external tools to host events.
The great thing about events is they complement your content efforts and let members participate in a shared experience. This helps both drive activity and unite members.
Some common types of activities include:
There’s no shortage of possible events you can host here. The best events are those which help members feel like they can make a useful contribution, are exciting and engaging to participate in, and leave behind a valuable asset for other members.
You have a choice between one-off and regular events. Usually, it’s best to setup a one-off event and see how it goes before committing to something more regular. With regular events, be mindful of the novelty effect. This is when an event is exciting at first but it’s popularity soon fades and participation dwindles.
Ensure each event is closely aligned to a particular goal members have. It’s a lot easier to have 3 to 5 big activities than to try to do one every other week. The purpose of activities is to increase engagement, build a stronger sense of community among members, and try to create or do something most members find valuable.
For this reason, I’d recommend staying away from frivolous events. A ‘Secret Santa’ might be fun, but it’s probably not going to resonate for members a year from now. Any event you want to host should benefit the entire community and be valuable over the long-term.
12. Nurturing Top Members
In internet culture, there is the 1% rule.
This is essentially a belief that in any group of people, 90% will ‘lurk’, 9% will contribute, and only 1% will create.
Whether the exact figure (1%) is accurate or not, doesn’t really matter. What matters is participation inequality is very real (compare how many wikipedia articles you’ve created and edited vs how many you’ve read).
This applies to anyone building communities too. Only a small percentage of your members will proactively engage in a community. And a tiny percentage of them (for example, the top 1%) will drive most of the activity.
The top 1% are usually the ones who create blog posts, testimonials, and take volunteer roles to help the community.
Don’t underestimate just how important this small group of committed members are. For example:
The critical step to achieving almost any goal you want to achieve in your community lies not in driving as much participation as possible but in working with a tiny group of committed members.
It’s usually a good idea to work closely with your top members to achieve your community goals. This often means the creation of what’s known as a ‘superuser’ program.
A superuser program is an exclusive program which aims to motivate and rewards top members for making the most valuable contributions to a community.
Superusers aren’t necessarily the most active members, they might be members with unique insight or expertise. However, typically, they are drawn from a pool of members who have made a high quantity of contributions or made unique quality contributions.
A superuser program doesn’t have to be a highly formal program.
If you’ve managed any sort of group before, you’ve probably had some sort of unofficial process where you get to know and support some of your top participants better than others. It’s only when you have a few hundred active members in a community that you might want to begin formalising the process.
There are several key steps here.
Superuser programs are designed to change behavior in a way that’s valuable to superusers and the community at large. Give them things to do that matter. These should ideally connect to your community goals.
You can find examples below:
Community Goals | Superuser Behaviors |
---|---|
Resolve 25% of customer support questions via the community. | Answer the majority of questions that are created by the community within 24 hours. |
Increase the expertise and abilities of members. (possibly customer success) | Create their own best resources for other members. Find the best resources on the web and share them in the community. |
Increase loyalty and retention rates. | Facilitate connections between members. Welcome newcomers and reach out to members. Remove bad content. |
While it might be tempting to recruit a large number of superusers in one batch, you don’t want to flood the community with superusers to answer only a trickle of questions.
The number of superusers you need is largely determined by the size of your community. We generally aim for a 1% ratio of active participants (people who have made a contribution in the past month).
Monthly Participants | Number of Superusers |
---|---|
1 to 100 | 2 to 3 |
100 to 500 | 3 to 5 |
500 to 1,000 | 5 to 10 |
1,000 to 5,000 | 10 to 50 |
5,000+ | 50+ |
Remember that each member is going to require a lot of personal attention. As your superuser program grows, so does the number of staff you need to manage it
It’s important that your superuser program is perceived as something exclusive and reflects a high standard of ability. The obvious way to do that is to make it exclusive and reflect a high standard of ability. As a general rule, the more exclusive it seems to be, the more motivated members may be to join.
This means you need criteria for determining who is able to become a superuser.
The best approach is to look for the specific skills and activities that match what you need members to do.
You can usually use one of these four criteria:
You can see a simple example below:
Requirement | |
---|---|
Level of Activity | Min 30 posts per month |
Passion, helpfulness, or expertise | Polite, clear, helpful. |
Interest | Can answer questions. |
Unique skills | High expertise in [widget] |
Once you have decided your criteria, you need to decide precisely how members can join. You have three approaches here:
When you’re just getting started, you will typically reach out to members individually. But as you grow, you will usually create an application form interested members can complete to join.
What’s the benefit of someone becoming a superuser? Why would anyone spend so much time and energy helping other people for free?
The answer is you’re going to pay them in a currency they value even more than money! You’re paying them in positive emotions – the feeling of being useful, recognized, respected, and connected to people like themselves.
Your rewards are likely to fall into one of five categories:
Feeling | Perks |
---|---|
Access | |
Status | |
Influence | |
Connection | |
Challenges |
Whether you’re just getting started or have an existing relationship, remember to build strong relationships with your most active members. They are the people who will keep the activity going strong and help you achieve your goals.
Who are your top members? How will you build your program?
13. Community Management Platforms and Software
The second layer of our ‘four layers of community’ model highlighted the engagement methods.
Every community needs a place where members can engage with one another.
Sometimes this is a super fancy community platform that lets members engage through forums, blogs, reviews, images, videos, knowledge bases, and more. Some come replete with clever security and privacy features.
Sometimes it’s the means of engagement can be as simple as the comments section of a major news site.
Regardless of the capabilities of the platform, it’s important to note that every community has at least one destination where members can engage with one another.
It’s good to distinguish here between a platform and a website.
You might be more familiar with engaging in group discussions on WhatsApp, Facebook Groups, or Slack. Each group chat on the platform is a specific instance of the platform.
A big decision every community manager needs to make early on is what platform to use.
You can find a breakdown of some of the most popular platforms in the table below. Be warned this isn’t a comprehensive list and technology changes fast. By the time you read these words the landscape may have changed significantly – so do your research!
Social media and other inexpensive tools | White label platforms | Open Source Platforms | Enterprise Platforms |
---|---|---|---|
Facebook Groups LinkedIn Groups Telegram Mailchimp Zoom Citrix GoToWebinar Slack Bevvy Eventbrite Twitch StackExchange | Ning MightyNetworks Tribe Hivebrite YourMembership Meetup | Drupal Discourse Vanilla Joomla ELGG | Khoros Salesforce Insided Telligent Vanilla Discourse HigherLogic Yammer Microsoft Teams Sharepoint |
Each of the options above have a variety of pros and cons. A key challenge is finding the right balance.
You’re probably most familiar with social media tools. Your organization can set up an account on any one of those tools, invite people to join or follow your account, and begin engaging with members. It’s the quickest way to get started. However, you’re significantly limited in what you can do.
If you’re technically gifted, you also have the option to build your own community platform. However, I would strongly recommend against this approach unless you really, really, know what you’re doing. Most efforts to create a community usually become a costly mistake.
Once you have selected the platform, you also need to design and configure it to your needs. Different platforms give you different options for doing this. The less flexible the platform, the easier this is. You can usually add a logo, change the colors, and maybe drag and drop different features into different places.
If you’re using an enterprise platform, you usually need to have someone (or an organization) who can help you do this. Most of the bigger platforms can refer you to ‘implementation partners’ who can help you set the community up.
Which platform will you use?
14. Community Management Tools
15. Community Management Training, Services, Books, and More
There are an array of community management training courses and services that can help you progress in your career and develop your community.
16. How to Measure Community Building
How will you know if any of this is working?
That’s the typically difficult question.
There are several ways to measure the success of the community. These range from looking at the health and vibrancy of a community (i.e. how active it is) to complex formulas which will help you determine the ROI of the community.
You can see some of the more common metrics in this table:
Before deciding what to measure it’s a good idea to first understand why you’re measuring the community. What is your goal?
Be clear about why you’re measuring the community before deciding what to measure. This will give you an idea about how to measure your goal.
Ideally, you want to turn your key measurements into an easy-to-use dashboard.
What are you measuring and why?
17. Principles of Community Management
Think you might need some help?