Should you hire a Community Manager?
Things to consider before hiring help in handling your online community
If you’re:
- Feeling burnt out from launching your new community;
- Getting overwhelmed by the sheer number of people being excited to become members of your group;
- Struggling to go through the endless dm’s from your members on your inbox;
- Losing focus on what to prioritize amongst your increasing list of things you need to do to meet the demands of your quickly growing community;
You might be looking for extra hands (or brains) to juggle these obligations effectively. Before you start pouring the extra cash into hiring someone to do the job, you may want to take a moment to re-assess.
What is the normal level of engagement for your community? Is hiring a community manager worth it?
The Problem
We’ve seen a lot of communities jump into expanding their team too early to accommodate the increasing work load only to find the hype dying down a few steps down the line. Eventually, this leaves the hired hands with little to no activity to manage.
The Solution
To avoid this, it’s good to assess the level of interest or how committed your members are to your community before investing into extra help.
If your members are deeply invested or interested, have you tried giving your power users roles inside your community?
This helps balance the work load while managing the costs for your business.
The Benefits & Impact on The Community & The Business
It also helps in making sure that the initiatives and the direction of the community are both aligned with your intended goals and with the needs and interests of your members.
It’s one way to reward your power users and thank them for being an active contributor to your community’s success.
Do you have enough budget?
How long can you sustain your current operational costs/expenses before the business becomes profitable?
The Benefits of Having a Community Manager
Hiring a community manager can be an investment if it helps your business increase your profits. It can help decrease expending precious resources like time, energy, and brain power so that you can allocate those limited resources into other areas of your life or business.
Choose the Right Role that Fits Your Needs
Community Manager vs. Community Moderator vs. Virtual Assistant (V.A.)
Sometimes it’s challenging to choose amongst the different roles to match the job description because they all play such an integral part to building and growing the community. It becomes easier to find what we’re looking for if we can be specific about what we need.
Community Moderators uphold structure and organization inside the community. They help enforce rules and guide members to the right direction. Meanwhile, virtual assistants can do wider range of jobs from social media content creation and management to handling messages and concerns from clients or customers.
A community manager is a strategic partner in ensuring that the community values, goals, and culture is exemplified in all aspects of the community from the interactions to the activities or events inside it. They proactively facilitate the space and curate the experience for the members of the community. In coordination with the Founders and the rest of the team, their objectives may look like:
- Meeting the needs of the members of the community,
- Ensuring that the communication and the messages are clear,
- Facilitating the growth of the community & the business.
What It Takes To Hire An Effective Community Manager
Do you have enough budget?
Also consider that hiring a community manager means allocating additional cash to what you’re already investing into your business every month. Can your initial capital or your current profit model sustain the extra funds without exhausting your budget?
Be clear with your Goals
Outside assigning tasks to the role, it would be beneficial to outline your specific goals in line with the business. Setting goals effectively helps define expectations clearly and increase the potential of achieving success for the community. Otherwise, you might just end up onboarding an additional expense rather than an investment into your business.
Be Commited to the Plan
Just as with everything that involves business, hiring team members require commitment. It means showing up to meetings and keeping everyone aligned with the goals of the business. It’s dedicating yourself to a strategy and being accountable for your role in the game plan.
We’d love to help!
As much as I’d love to rally up there and tell you that you need a new community manager ASAP, I’d rather have you maximizing what you’ve got and re-assessing how much you really need one before jumping into this commitment.
If you need to consult someone about what can be done or would like to dip your toes a bit with a trial of community management to see if it’s something that you really need right now, drop me a message! We’d be happy to help.
