4 Must-Have Skills for Effective Community Managers

Shané Dukes
2 min readFeb 13, 2022

Are you a community manager, or thinking of starting your own community? Well then here are the top 4 skills you must have to run an effective community.

1. Love for the Topic, Service, or Brand

Love your work and you’ll hardly ever feel like you’re working. When a community manager is passionate about their topic, they will also be more inclined to provide valuable content to the community members. It will make all the tasks that come with running a community easier to complete. Discussion topics will come easily and engagement will flow naturally.

2. Time Management Skills

Courtesy of DART

The community manager should be able to split his or her time between several projects. It is crucial that they be able to prioritize tasks and still make time for starting conversations, handling conflicts, bringing in new members, promoting the community, and carrying out other everyday activities associated with online communities.

3. Interpersonal skills

Courtesy of ARC

In order to manage a community effectively, managers must understand the varying personas, feelings, and thoughts of its members. This will require a bit more creativity than everyday communication. Community members will need to be pushed in a certain direction and strong interpersonal skills can aid in driving community engagement.

4. Engagement skills

Courtesy of Wellesley Institute

There are many moving parts in online communities. Strong engagement is the key to keeping things moving. It is up to community managers to think of creative ways, like surveys, polls, questionnaires, and discussions to keep a group active and thriving. They have to know what works best to drive the highest level of engagement. It is also important to understand how to reward members to ensure they will participate as much as possible.

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