One of the essential hires for companies that want to affect real change as a social media savvy organization connecting with people and communities is a Community Manager.  During the social media discovery and initial learning phase the addition of a dedicated person is often unlikely, so the tasks a Community Manager would handle can be performed by a combination of a truly competent outside agency and moreso by multiple people within the company.

I know the right thing to do is talk about social strategy and broader level considerations before getting into the tactical details and specific tasks. Sometimes showing minute by minute examples of what a Community Manager does is jumping the gun for a new discussion on social media but it might be the only way to reach those that will perform the new role. Think of it as bottom up social media strategy if you have to. The more front line and middle managers that “get it”, the more powerful winning executive support will be.

There is no universal job description for a Community Manager. Actual role and responsibility will vary. It might be Customer Service focused, or Marketing/Sales, Legal, HR, Product Development or a mix of all of these. Here’s a one hour snapshot of a Marketing focused Social Media Community Manager:

6:45 am Check and reply to company blog(s) comments.

6:55 am Scan news feeds for interesting articles, blog posts, media to share. Write tweets, updates etc with short URLs. Schedule messages for sharing throughout the day.

7:10 am Check Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn comments, Retweets, messages and reply as necessary.

7:20 am Scan persistent search for topics, keywords and brand terms to reveal commenting opportunities on industry news websites and blogs. Make comments, take notes for future blog posts.

7:30 am Revisit company blog comment management tool for new replies.

7:35 am Revisit Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn for specific follow ups.

7:40 Scan social media monitoring tool for mentions, links (alternatively alerts can be used to surface events as they happen)

7:45 am  Review Social Dashboard and web analytics for the company blog for notable links, trending traffic sources and relevant conversion metrics (RSS subscribers, email subscribers, downloads, webinar signups, sales inquires)

This is probably going to seem like a lot in an hour. It is.  However, software, training and experience make such social media community management efficiency possible. “Fires” certainly do happen and there’s a multitude of situations that can throw this out of whack. But hopefully those looking for a glimpse at what s marketing-focused community manager does, will get an idea of what might be involved.

I know there are quite a few people that read this blog working part or full time in a community manager role. It would be great to get your perspective on the responsibilities of working with social communities (or online communities at large).

How have you become more efficient?  How does your early morning routine differ than the one above?  What more would you like to see in a “glimpse” post like this?

Originally published on the TopRank Online Marketing Blog