1. Be Fast
Google, Facebook and others often write about how important being fast is. Speed in any business is important. In community management responding to any support emails, questions or quickly letting the community know you are aware of the problem is imperative. The reason speed is so important above everything else is my eyes is it leaves people with an impression about how serious you treat them. Constantly I hear “Wow amazingly fast response!” or tweets like this.
2. Know Your Product
This may seem simple. It isn’t. When I say know your product, I mean know it better than anyone at the company. In the case with Apture I pride myself on attempting to know more than @tristanharris (he has an insane ability to find things) when it comes down to bugs, general usage and workarounds to common problems. The reason this is so important is it plays into commandment one, but it also frees up your engineers to keep working on larger problems. When you know your product well a great majority of gripes users have can be solved without an engineer. When you run a small shop engineering time is imperative, slowing them down should be avoided at all costs. One issue I’ve seen pop up since the launch of Apture Search is where users may install our javascript twice on a page. When you know the entire installation process, how to read html, etc you can quickly walk the user through a solution to this problem quickly. They’ll love you for this.
3. Always Be Closing
As a Community Manager your job is to “manage the community” well a big part of this is growing the community. You can only grow the community so much by being quick and knowing your product. Start looking for potential new customers who you think would love it. A quick tip for this is find a target on Twitter send them an @ message about how you have an awesome product for their site and you’d love to send them a demo. They’ll usually reply. Who doesnt want to see a demo? You can do contests and things to drive participation, but I’m a firm believer especially in new companies you need to use brute force to grow your business.
4. Be Yourself
You probably spend a great majority of your day inside GetSatisfaction or inside your mail program replying to customers. When communicating with people who are having problems be yourself, feel more like a real person than an automated reply. If I’m talking with someone who runs a sports site, I’ll mention something about an article I read on their site or a player from a sports they like. These types of things I believe break the ice with someone and give them comfort in knowing a capable person is on the other end, but they are also cool 
5. Connect on Twitter or Facebook with your customers
If someone has a great experience with getting help from you find them on Twitter or Facebook and connect with them. You should not only build your community for your company, but increase your circle of connections. Now when I go to SXSW or BWE I can say hi to Kate Buck Jr, simply because after talking with her a few times over Twitter about Apture we are now friends. Relationships with people are not only beneficial personally, but if I need help promoting something for Apture I’m always going to reach out to her. Just don’t post crazy pictures of yourself on Facebook or they may see them
I hope these tips help you become a better community manager. If you have any questions or comments do not be afraid to reach out on Twitter or leave a note below.
