Facebook now offers free courses in effective Community Management

Community management is the process of building an authentic community consisting of your business customers, employees, and partners through different types of interaction.

According to HubSpot, “It’s how a brand uses opportunities (in-person and online) to interact with their audience to create a network in which they can connect, share, and grow.”

In the current digital age and in light of the global pandemic, building a community on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram is an effective way to target and reach your customer base.

It’s become such an important part of one’s business that more companies today are hiring community managers.

Their job scope often involves participating in discussions, seeking new customers, and listening to the needs of current ones to find new ways to engage with the digital community.

Community managers sometimes work under their own personal account, acting as brand ambassadors, or create a separate social account with the brand name in the username.

For smaller companies, a community manager also takes on the role of the social media manager. However, SproutSocial pointed out that these two roles have different daily tasks and goals.

“For small teams, one person may be doing both jobs. But as you grow your team, specialisation is helpful and it’s good to know how building out these two roles can help you grow even more.”

The main responsibilities of community management on social media are finding new users and answering their questions, engaging current community members, and coming up with strategies to further develop the community.

Whether you’ve got a social media manager who also takes on the role of a community manager or a separate position altogether, there are a number of free online courses they can take to develop their skills in community management.

Facebook has recently launched a new Community Manager eLearning Programme on its free Blueprint training platform, focusing on the different aspects of community management through free online courses.

Courses are organised around topics that can be applied by all types of businesses, whether they’re a non-governmental organisation, a non-profit organisation, established community leader, brand or agency.

They can use this programme as a reference as they build, scale, and sustain their online communities.

Throughout the programme, community managers will have the opportunity to explore strategies and learn about tools to support the moderation and engagement of their online community.

More courses will be coming soon, but for now, the programme includes the following courses in Community Management:

• Defining and establishing a community: how to build an online community, community goals and community guiding principles.
• Developing community strategies and processes: Best practices for managing audiences, tapping into the platform, building a brand, launching effectively, building and supporting your team, and nurturing strong partnerships, as well as developing efficient operational workflows.
• Making strategic content decisions for a community: Serving up relevant content, keeping track of trends and planning goal-driven activities.
• Engaging and moderating a community: Understanding the onboarding process for new members, community operations, member-to-member connections, engagement tactics, community standards, and terms of service, as well as safely and thoughtfully handling crises and conflicts.
• Measuring and analysing community success: Tracking content performance, feedback collection, data reporting, and sustainability.