How to become a community manager Training & alternatives

How do I become a community manager? Not a simple question to answer. But you'll find all the answers you're looking for in this article.

• Skills you need to succeed in this field
• Education or training you can take
• Possible pay and career paths as a community manager

Briefly all the steps you need to take to find out how to become a community manager.

First of all, let's take a brief look at what a community manager is.

What is a community manager?

The community manager is the person in charge of a company's social networks and communications. As his name suggests, he manages and animates the community, particularly on the various social networks such as: Youtube, Instagram, Facebook or Tiktok.

The missions of a community manager

A community manager is often a person with multiple skills. Depending on the size of the company they work for, their missions vary enormously. But these can include:

• Creating communication strategy
• Creating editorial planning
• Creating content for the various networks
• Competitive intelligence
• Responding to user messages and comments
• Processing campaign data
• Analyzing this data to deduce the strategy to be implemented

Bref, a panel of highly varied missions requiring a wide range of skills.

Skills you need to have

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As a community manager, you'll need to develop certain skills that are essential to your success. Here they are:

• You'll need to know how to organize and manage projects or teams to coordinate communication campaigns.
• You'll need to be able to create high-quality content for the full range of social networks. Whether on instagram, Tiktok, Linkedin, Facebook or future social networks. Illustrator, photoshop, canva and after effect will become your daily tools to create the most impactful content for your audience.
• Compulsory editorial quality. You'll be writing posts that are read by thousands or even millions of people. Spelling must be impeccable.
• In some cases you'll also need to write in English or another language. So think about developing this skill to respond to the best job offer as community manager.
• You'll also need to be able to implement and analyze communication campaigns you've launched. Analyzing the performance of your content is an integral part of your job as a community manager.
• Finally, you need to have a wise eye for following all the trends on the various social networks. How are audiences evolving, what are the new features, what content is currently buzzing and how can you integrate it into your strategy. You don't just have to ask yourself these questions every day, but all the time. Only then will you be able to imagine the best communication campaigns for your social networks.

All these skills may seem like a lot, but these are the fundamentals for applying for a job as a community manager.

Try to develop them every day and you'll quickly become a savvy community manager who earns top pay.

Compensation

When it comes to community manager compensation, these obviously vary depending on:

• Your experience
• Your sector
• Your skills
• Your geographical area
• The size of the company you're applying to
• Or simply your status.

For yes you can perform the community manager job as an employee or as a freelancer.

As an employee, the average salary in France varies between €25,000 a year and €35,000 (gross). It can go up to €50,000 for the most experienced.

For a freelancer, there's no real limit, but the average daily rate is between €200 and €300 and can go up to €500 or even €1,000 a day. Please note, however, that as a freelancer, you'll need to find your own customers and keep them fully satisfied so that they continue to use your services. Your income is therefore not guaranteed.

Possible career paths

The possible career paths as a community manager are quite diverse. You'll have developed so many different skills that you can move into a wide variety of fields.

For example, you could become digital project manager, a data specialist or even specialize in viral content creation. In short, you'll have dabbled in so much that you'll be able to specialize in the field that interests you most.

Depending on the sector you're moving into, your domain skills can also be a major asset.

Generally speaking, you can move into any position of responsibility that involves community animation.

How to become a community manager

So how can you become a community manager, that's the real question of this article. There are several possible ways to do this:

• Educate yourself in this field
• Take further training
• Learn on your own

But whatever solution you choose, the method of becoming a community manager remains broadly the same. We'll see that at the end of this section. Let's start by comparing the 3 ways mentioned.

Dedicated study

If you haven't yet started higher education, or want to go back to it. This may be the solution for you.

The idea is simple: follow a school curriculum to learn the community manager profession.

As the community manager profession is so diverse, you won't find a dedicated school directly. However, you will learn all the fundamentals of marketing, communication and project management. Elements which, as you now know, are indispensable.

At the end of certain courses of study, you may find specialized masters degrees for becoming a community manager, but this will inevitably remain fairly generalist.

The advantages of this are:

• Getting a degree recognized by companies
• Supervised, easy-to-follow courses
• And the inclusion of internships in most curricula

However, these studies are often very expensive and student status isn't for everyone.

Further training

The second way you can become a community manager is to further training.

Are you already on the job market? Do you have the skills, but not enough to be recruited for community manager positions? All you need to do is add to your skill set with specialized training.

You can find dedicated training courses for each of the skills we've described earlier in this article. Some training courses can even be 100% funded by the CPF.

You could, for example, find a training course specializing in the use of automation tools for social networks.

You simply need to query training organizations or online training sites to find the training course that's right for you.

The advantages of this method are:

• it works even if you have no knowledge of the field.
• It can also be much more accessible and shorter than studying
• and in some cases can bring state-recognized certifications.

So all you have to do is get started to become a community manager.

Getting started by self-taught

Finally, the third solution is to learn on your own and develop all the skills you need to get into a community manager position.

For this method, practice is key. You can develop your own networks, those of your friends, or promote companies to which you offer your services for free.

Bref, you learn on the job and as fast as you can to develop all the necessary skills.

This is clearly not the easiest method, but you can put it into practice alongside a job or your studies. It offers enormous flexibility and guarantees you rapid progress and tangible results to show your next employer.

In short, the advantages of this method are:

• Flexibility
• Putting it into practice concretely and immediately
• Tangible results to show your next employer

Among these 3 methods, it's up to you to choose the one best suited to your situation and desires. Note, however, that they all follow the same learning method:

1. Acquire digital marketing and communications skills, either by attending a training course or by self-taught by reading books and watching online videos.
2. Familiarize yourself with the various social networking and online media platforms.
3. Create and manage your own social networking account to build up practical experience.
4. Search for internship or job opportunities as a community management assistant or intern to gain professional experience.
5. Develop a portfolio detailing achievements and results obtained in community management assignments.
6. Apply for community manager positions in companies or communications agencies looking to strengthen their online presence.

If you follow these outlines and develop your skills, expertise and portfolio via real-world experience, you'll get to become a community manager.