From Moderator to Manager - how to prepare for a career working with online communities?

Uh, Tim! What a great conversation topic! 😃 This is a topic very close to my heart, as I believe we can all continue to grow, learn, develop and simply acquire more knowledge in our professional and personal lives.

Right now, I'm building a training curriculum for my team, based on their general background in email/phone/online support. I want them to become community managers one day, and be ready to tip me off my sparkly throne when I've grown old and wizened 😉

First, and quite important: Please keep in mind that anything I write here are based on my personal experiences and 'expectations', and generally written from the perspective of a 'perfect world'. It probably goes without saying that it's kinda simplified.

Mind you, I'll not focus on the things you most likely already do, like "Be awesome at moderating, keep up with your superusers, write compelling and amazeballs content" etc.)

Anyways. There are some subtle differences between how community managers and moderators think and work. What I mean with that is that moderators (usually straight out of a support environment) tend to work and think 'top down' (case by case), whereas community managers tend to work by 'cherry picking' (What has the biggest impact).
So, how do you find out what has the biggest impact?

DATA! (The digital world today is data driven)
Action points: Get (access to and) comfortable with analytics, in particular Google Analytics and Excel.
Google Analytics is a powerhouse of information, -even- if you don't actually have any particular training in it.
Out of the box Google Analytics will tell you which topics and pages has had the most amount of views during a particular time frame. Couple that information with what you see in your community data. Topics that get a lot of attention in the form of replies, may only actually be seen by a fraction of the users that click into your page. With some nerding around in google (and maybe the help of someone that knows his or her sh!t) you can set up some interesting 'segments' to further slice and dice your data. Google is great at telling you how well your 'silent' content is doing.
Google also has a great Search Console that can give you some interesting (and sometimes surprising) insights into what people search for before they land on your community.

Most people find that Excel is a @#$%$# of a program, and they will neeever find out how to analyse their data. The easiest way to get comfortable with Excel is to first and foremost carve out some time (More than 2 hours) to get nerdy, then ask yourself a few questions that Excel can give you the answers to.
For instance: How many posts did I write on average per day, last month? (You'll need the Post Export for that one)
Which percentage of all our topics had more than 3 replies last month? (You'll need the Topic Export for that one)
How many of the topics with a 'best answer' on the community had the first reply written by a non-employee? (You'll need the Marked as Answer Export for that one)
You can 'pivot table' your way out of all of those.

But what do you do with all this data? Well, you can action it based on combinations:
People land on this page constantly according to google, but they 'bounce' off again quickly. Does the page not have the necessary information to get them going? Is it already plenty informational which is the purpose?
This topic has received a LOT of replies in a short amount of time by a few users, what's going on? Do I need to intervene? Is there a potential outage on the horizon?

Long story short with regards to data: It takes time to learn and understand the intricacies between the data points, and more importantly, it takes time to understand and recognise which data-points you can ignore from the perspective of your community. That's almost a skill in its own right :)

Get Networking: Get to know people. Anyone from your manager's peers to the persons responsible for press releases, or product development. It's not (only) about rubbing shoulders, it's about awareness both ways.
Action point: Set up a meeting with an 'interesting' person, and see what sort of insights they can give you to prepare your community for what's coming, or what has already happened. (I can almost promise you that your future in community management will be a calendar filled with these kinds of meetings).

'Business Awareness' as a skill - By that I mean "know what's going on, and react to it in a timely manner". And I don't mean the random gossip, I mean the available knowledge around your company's products and their lifecycle. Know where this information is being shared, and keep tabs on it.
Action points: Sort and filter your email inbox. Read your emails starting with the most important. What's going on in the business? Also keep a diligent eye on other communication channels, meetings (do. not. be. late.) and respond/attend where your insights can be helpful.
For instance, can you help someone make an informed decision based on sharing a few tidbits of expertise data? "Yeah we saw quite a steep increase in views on the announcement topic compared to other topics, but hardly any comments, which we gather to mean that the message was clear and positive".

The oldie but goodie: Time Management / governance: aka work smarter, not harder. (I want to get the most out of my day, not burn down asap).
Action point: Block time in your calendar to action important items. Plan your day and your activities based on what makes sense through business awareness and data (priority).
With that said, sometimes something happens that threatens your community, and you need to start prioritising firefighting. Don't be too rigid in your time management, there also need to be room for the unforeseen.
For most current moderators, their time has already been blocked by their manager to work on community topics, so see if you can't carve out some time together with your manager for development purposes.

Last but not least:
Keep up with the general world of communities. There are a number of amazing websites with fantastic content for new and tenured community managers - Feverbee and The Community Roundtable have both helped me tremendously in learning the ropes and keeping up with it. InSided, and other community platform vendors, also have a lot of content to support their community managers, so go digging 🙂
Action Point: Sign up to Feverbee and Community Roundtable newsletters.


Phew. That was quite the post. Enjoy, and feel free to ask more questions 🙂
Ditte

Some great advice here for me to get started on, Ditte - thanks for such a detailed reply!

Let's get cracking! 🤓