Being a Community Manager
Lisa Schaeffer
Hi! I’m Lisa and I’m the Community Manager here at Netspeak Games!
Working at Netspeak is my first experience as a full-time, solo community manager, and I want to share some of the things I’ve learned ✨
Being a solo community manager is completely and utterly doable. It’s a Big, Tough job. I won’t pretend it isn’t.
The constantly changing expectations can lead to big ups and big downs, but if you’re backed by the right team and manage yourself and your time well, the impact you can have in a relatively short time is huge! Communication with your line manager, team members you work with regularly and your other coworkers is essential.
As a Community Manager, you find yourself in a unique position of having to process anything and everything that is being done in the game studio and translate it into engaging, interesting, and creative content for your players.
But where to begin?
You got the job and now you’re alone, head-to-head with a big, faceless audience of potential players who are asking for a space where they can gather, like, subscribe, comment and create.
Start with your team! Interview them, ask them what they think you should do, what community means to them, which game communities they enjoy and admire, and most importantly what they’d want your community to look like. That should help you get to know who you work with, help you define your relationship with your coworkers and see who would be ready to help you create behind the scenes content in the long run!
After that, assess your past and present territory - all the accounts, communication channels and anything related to informing players - and chat with the people who started them. What was their goal? What were their results? Use that to make informed decisions on what you should focus your energy on. Because believe me, you won’t be able to do everything or be everywhere at once. After assessing and understanding what kind of players you’ll attract and finding the most appropriate platform(s) for them, aim to build frequency and consistency.
This is when planning and preparing your content is going to take the bulk of your time, because you’ll mold and refine the game tone over time. Make mistakes, try new formats, new tones, but do it frequently enough so you start gathering data that’ll help you see what worked and what didn’t. Once you feel like you’re getting that frequency, it’s time to think about expanding your community territory.
This is the moment in the article where I tell you that all of the above and what comes next should never happen at the cost of your health, mental and physical. Setting goals and achieving them is important, but if a goal is starting to look stale or not doable, talk about it.
Goals can be changed and shifted and often numbers are less important than doing the work that leads to them as a result. Don’t let pressure become stress. Keep your team and line managers in the loop of how you feel about your tasks and how you want to handle them. I’ve often put too much pressure on myself trying to do what I promised to the letter, however accountability isn’t just about keeping to your goals, it’s about asking for help and being flexible enough to accept that circumstances change!
Trust that you were hired because you have both the skills and the space to create a community you’ll be proud of.
Discord ended up being that space for us and more recently, TikTok! Along with Twitter and Instagram, they are the platforms I decided were the most creative, welcoming and in tone with our game and our values.
I’d be happy to go over the details of how our expectations and priorities shifted over the past year and a half, tell us if that’d interest you!
If you want to know more about Sunshine Days, Netspeak, game dev, community management, please let us know!
