The Role of a Community Relations Manager: Insights into Responsibilities, Salary Expectations, and Essential Skills

Welcome to PR Jobs project! We live in a world where it’s become vital for brands to engage with their audiences online. Managing such relationships requires specific skills and knowledge of managers keeping in touch with the customers on social media, forums, and other media. To manage such communications, businesses hire community relations managers. 

A Community Relations Manager is vital in maintaining relationships within and outside companies. A person working as a community relations manager is responsible for building a brand image online, maintaining good relationships with customers, searching for business growth opportunities, and solving customer complaints, among other things. To become a successful manager, one should possess advanced problem-solving skills and establish positive relationships with the customers and inside the organization (mainly with the sales and marketing teams) to boost business profitability. 

A community relations manager is vital in helping businesses succeed and establish positive, long-lasting customer relationships. How can you become one? What are the major skills and responsibilities of the community relations manager jobs? Most importantly, how much will you get paid? Let’s explore. 

“In every community, there is work to be done. In every nation, there are wounds to heal. In every heart, there is the power to do it.”

Marianne Williamson

What is a Community Relations Manager?

Simply put, a community relations manager is a liaison between an organization and its audience. By directly communicating with the online community, they build the tone, voice, and trust in the brand through online and in-person communications. A skillful community relations manager knows how to increase brand awareness and boost company performance by implementing a well-thought-out marketing strategy. 

Essential skills of a community relations manager include but are not limited to the following:

• Strong understanding of the organization, its products, and services;
• Advanced communication skills (both verbal and written);
• Excellent team player; 
• The possibility to work under pressure while still managing kindness, tact, and professionalism; 
• Ability to build and implement community-focused content strategies;
• Time-management skills. 

What Does a Community Relations Manager Do? 

To provide a better understanding of the community relations manager job description. Let’s outline an example of their scope of work. As a rule, working as a community relations manager suggests you should be able to complete such tasks as: 

1. Building and maintaining a brand’s online and offline communities. The task is to reach audiences and engage the community on as many relevant channels as possible, including forums, social media communities, Slack, in-person groups, etc. Community managers should be flexible and adjust to different community spaces and cultures while keeping the brand’s tone and voice consistent. 
2. PR is a vital element of building and maintaining a brand image. This is one of the skills a community relations manager should possess. How managers handle legal issues or negative press publications identifies a true expert and differs from an enthusiast. Taking the wrong steps in PR management can cause immense damage to a brand. That’s why relying on expert help to mitigate the problems and build a positive brand image is always better. This is when the PRNEWS.IO team’s expertise should be beneficial.   
3. A great community relations manager should be able to craft new strategies for their brands. Rather than focusing on short-term strategies, investing in long-term ones should help brands find new directions for positioning themselves in the future. One proven way to craft new strategies is by learning from the examples of other managers with similar positions and how they handled similar situations. 
4. Brand presence includes building a consistent brand image while maintaining a similar tone of voice across different platforms. Whether users are seeing a post on Instagram or come across a question on Quora, they should be able to recognize your brand and its voice. Cultivating brand presence is one of the duties of a community brand manager. 
5. In addition to participating in direct communication with the audience, a community relations manager should track customer engagement and report on the engagement rates they see monthly. Unlike other team members primarily operating on the backend, a community manager directly interacts with the audience and sees customers’ responses. By tracking such stats, community managers can shape the content and strategy that will appeal to their community and aid in building a larger one. 
6. A great community manager encourages the audience by giving gift cards or other small presents. Whether the community members have a positive or negative experience, building positive relationships with community members lets managers build a trustworthy brand perception. 

How to Become One?

Becoming a community manager can come from various backgrounds, such as recruiting, journalism, or engineering. Success in this role depends more on skills than on a specific degree.

Community managers must have solid and soft skills to advocate for and uphold an organization’s brand. Empathy, good listening skills, and adaptability are crucial for creating positive impressions of the organization. In addition to interpersonal abilities, top community managers actively research trends and current topics within their industry. By staying engaged with the latest developments, they can better connect with relevant audiences and provide them with updated resources and best practices.

Great community managers understand that their role is centered around customer service. They actively listen to customers’ concerns while maintaining an authentic social presence to build productive consumer partnerships — ultimately being a positive brand representative.

Being an effective community manager requires passion and dedication due to frequent communication with customers and community members. Setting clear goals is vital at every stage of your career journey as it helps prioritize workload while demonstrating the value of your role once achieved.

Improving listening skills is also crucial. Rather than providing generic responses to comments or feedback from community members – positive or negative – showing empathy towards their contributions fosters inclusivity within the space.

Similarly, fostering inclusivity helps ensure all contributors feel safe by consistently enforcing communication guidelines throughout interactions. Managers should aim at timely responses when engaging in discussions within larger communities—even though keeping up might be challenging—striving for fast response times remains critical.

Content marketing serves as a vital tool allowing you not only to provide valuable resources but also to spark lively discussions among your audience, ensuring repeat visits—a tactic that increases engagement levels significantly, making content marketing an indispensable strategy skillset

These strategies will help aspiring individuals navigate challenges effectively, helping them become successful professional community managers and positively influencing their online presence.

Community Relations Manager Job Description

A community relations manager is vital in fostering a positive and long-lasting relationship between a brand and its community. Keeping this in mind and considering all the previously mentioned details about community relations manager jobs, we’ll provide a detailed breakdown of all the major responsibilities associated with this role. 

Community Engagement

As part of the community engagement initiatives, community relations managers develop strategies to build and maintain activities that will positively impact the community. Besides, they commonly attend relevant events to represent their organizations and build strong relationships with the major community members. 

Outreach Programs

Hardly any online promotion strategy can achieve the needed success without engaging in outreach initiatives. Organizing community outreach is one of the duties of community relations managers. By coordinating events promoting the company’s products or ideas, they distribute communications promoting the company and its people. 

Stakeholder Management

A community relations manager serves as the principal ambassador for the company, sharing its vision with the community. Besides responding to inquiries from community members and other parties, they can recruit knowledgeable spokespeople or seek other assistance whenever it’s needed. 

If you are a community manager seeking expert help, feel free to rely on the PRNEWS.IO expertise. 

PRNEWS.IO plays a significant role as a community relations manager. PRNEWS.IO is the world’s first sponsored content online store with fixed prices for publications. It provides a user-friendly platform for creating and sharing news and stories on your terms. This platform can help community relations managers secure business publications efficiently, increase awareness among potential partners and investors, boost sales, and gain link juice. It simplifies sharing news or stories, removing the need for a middleman and improving responsiveness compared to traditional news distribution methodologies. This can be particularly useful for community relations managers looking to enhance their organization’s online profile and reach a wider audience.

Community Relations Manager Salary

If you are considering becoming a community relations manager, we can assume you should be interested in the money matter. How much can you earn as a community manager? 

Brands are increasingly realizing the significance of effective community management, whether it’s across social media channels or specific platforms and support hubs. Community managers add a human touch to a brand’s online presence, which consumers and organizations value.

Studies show that 83% of consumers on Facebook prefer brands with personality. Additionally, Sprout Social reports that 21% of consumers are more inclined to purchase from brands accessible via social media. The demand for community management roles is also strong from the organizational perspective. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics report, employment for social and community managers is projected to increase by 12% between 2021 and 2031.

Although AI tools may bring increased automation to community management in the future, those pursuing this career should feel reassured. This role requires a diverse skill set emphasizing soft skills; hence, it’s likely to evolve alongside AI rather than be replaced entirely.

The salary expectations for Community Relations Managers are subject to significant variations influenced by various factors:

• Different industries may offer varying salary ranges for the same role based on industry profitability, competition, and demand.
• Salaries can differ significantly based on the cost of living in a specific area. Generally, urban areas offer higher salaries compared to rural areas.
• Community Relations Managers with more experience typically earn higher salaries than those with less experience. For instance:
  • An entry-level Community Relations Manager with less than 1 year of experience can expect an average compensation of $56,866.
  • An early career Community Relations Manager with 1-4 years of experience earns an average total compensation of $61,403

Wrapping up

If you share the skillset we’ve discussed in this guide, are passionate about engaging with people on social media and forums, and possess advanced communication and problem-solving skills, becoming a community relations manager could be your piece of cake. 

Whenever you need expert help enhancing your organization’s online profile and reaching a wider audience, consider relying on the PRNEWS.IO team’s expertise to spread the word about your brand and expand your community.