Reinvent Yourself as a Freelance Community Manager

Welcome to the Reinvent Yourself series! In each of these posts, we will handle a different freelance career: An activity typically performed by professionals who want to work on their own terms, who don’t want a boss but high-quality customers, and who want to choose when and where they work. This post is all about freelance community managers. Let’s get started!

What does a freelance community manager do?

A freelance community manager takes care of all social media accounts of her customers. They can write posts on social platforms, answer questions or comments, and try to create and maintain a relationship with their social media network users. Although their tasks are different, community managers are often also known as social media managers, who are rather in charge of creating social media strategies. For the sake of uncomplicating things, I’m going to use both terms indistinctly.

Reinvent Yourself as a Freelance Community Manager — *This post may contain affiliate links at NO cost to you.*

Some examples of freelance community managers’ work:

Writing posts for different social media networks, like Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter.
Uploading images on visual social media networks, like Instagram and Pinterest.
Creating video content for Instagram or TikTok.
Scheduling all social media activities on social media tools, like Hootsuite or Planoly.
Tracking and analyzing all social media activities related to the brand they’re representing.

Some additional notes about freelance social media managers’ work

Working on social media marketing can drive you nuts if you don’t have a plan, so you’d rather test some social media scheduling tools before choosing the one which you feel more comfortable with. Take advantage of the free testing period they usually offer!
After choosing your social media scheduling tools, create a strategy for yourself. How will you distribute your time to serve – hopefully – so many customers??
These posts about social media strategy may help: 3 Steps to Manage Social Media without Going Cray-Cray and How to Choose the Best Time-Saving Tools
The key factor to having great success as a community manager is having good organization talent AND high doses of communication and diplomatic skills. Think of social media trolls! You have to be well aware that you’re the voice of your customer, which means that you’ll have to think twice before you hit publish.

Equipment I need as a freelance community manager

Good PC or laptop, and a smartphone
High-speed Internet connection – You’re going to have to be online A LOT.
Social media scheduling tools. Choose one of them, but get to know all of them! You don’t want to get caught uncharged!