What is a community manager and what are their responsibilities?

• The importance of this professional has grown so much that there is even a specific day dedicated to them: the fourth Monday of every January.
• A community manager can be defined as the professional responsible for building and managing a brand’s online community.

When social media was born in the late 1990s, it was difficult to imagine the social significance it would acquire in so many different aspects of our daily lives.

Community Manager Day

Like social media, which is celebrated on 30 June, community managers also have a specific day dedicated to their work.

Specifically, every fourth Monday in January is Community Manager Day, with the aim of highlighting the work of those whose professional dedication involves managing social media.

In 2026, this day falls on 26 January and its origin lies in a proposal by analyst and web expert Jeremiah Owyang in a blog post in 2010.

The premise was that ‘a genuine “thank you” can mean more than an annual customer satisfaction survey’. This post became the founding argument for the day ‘to recognise and thank the community manager who may have helped you in a time of need’.

What is a community manager?

According to the IEBS, the CM ‘is the professional responsible for building and managing a brand’s online community, managing its identity and image on the internet and creating stable and lasting relationships with customers and fans’.

Communication skills, empathy, ingenuity and creativity are some of the main characteristics of this profession for which, and this is obviously no exception, training and professional experience are of great importance, even though some may think otherwise.

What are the duties of a community manager?

It is not only the most widely used social networks that require the services of these professionals, although they are the ones most used by CMs.

But what are these duties?

• – Content creation. The development, writing, recording and/or editing of content is what can be understood as a whole as content creation. This content must be attractive in order to capture the audience’s attention and has its own particularities depending on the social network on which it is to be published.
• – Interaction. Once this content is published, the CM is also responsible for responding and conversing with the audience in an authentic and empathetic manner, thereby promoting dialogue and increasing the sense of belonging.
• – Community management. In line with the previous point on interaction, building a community, as well as growing and energising it to create a productive and positive environment, is another of the tasks.
• – Active listening. Having information about the brand, the competition or industry trends is what the function of social listening or active listening provides. The aim is to understand the needs of the audience and to be able to detect crises or opportunities.
• – Analysis and reports. Related to active listening, providing analysis and reports to measure the performance of publications (reach, engagement, etc.) and to be able to adjust the strategies to be developed based on what can be extracted from the data.
• – Customer service. Other functions of the community manager include resolving user queries, managing incidents or simply being the first point of contact to refer users to the relevant departments.
• – Reputation management. All of the above functions have an impact on the management of the brand’s digital reputation.

Thus, the tasks of a community manager can be summarised as a combination of skills ranging from creativity and communication skills when developing content, empathy and a willingness to engage in dialogue with users, and the reading, analysis and interpretation of data from studies carried out to adjust strategies depending on the interests of the audience.

Frequently asked questions