Are Community Managers One-trick Ponies? Or Will Brands Survive on Instagram and Pinterest

Community management. The job of fostering and sometimes even creating a whole new community around a brand. It started with Facebook and Twitter – with a lot of words or at least 140 characters. Now there’s Instagram and Pinterest – images rule! But can community managers be decent photographers or are most of them just one-trick ponies?

Community management took off with the new generation of social networks, specifically Facebook and Twitter. Both, but especially Twitter, are based on text. Funny statuses that make your followers laugh. Smart statuses that make your fans think. Oh, and comment, and like, and retweet. To be successful on Twitter and Facebook a lot of the time means to be witty. To know how to write the right thing. Write.

You Don’t Know How to Take Stinking Photos

Now. We have Pinterest and Instagram. Both are said to be the next big thing or at least the next big social network (with some claiming that Instagram is on course to eclipse Facebook) – yet they are not based on text, on statuses or tweets. Both Instagram and Pinterest are based on images, although you can add a comment which does add context. The witty community managers will find space to write interesting comments to accompany their images, but will the images themselves be interesting enough?

…and we come to the problem facing community managers who want to get their brands on Pinterest and Instagram. The images have to be both interesting in good. Better than good. While community managers might have a feeling for taking an interesting photograph, it’s not something all of them naturally know. They’re not photographers after all. Jeremiah Owyang, social media analyst at Altimeter and author of the Web Strategist blog, agrees that photos might pose a challenge:

Yes, as In general, all content quality must be elevated as nearly everyone is in the content creation game.

So What Will CMs Do?

The good thing about most community managers is that they are self taught. There has not been a lot of community managment workshops so ost of them have played with Twitter and Facebook on their own. Today they play with Pinterest and Instagram, 2 social networks that don’t even have official brand profiles yet. Oh wait, Twitter didn’t have official brand profiles until just recently.

There was a time when Facebook fan pages didn’t exist. When Twitter was only launched… and community managers found their way. They will have to adapt accordingly to Instagram, Pinterest and any other social network based on photos. Learn how to take a proper photograph, learn how to take photos of cars (if you work for Ford) or photos of children (if you work for Pampers), learn how not to have blurry portraits and how to properly retouch images on your phone – Instagram filters can only do so much. Hiring a photographer for specific shoots won’t be a day-to-day solution either.

So it’s off to photography school for you, or at least digital-photography-school.com. The good thing is that the real community managers will once again take hold of the industry, showing that you need to learn new skills along the way. Marketeers whose definition of “community management” is “having a lot of likes” will not manage. Good. What a Kodak moment – now only if they needed community management as well.