5 trends community managers should expect this year

Some of the findings were interesting—community managers tend to be female in a male-dominated industry—while others weren’t all that surprising—only one in five community managers works on the agency side. Shelly Kramer shared her two cents on the report here.

As I thought about the data, a number of trends and predictions started to surface.

Here are five community management trends I predict will play out this year:

1. More brands will understand they shouldn’t outsource community management.

Brands’ early strategy seemed to be to outsource community management to agencies. This is what we saw in the “early years” (2008 to 2011 or so). We saw a lot of agencies swoop in to take over community management of brand pages. It was an easy sell (it freed up brands to work on more strategic work), and it was lucrative (billable hours, remember?).