As a community manager, you would know firsthand how tedious and time-consuming a lot of the tasks are that you do on a daily basis. There are MANY community managers I know who would LOVE to have a personal assistant to help them out!
ChatGPT has gained a lot of interest, notoriety and controversy this year. The “haters” state that the prompts are irrelevant, inaccurate or are just not sophisticated enough for their needs.
I always love trying out new tools to understand from a practical perspective whether they are useful to community managers.
I also consider myself an optimist, knowing that tools evolve over time and can improve SO much (especially as users submit more feedback to developers).
In my experience using ChatGPT this year, I have found that when used right this tool can be incredibly tool. I’ve used it to help me with tasks that I used to struggle with in the past (or took me a very long time to get through it – or even worse- burning through my community budget!).
I’ll break down some of the ways I have found ChatGPT to be useful specifically through the eyes of a Community Builder/ Manager/ Strategist.
Using ChatGPT to help with content/ writing
COMMUNICATION TOOL: Emails, blog posts, welcome messages to new members, social media posts.
The first way ChatGPT can help you is through communication. As community managers, we need to compose emails, blog posts, social media posts… there’s a ton of writing involved in being a community manager, even with welcoming new members and onboarding messages.
All of that does require your time to think through what those messages should look like, what should you include, what should the tone of that message be like, are you including things around your vision and mission, making sure your branding is on point. You could be hiring a writer to help you with all these tasks, but with ChatGPT, you can use this tool to help you save time writing what you need and then you can just edit accordingly.
TIP: If you’re not happy with the responses ChatGPT is giving you, it’s worth taking a look through the prompts you are giving it. Prompts should include who your audience is, what tone of voice you want (should it be professional or casual for example), how long you would like the writing to be (e.g. succinct or essay structure) etc. There are many ways to improve the outcome from ChatGPT so keep this in mind if you’re not happy with the first result.
You can actually ask ChatGPT to create a welcome message for your community, providing information around who your community is for, what language to use, tone of voice, values that are important such as inclusivity, and important messaging that should be covered. You could even ask to include community house rules based on the industry standard for online communities.
Think of ChatGPT as a community manager’s assistant. It can help you create blog posts, just give it a topic, and you’ll see it come back with incredible responses. Of course, it may not be perfect first go with ChatGPT, it may take you a while to get used to using this assistant, but that’s like a human being as well.
Using ChatGPT to answer questions
MODERATION TOOL: Help you answer community questions (including ones that require experts) - use this with caution!
Next, you can use ChatGPT to assist you with answering questions that have come up in your community.
As a community manager, we all have been there with some of these scenarios:
– You’ve got a moderator team that is completely overwhelmed and struggling to keep up with support
– You’re a team of one and really struggling to answer some of the more technical questions in your community ( I know for instance this would apply a lot to devrel managers where they can input into chatgpt the issue with code and chatgpt will come up with some possible solutions!)
– You can’t find anyone within the community that can help answer someone’s question
ChatGPT can help you out with all of the above!
You can use ChatGPT to provide quick and accurate responses to even the most technical questions around coding and other topics. This can save you a significant amount of time trying to research to find answers to questions or asking around your community. ChatGPT could really help you save the day here, and you can also further edit ChatGPT’s response.
I would say to be the MOST responsible community manager you should mention that ChatGPT has helped you with answering these questions.
For example, you could say “Hi <community member name>, this is a great question and it looks like no-one here has been able to answer your question yet! In the meantime, I’ve actually used ChatGPT to see if there were any solutions to your issue, and here is their full response <insert ChatGPT response>. I hope that helps get you started. Would be great to know if that is helpful. or if you’re still seeking help.”
Now remember: ChatGPT is only as good as the prompts it receives from you! When you receive a response to a question that you’ve asked, if it’s not quite the right tone of language that you would use to reply to someone in a community, make sure to ask ChatGPT to edit their response/ reword the answer and see if you can get closer to a better response.
Using ChatGPT to start conversations
CONVERSATIONAL TOOL
You can use ChatGPT to help you find ways of encouraging conversations within your community.
It can be challenging to come up with conversational starters, and you may spend hours trying to generate ideas for questions and prompts to keep the conversation flowing and the community engaged.
ChatGPT can be used to help generate ideas for topics, questions, and conversational starters, saving you time and effort.
Final Thoughts
To skeptics who think that ChatGPT is not sophisticated and wouldn’t be able to help them, I would say that you need to learn how to use this tool.
There is a saying “rubbish in, rubbish out” and this definitely applies to ChatGPT.
You can get more out of this tool if you learn how to write prompts properly.
There are definitely tricks to doing this more effectively and I’ve included those in my ebook, along with more resources for you to read further about it.
And if you prefer to watch me talk about this on video instead, here’s my Youtube video on ChatGPT: