Social media marketing and community management are often used synonymously. While social media marketing and community management are closely intertwined, they’re actually separate functions.
Social media marketing, also known as social media management, focuses on channel growth. It falls on the side of strategy, content creation, and branding. It’s concerned with advertising, promotion, and tracking attribution.
Community management, on the other hand, focuses on engagement. It falls on the side of online customer service, concerning itself with creating, developing, and maintaining customer relationships. Often times, community managers create their own personas to actively connect with their online community.
The difference between social media management and community management can be simplified to strategy versus relationships. While social media marketing is customer-centric and community management is somewhat strategic, each role is still its own. However, when social media marketing and community management are synergistic, they are most powerful.
Basically, social media marketing is a way to strategize your actions to improve your sales while community management is the act of doing the actions to improve your sales as you’ve mentioned. Those seem to be quite a great feature when they are used together in sync as they both aim to improve one’s branding in the market. Personally, I would love to have both in a company if I ever start one as it would help me boost my sales and my company’s growth. Thanks!
Thanks for helping me learn more about social media marketing and community management. I actually didn’t know that the management is like online customer service and focuses on the relationships with customers. I’m a bit interested to learn some techniques that they utilize, and some tips that they may have to achieve a good relationship with customers.