What You Need to Know – InstantFollowerz

From 2024 86% of SOCIAL MEDIA marketing say that building an active and engaged online community is key to a successful SOCIAL MEDIA strategy.

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If your company is looking to build or grow its SOCIAL MEDIA community, you’re probably wondering which approach is better—community management in-house or outsourcing.

Fortunately, I have years of experience in both and can offer some advice based on what I learned working in-house and later for an outsourced marketing firm.

Here’s what you need to know.

Contents:

In-House Community Management

Outsourced Community Management

How to choose between internal and external community management

In-house community management is when an internal employee or team manages community relations between the brand and its audience, especially on SOCIAL MEDIA.

For example, when I was a journalist in First Coast News in Jacksonville, I was part of a team of reporters who ran First Coast Weather Watchers, a Facebook community page that the station began to better connect with its audience.

Image source

Like the rest of my team, I was already an in-house employee at First Coast News, so we would be considered in-house community management.

Outsourced community management is when an organization has its own online community managed by an external sourcesuch as a freelancer or a marketing firm.

Before working at HubSpot, I worked for a marketing firm writing content for clients’ websites.

We also had a team that managed our clients’ SOCIAL MEDIA pages and interacted with their community. This would be external community management as our team was employed by the marketing firm, not the clients.

According to ContentFacOutsourcing SOCIAL MEDIA marketing (which includes community management) can cost anywhere from $3,000 to $20,000 per month, with an average of $4,000 to $7,000 per month.

If that sounds too much for your budget, consider hiring in-house.

Expertise

It was easy for First Coast News to form an in-house community management team because we already had the necessary expertise.

Most journalists have already honed the skill of connecting with their community and are quite SOCIAL MEDIA savvy (which is how they often get leads for their stories).

On the other hand, my clients at the marketing firm were usually business owners unfamiliar with SOCIAL MEDIA marketing and didn’t have time to build their online communities from scratch. So they left it to my company.

Ask yourself if any employee or position in your organization could easily be used to manage the SOCIAL MEDIA community. Is there anyone who is SOCIAL MEDIA savvy?

Do they know the intricacies of Facebook, X, Instagram, TikTok or other platforms?

Can you hire someone to work around the house?

If not, consider outsourcing.

Control

Finally, you’ll want to consider how much control you’ll give up. Okay, back to the news example. Trust and a positive reputation are gold for any newspaper company.

Their audience needs to know that the information is accurate, reliable and comes from a trusted source.

Outsourcing SOCIAL MEDIA community management would mean entrusting our reputation and the trust of our audience to another organization, and those factors were simply too valuable to gamble with.

So we stayed in the house.

However, my clients at the marketing firm were not news outlets and did not have to adhere strictly to the principles of journalism. Again, they weren’t very SOCIAL MEDIA savvy and could use some extra help to bring their vision to life.

So, they entrusted the company where I worked with my vision and community management goals. That meant working with writers and marketing managers and trusting our process.

If you are comfortable leaving control in the hands of a marketing firm, freelancer or outsourced manager, then outsourcing may work for you. If that seems like too much of a risk, consider managing your community internally.

Both internal and external community management have their benefits, but it’s up to you and your organization to decide which approach is best for community management success.

Now that you know the differences between the two approaches and what factors to consider, you’re one step closer to deciding which way to go with your internet marketing campaign. Good luck!