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If you came here looking a quick answer here it is. Hire people and do it in-house, but partner with agencies for activations that are outside the scope of your internal team’s ability to execute. Now, if you’re curious as to why this is the case take a gander at the reasoning below.
Top 5 Pros of In-house Community Management
- Brand has complete control of it’s voice, profiles, online communications, and to an extent it’s reputation
- Customer service and inquiries are handled quicker and more knowledgeably
- Content, statements, changes in strategy, etc. can be executed in a moment making crisis management significantly quicker and easier
- Your community gets 100% focus and isn’t shared with 3-7+ others clients
- It is far more authentic and genuine which will be reflected in the interactions and communications
Top 5 Pros of Outsourced Community Management
- Agencies often have a whole host of people at their disposal from creative to community that can work on a campaign
- Top agencies attract top talent who put out great work
- Agencies often have access to tools and research not feasible for a small SM team
- Will have learnings from dozens of other clients and campaigns they can apply to your brand
- Get better rates on paid media, activations, and tools than you can get on your own
In a perfect world you would have all the people, talent, and budget you need to do it right in-house. But we don’t live in a perfect world so what we need to do is take the pros of each (which are the cons of the others if you were wondering) and smash them together into a hybrid model.
In this hybrid model the social profiles, social strategy, community management, social customer service, etc. come from inside of the brand. It’s handled by an internal person or team who are in charge of the day to day social executions and work with PR, marketing, corporate communications, etc. to integrate social into the company’s operations and don’t rely on an agency to keep their community up and running. However, they do partner with agencies and leverage talent, connections, and access to data that the brand might not have internally. The brand and the agency(ies) work together on larger activations, campaigns, and projects.
Building your community can be a time intense and, at times, a monetarily expensive endeavor but in the end it’s almost always worth it. If you go about it in a smart and patient way with an eye to the future you can build a marketing channel filled with your most passionate and vocal customers who have all opted in to see what you have to offer and are willing to tell their friends all about you.