As of 2024, 86% of social media marketers say building an active and engaging online community is critical to a successful social media strategy.
If your company wants to build or expand its social media community, you're probably wondering which approach is better—in-house or outsourced community management.
Fortunately, I have years of experience in both and can give some advice based on what I learned working in-house and later for an outsourced marketing firm.
Here's what you need to know.
Table of Contents:
Outsourced Community Management
How to Choose Between In-House and Outsourced Community Management
In-House Community Management
In-house community management is when an internal employee or team manages community relations between a brand and its audience, especially on social media.
For example, when I was a journalist at First Coast News in Jacksonville, I was a part of the team of reporters that managed First Coast Weather Watchers, a Facebook Community page the station started to better connect with its audience.
As was the rest of my team, I was already an internal employee with First Coast News, so we would be considered in-house community management.
Outsourced Community Management
Outsourced community management is when an organization has its online community managed by an outside source, such as a freelancer or marketing firm.
Before working at HubSpot, I worked for a marketing firm that would write content for clients' web pages.
We also had a team to manage our clients' social media pages and communicate with their community. This would be outsourced community management since our team was employed by the marketing firm rather than the clients.
How to Choose Between In-House and Outsourced Community Management
Here's what I notice most companies consider when deciding between in-house and outsourced community management.
Budget
Let's go back to my TV station example. Most local television news stations have a very tight budget, so it made sense for leadership to keep community management in-house.
In contrast, the companies I worked with at the marketing firm had a bigger budget and could afford to outsource community management. So, when choosing between in-house or community management, consider your budget.
According to ContentFac, outsourcing 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 like a stretch for your budget, consider hiring in-house.
Expertise
First Coast News easily formed a community management team in-house because we already had the needed expertise.
Most journalists have already honed the skill of connecting with their community and are pretty social media savvy (that's often how they get the scoops for their stories).
On the other hand, my clients at the marketing firm typically consisted of business owners unfamiliar with social media marketing and didn't have the time to build their online communities from scratch. So, they outsourced to my firm.
Ask yourself if any employees or positions within your organization can easily lend themselves to social media community management. 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 in-house?
If not, consider outsourcing.
Control
Finally, you will want to consider how much control you will relinquish. Okay, back to the news example. Trust and a positive reputation are gold for any news outlet.
Their audiences need to know the information is accurate, reliable, and coming from a trustworthy source.
Outsourcing our social media community management would have meant entrusting our reputation and our audience's trust to another organization, and those factors were simply too precious for us to gamble with.
So, we stayed in-house.
However, my clients at the marketing firm were not news outlets, and they did not have to strictly adhere to the tenets of journalism. Again, they were not very savvy with social media and could use the extra help to bring their vision to life.
So, they entrusted the firm I was working for with their vision and community management goals. This meant collaborating with writers and marketing managers and trusting our process.
If you're comfortable placing some control in the hands of a marketing firm, freelancer, or outsourced manager, then outsourcing could work for you. If that seems too big of a risk, then consider in-house community management.
Both in-house and outsourced community management have their perks, but it's up to you and your organization to decide which approach is best for the success of community management.
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 in your online marketing campaign. Good luck!
