You get a comment on Twitter from someone who loves your product and would like to promote it to their followers. Do you forward this to your community manager or to your social media manager? Are these even distinct jobs at your company, or does one person handle it all?

Community management and social media management are so often used interchangeably, when really they each have a unique role to play for your business. Learning the difference will help you succeed at both, while ignoring it puts all of your online efforts at a disadvantage.

Community Management vs Social Media Management

A community manager is, at heart, a builder of relationships. This person will be engaging and nurturing customers and key members of your community. They make the brand personal and they advocate for the customer.

The social media manager, on the other hand, is more of a strategist. Your social media manager should be creating and aligning social media strategies in different departments within your company. They’ll be tracking your social media successes and failures, and using data to ensure you’re always improving. And they’ll be constantly creating and curating content for social networks.

Dr. William J. Ward, Director of Education Strategy at Hootsuite, will be exploring the differences between these roles in much greater detail in an upcoming live webinar with General Assembly, Community Management vs Social Media Management.

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In many businesses there can be considerable overlap between these two roles. A community manager is a strategist, in finding the right people to target and the right way to engage them. A social media manager is choosing content that will hopefully help your community. But by understanding distinction, you can build a more effective social media team.

Together these two roles are an extremely powerful force for your business. The word together is important there. You do need someone or multiple people thinking about both sets of responsibilities and challenges. You can’t simply assume your social media manager will manage community. It’s so important to actually identify your goals and metrics for each of these roles, even if they’re managed by the same person, to ensure that you’re meeting the requirements day in and day out.

The Community Management vs Social Media Management webinar is great for those already in social media manager and community manager roles and for those looking to learn more about these roles when considering career transitions. Please join in the conversation and Tweet any questions to Dr. Ward (@DR4WARD) before and during the webinar by using the hashtag #gahootsuite.