Community Manager vs Comment Engager

Hi ​@TAMAYS! I’m a Community Manager for a mid-sized retailer, and this is a fascinating question. In my role as a Community Manager, I’m responsible for not only the day-to-day execution of community engagement (all comments, replies, and mentions, both proactive and reactive with our audience), but the strategies behind our community growth (including and not limited to influencer strategy, trend spotting, surprise and delight tactics, reporting, ambassador programs, and more). We do however filter specific inboxes where 99% of incoming messages are Customer Care concerns directly to our support teams (in our case, Twitter DMs and Facebook DMs). 

I think how you choose to divide and conquer community growth execution and strategy depends on both your goals and your available resources! Keep us posted on where you land.

I manage a Global Social team for a large B2B SaaS provider and in my experience, Community Management is that Social pro who is on top of providing timely and accurate responses to comments. Responding to comments goes beyond just regular engagement management I’d think especially if a company is outsourcing it because you truly need to know the product and/or brand to be able to provide timely responses. 

Community growth is 100% a strategy-based component for any Social pro. You should develop a common brand voice for the way that comments are in terms of tone etc. and make sure that aligns with the other social content being released. You should also have a blocked out specific time when you’ll respond to comments and I’d think as a freelance SMM you’ll want to have some sort of an agreement based on the services you agreed to offer the brand - i.e. monitoring once a week for smaller comments, or perhaps twice a day for larger clients. As a 9-5 Social Manager I monitor from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. ET Mon-Fri and also keep an eye on things over the weekend here and there but that shouldn’t be expected of a freelance Community Manager unless you’re being paid as such.