Social Media Management vs Marketing: What Are You Paying For?

These terms get used interchangeably in proposals, and the difference is where a lot of disappointment originates. One is an operational service. The other is supposed to produce a commercial result.

What Management Covers

Social media management is running the accounts: planning and publishing content, scheduling, responding to comments and messages, and reporting on what happened.

It is a real service with a real cost, and its success measure is that the accounts are active, consistent and responsive. That is a legitimate thing to buy.

What Marketing Covers

Social media marketing is supposed to produce an outcome — awareness, enquiries, sales. It includes management and adds strategy, audience definition, paid amplification, measurement and iteration against a commercial goal.

The distinction is that marketing has a target beyond activity. Management can be executed perfectly and produce nothing commercially, and it will still have been delivered as specified.

Why the Confusion Costs Money

A business buys management, expects marketing outcomes, and is disappointed twelve months later. The accounts were posted to consistently, messages were answered, reports arrived monthly — and nothing changed commercially.

Nobody was dishonest. The service was delivered. The expectation was for a different service, and the proposal did not distinguish between them.

How to Tell Which You Are Being Offered

Read what is being measured. If the proposal reports posts published, followers gained and engagement rate, it is management. If it reports enquiries, pipeline or revenue, it is marketing.

Ask what happens if the numbers do not move. A management contract has no answer to that, correctly — activity was the deliverable. A marketing engagement should have one.

Which Do You Need?

Management is right if

• You need a presence maintained and have nobody to do it.
• Messages are going unanswered — see community management.
• Consistency is the problem rather than strategy.
• Social supports the business rather than acquiring for it.

Marketing is right if

• You need social to produce enquiries or sales.
• You are entering a new market or launching something.
• Current activity is consistent and producing nothing.
• You are prepared to spend on paid amplification as well as content.

The Decision Rule

Decide what you are buying before you read a proposal, and check what the reporting section measures. Activity metrics mean management; commercial metrics mean marketing.

If you are not sure whether social can produce a commercial outcome for your business at all, that question comes first — and the honest answer is sometimes no. Social media consulting is where that gets settled.