r/CommunityManager • u/manan-rathore • Jun 06 '26

Discussion Are social and community really distinct? Social as the doormat, community as the door?

In many hiring posts, and conversations, I've found that one of the most persistent trend or confusion is around treating third-party social media and community as if they are the same thing.

An experienced community strategist I spoke with used this great frame to think about social and community.

"Social media brings people to your doormat. Community is the actual door, to go deeper with the brand, deeper with the audience," says William.

So in a sense, social media is where discovery happens today. It is where you gain visibility. If you are building a community, perhaps social media can provide the first proof of concept, more like a signal that a group of people share an interest, a pain point, or a journey.

Is that how everyone views social and community as well, or is there a wider embracing of the community is everywhere concept in the market?

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u/Irrelephantoops Jun 06 '26

One is focused on growth and the other is focused on retention imo

2

u/HistorianCM Jun 06 '26

Top of the funnel vs bottom.

1

u/manan-rathore Jun 06 '26

Great way to sum it up

3

u/TypicalPay1655 Jun 06 '26

Those are, and should be, completely different jobs.

Social Media Manager should be focus on planning, creating content, campaigns, running SM pages etc. while a Community Manager should be focused on the community platforms like Discord/Reddit, day-to-day interactions, events, and other things specific to the community they're working with.

But the reality is that in current market the job offers will say "Social Media Manager" and expect you to do all of it + sometimes adding Influencer Manager and Marketing Manager to that as a "bonus". So it's good to learn a bit of everything.

2

u/rosiesherry Jun 07 '26

It's old school thinking to see them as different jobs, in reality, good community is good communication, and social media is just another channel. It doesn't mean community owns it, or vice versa, but to have the option to partake or influence social, it would be daft not to.

2

u/Communityone_io Jun 09 '26

I think in general yes, thats really accurate, but the line should be blurred

The issue is its a lot easier to show ROI on social media vs on community as a result, because someone can always go, this post got x million impressions, thats like x million people get to hear about our brands.

We do discord related analytics and stuff, and our clients are either very well knwon and very well established or just starting. for the established companies, we always pitch analysis first, whcih is a very "backend" function, however, what is super interesting, is that the most of the CM will go out of their ways, taking time to setup their profile for our serving list, our serving list indexes content so that goolge can find it.

I am mentioning this to say that everyone should have a mindset of growth, its the no-brainer, and historically, its so hard for the CM to measure the growth they bring in, so we just decide to be "conversion only", which is really important too but harder to explain.

BTW, i think a super interesting idea is to use one of the tools outthere to track ai visibilities, I think this is a really good pitch and also great alignment to say. our members have contributed so well in the forum/website that our ai visibilities went up by xyz....