Outsourcing Social Media Management

Yes, you know that social media is out there and you want that your customers find you and your products online, so you just need to do it. Unfortunately, social media is not something that you just do -couple of minutes here and other two minutes there, without a strategy. As any other part of your communication, media relations, and marketing activities, social media deserves respect if you want to see results. In fact, social media requires time and brain investment and especially, your availability to react fast, perhaps faster than when we talk about the traditional channel.  

So if you have no time for Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, you don’t feel very confident with these channels, or you have no intention to hire a full time person for this role, your best option is to outsource your social media management. However, sorry for disappointing you, your job does not end there when you sign your contract with a social media freelancer or with an agency. This contract is just a commitment to work together building your brand and even taking your selling activities to a new level.

What to do when outsourcing your social media management?  

- Find an agency with team members who actually know what they are doing. The social media channels speak by themselves, check the people’s activities and the agency’s previous campaigns: what kind of content do they prepare? How they act or react on the channels? How they look like out there?

- After finding the agency, the most important is to let them do their job. Give the agency they right tools, information and contacts to get seeds for their content. Your agency has to be supported by a variety of people with experience in your particular industry and company, especially at the beginning. They will not able to generate genuine content if they don’t get the basic knowledge from the company. Or they will not be able to generate content if you need to approve all their work, word by word, and you have no time for that.

- Delegate a social media “manager” inside your company who will manage your relations with the agency, and especially who will make sure that they get all the info that they need for preparing the content. Your social media manager does not need to be the full time doing this job, you can use for example your PR, Marketing or Communications to do this. However, remember that social media management requires time, so considering this with assigning the tasks/role. 

- Organize regular “content” meetings in which people from your company can share ideas and your agency can show regular results - what works, what doesn’t...how to improve. In other words, constructive meetings. The meetings are very useful for your agency to get to know more about your company, your products, your people and your company culture.

Try new things and fail. This is the only way how you and your agency will know what actually works out there, for example in your industry. The good things is that social media is more affordable than the traditional channels which means that if you fail you will not go bankrupt

- Connect your agency activities with your employees’ social media actions. In addition to training your personnel on how to use the channels, you need to connect the inside (your employees) with the outside (your agency) so your brand is shown as a one and only one brand. Your inside social media manager might help you synchronizing these “two parts”.   

Manage your expectations and be realistic. It takes time to create engagement on the channels, so don’t expect miracles in a week. Monitor and measure often.

Outsourcing social media management can give you access to a talent pool of people with a full disposition to manage your channels at a lower cost than a full time employee. A good social media company will work hard to develop a voice for your brand that works, however, if you leave this social media agency relationship abandoned on a pile of paper on your desk, you are at risk of creating an inconsistent brand, or nothing at all. So remember, if you work with an agency, make them “part of your team” and give them what they need to make your brand to shine.