What social media should you not outsource? is a post by Fiona Powell from the blog Chiefette
As more businesses start to think about using social media, a common question (especially for the already busy small business owner) is: How much of their social media can they outsource or delegate?
Some businesses don’t have the time to manage their social media or just not sure how to manage it all efficiently.
So what social media can you outsource and what social media needs to stay in-house?
1: Social media set up – It can hours and hours (and hours) to set up your social media profiles and accounts. Customising that twitter background so it fits; adding in a landing page to Facebook, adding the right plugins to your blog… Never mind setting up some automation, adding in ‘like’ buttons, and tools like Tweetdeck. Figuring out all this takes time.
Answer – yes outsource setting up your social media – save yourself time, frustrations and get set up properly. Whoever sets up your social media accounts will need access to some of your passwords, so remember to change them later.
2: Social media monitoring and listening – Keeping an eye on conversations via twitter search or mentions via Google Alerts can be managed by others if you have chosen the right key words and have a good reporting system in place. How and when do you get notified? Right away (so you can jump into conversations); via email or report format?
But adding search feeds to a feed reader like Netvibes makes monitoring at a glance easy anyway.
Answer – possibly yes outsource or delegate to another team member.
3: Social media moderation – Moderating your Facebook pages and blogs for spam comments not filtered by your spam filters takes time and is a job someone else can do.
Answer – yes, moderation can be outsourced; if someone else manages this for you they can separate out the gems and forward them to you to reply to.
4. Social media engagement – Replying to tweets and Facebook posts and adding blog comments can really only be done by you and your team. The whole point of social media is to build relationships and trust – and you can’t outsource that.
Answer – No you shouldn’t outsource engagement.
5. Social Media content generation – A huge part of social media is creating content; conversations, dialogue, tweets, blog posts, facebook posts…. and then there’s the ebooks, white papers, videos…
The conversations and dialogues are part of building relationships and trust and again they can’t be outsourced, while creation and production of ebooks and white papers and videos can be. Blog and facebook posts are part of the conversation – and give your business a personable ‘voice’ so these need to come from you and your team.
Answer – some of your content creation can be outsourced.
6. Social media measurement – Someone else can monitor whatever metrics fit with your goal, whether that be an increase in media mentions, an increase in leads, the number of followers and fans and subscribers and so on. This will save you time collating information.
Answer – yes you can outsource measurement. This information can be easily tracked and presented as a report to you with recommendations, trends, summaries – whatever you need.
7. Social media optimisation – Promoting your various social media activity, ensuring you have landing pages, repurposing content… all takes time (and know-how) and can easily be outsourced to a professional.
Answer – yes, you can outsource social media optimisation.
The final word – social media is about giving your business a real ‘voice’ and joining in and engaging in the conversations; and only you and your team can do that.
