Should my business outsource social media?

It can be difficult to decide what you should and shouldn’t outsource as a business. Many different factors come into play when making this consideration, such as the cost, time, quality and much more.

Our advice would likely be different for all things relating to your business, but today we are speaking solely about social media. Running a social media platform for your respective business venture is yet another duty to tend to and take care of for the modern-day business owner. You need to be creative and have a high level of flair attached to your work; running a social media account certainly isn’t for everyone.

If you aren’t a perfect fit for social media, or simply value your time spent performing other actions in the name of your business to be a bigger priority, perhaps you should think about outsourcing. We’re here to tell you whether you’d be right to do so or not, so read on for more information about outsourcing social media.

Social media outsourcing for small business

The first big question you need to ask yourself when thinking about outsourcing your social media activities for your small business is: Can I afford to outsource to a social media management agency? Of course, it isn’t as simple as an instant yes or no and there are many checks to be completed before answering this question, but money will always be the key factor here.

You should also keep in mind that it isn’t a case of whether or not you can literally afford to pay for the outsourced work; it is just as much about if it will be worth it to you at the end of the day. Will it stop you from earning the maximum amount of money you can as a business? Will it take away valuable assets? Will it improve profit margins? You need to be asking yourself all these questions and more.

Conduct the proper research before outsourcing your social media workings to another firm or individual. You need to know if it will be financially beneficial to your company or not.

Do you have the time to run your social media? 

Running the social media channels of a modern-day business is not just a case of posting a daily update and waiting for the engagement to roll in. You have to spend a lot of time perfecting your social media strategy and putting it into action if you are going to have a fair crack of the whip and connect to your target audience in an online environment.

The extensive presence of social media is something that can be commonly found throughout most online businesses. This is because it essentially acts as a free added strand of both branding and marketing. Although, if you outsource your social media, the free element is obviously lost.

Social media management takes a lot of time and dedication in order to get it right. Do you have the time, or an employee that can permanently cover these areas? It involves much more than simply scheduling posts to go out at certain times of the day.

You will need to have the time to:

• Create content and post it out to social media
• Track engagement levels across all channels
• Respond to any and all enquiries you receive
• Develop new strategies to increase growth and followings
• Monitor ongoing social media trends within your industry
• Much more…

As you can probably tell, running the social media side of a business in this current day and age is a full-time job, so if you do not have the time or people to allow you to work on it in that way, perhaps you should consider outsourcing your social media duties. By putting the work in the hands of someone else it can save you time to do other things, such as developing new marketing strategies.

Do you have social media experience? 

Another reason you may want to consider outsourcing your social media activities is that you are vastly unexperienced in the area. If you have never ran a social media business account before and are not aware with the ins and outs of the different channels, you may be rather out of your depth.

You can’t run a social media page when you don’t know how to use it. Therefore, many business owners turn to a social media expert, to ensure that the job is being done correctly. Social media marketers will understand the importance of connecting with an audience, as well as making high quality content that is fit to be posted online. They will also be aware that your business needs to be presented in a certain way across social media platforms and they will work hard to do that for you.

You see, social media is a form of content marketing, so when you outsource your social media, you also outsource social media marketing. This is often best left to the experts who know how to rocket up engagement levels and make your brand more noticeable online. These things are so highly important today and can make or break your business as a whole.

Sometimes things are best left to the experts

Regardless of what you are outsourcing, the best advantage that comes from it is the expertise it presents to you, which you do not currently have access to. A social media master utilises the information you have of your client, combined with the knowledge of data to advance your strategies, and develop new ones.

Furthermore, getting a new viewpoint from somebody outside of your organisation can be incredibly valuable.

Rather than attempting to cut out hours every week to commit to something that isn’t inside your own wheelhouse, you could have a specialist who lives and inhales social media working for you.

These specialists keep up to date with the latest industry trends, platforms, and devices, so you don’t have to. Utilising hashtags effectively, understanding what size photograph to use on Pinterest, and knowing whether TikTok could be used for your business are just a few of the things an agency would deal with easily.

Agencies can also test different types of content with your audience and measure your return of investment. Allow the specialists to take care of their work while you sit back and analyse the progress they are making on behalf of your business venture.

Do you have content all set or do you require it?

One approach to do social media is to be totally uninvolved and let a social media firm do the entirety of the work for you, which can even incorporate making the actual content that will end up being posted across your channels.

On the off chance that you have your own content to share all ready to go, that doesn’t necessarily mean you shouldn’t consider outsourcing your social media campaigns.

If you are struggling to figure out what sort of material you need to produce to best connect with your audience or user base, it merits re-appropriating your content creation to an expert.

Your chosen expert will require a decent debriefing of your business, figuring out how and why it works, who it’s ideal and actual clients and customers are, and what sort of content materials you as of now have.

From that point, outsourcing content might be the best move for your business. You can in any case deal with the social media in-house, however without the concerns of attempting to sort out what sort of content your followers will best engage with and enjoy interacting with.

Should I stay or should I go?

To give you a fair look at all things outsourcing, here is a list of the main relevant pros and cons:

Pros of outsourcing social media

• Improved focus on core business activities – Outsourcing can free up your business to focus on other things while work is being performed in certain areas outside of the office
• Increased efficiency – Picking an outsourcing company that specialises in your industry or service you want them to carry out for you can help you achieve a more productive, efficient service, which is often of a higher standard (especially when dealing with experts)
• Controlled costs – Cost-savings achieved by outsourcing can help you release capital for investment in other areas of your business
• Increased reach – Outsourcing can give you access to capabilities and facilities otherwise not available to your business venture. This may be due to financial reasons, the location of the business, or otherwise
• Greater competitive advantage – You can get the upper hand on your competitors when using someone with expert knowledge to take care of your outsourced duties

Cons of outsourcing social media

• The progress being made – You cannot keep an eye on the work as it progresses as easily as you could with stuff that is completed in-house
• Confidentiality and security – You may come across confidentiality risks while getting other people outside of the company to perform work for your business venture
• Lack of flexibility – It is difficult to order changes to the work as it is being completed once you have signed the official contracts to outsource it
• Management difficulties – changes at the outsourcing company could lead to friction
• Instability – the outsourcing company could go out of business and leave you with an unfinished price of work; there are no guarantees to a business’ safety when you are unaware of its financial situation

The ‘should I outsource social media?’ checklist

If you are still struggling to decide whether you should outsource your social media output, here are the key things you need to ask yourself and think about:

• Are you struggling to keep up with the direct competition within your sector? If so, the social media tasks of your company being taken away and handed to someone else may help you to gain the upper hand, or at least reach the level of your rival business ventures.
• Does time seem to always be against you? If you find yourself with very little time to achieve everything you want your business to achieve, it may be because the checklist of tasks and activities are piling up too much for you each day. Not all small businesses can afford to set on endless amounts of staff members, so outsourcing may be the perfect solution for you.
• Do you lack experience in the area of social media? If you have never worked in social media before, or the online movement as a whole has passed you by, it is often a wise idea to place it into a more experienced pair of hands. By outsourcing your social media content, you will ensure it is being completed and overseen by people that know exactly what they’re doing.
• Can your business afford to outsource social media? If your budget is very tight and limited, perhaps you should worry less about handing your social media over to someone else and focus on cutting costs where you can. Possibly even putting social media on the back burner could be a solution for your company.
• Are you placing too much focus on social media? Building off our previous point, social media isn’t always the answer to a business’ growth problems. If you run a convenience store, your social media output will not be that high on your list of business essentials for instance.
• Do you have access to premium marketing tools? If you don’t have direct access to the most up to date, efficient marketing tools, perhaps moving your social media to outside of the office will become the perfect solution for you. By handing the social media activities to someone else, you will be placing your online content creation and production to a place that can help it develop and strive in better ways than ever before.

How much time do we need to devote to social media marketing? 

Chances are you’re interested in outsourcing due to time or resource restraints, right?

However, agencies aren’t mind-readers or miracle-workers. To begin with, you should expect to provide them with:

• Brand assets and creatives
• New pieces of content
• Guidance in terms of goals and KPIs

Keep in mind that as a brand, you’re responsible for establishing expectations and empowering whoever you hire.

Have we defined our brand voice and values?

Be aware that marketing agencies work with clients of all shapes and sizes. So, if your business is on the smaller size, fear not.

However, the approach given to those clients will change on a brand to brand basis. For instance, a clothing brand targeting Gen Z on Instagram is going to be very different than managing a community of older small business owners on Twitter. Each different business will require a completely different approach.

To establish your overall goal and uniqueness that will make any new employee’s job easier, defining your brand voice should be a top priority when outsourcing. Perhaps to improve the communication of your brand’s voice, you should put your venture into contact with a style guide that highlights how you could interact with your online audience.

What are our social media marketing goals? 

Simply put, you need to figure out what your endgame of what your social media outsourcing will be. Improved brand awareness? Better customer service and support? An increased number of leads and sales?

No one single answer here is wrong. However, with that being said, your answer will ultimately influence both your budget and the strategy of the agency you hire.

How much of our social media strategy is documented?

Keep in mind that there are different degrees of social media outsourcing. Indeed, some brands might need an agency to brainstorm their social presence from scratch. However, others could benefit from integrating a freelancer into an existing workflow or approval process. The more you already have documented, the better.

Do we need a fresh perspective? 

The answer here should be straightforward. That is, are you shifting your focus on your most important metrics of KPIs? If you’re not sure what those even are, you probably need a helping hand from elsewhere. Outsiders can provide you with a fresh perceptive and give your business’ social media content the injection of creativity it so desperately needs.

 

You’ll spend less time researching

It is normally a good idea to keep a watchful look out for what your business competitors are doing on social media. This can help you to stay ahead of the competition and keep you updated with the latest ongoings in the world of social media activity within your sector. This is often known as competitor analysis and it enables your business venture to compare itself with other online presences in a similar field.

If you choose to outsource your social media activities, you won’t have to do this, as your chosen agency or firm will do it all for you. This means you’ll be saving an awful lot of time that would have been taken up by researching the online actions of other businesses. Of course, there are indeed tools you can utilise to do this yourself, but the chances are, you won’t have time to go through each of their platforms and analyse their digital marketing plans.

Save yourself as much time as possible by letting another business take care of these proceedings for you; this will help to allow you to focus on other things that you possibly deem to be more pressing or urgent matters regarding your company.

Achieve the right marketing mix

As an entrepreneur, you need to augment your deals. With regards to social media, you should track down a cautious blend of sales-based tweets and tweets that offer worth to your target audience. Blog articles, measurements, pictures and recordings are for the most part as similarly significant as your business messages, so re-evaluating your social media to a group that can offset your business messages with fun, drawing in content is perhaps the most ideal approach to keep away from a timeline loaded with product advertisement posts.

Remember that you’ll need to keep your audience constantly engaged while on social media, so if you believe a second pair of hands would help you to achieve that, it may well be something that is worth investing in for you and your small business venture.

By doing all of this you’ll be able to get the right marketing mix, which is a combination of factors that can be controlled by a company to influence consumers to purchase its products.

Stay ahead of the competition

On the off chance that your rivals are posting feline recordings or, paradise restrict, utilising their online media stages to converse with their loved ones, then, at that point you have a chance to advance beyond the opposition. Working with a respectable web-based media the executives organisation can give you an edge on the off chance that you need to beat your rivals, as they will actually want to discover approaches to focus on your audience and advance your products or services such that works best.

Remember that staying one step ahead of your competition can be a rather time-consuming act to carry on with, so if you can get a helping hand in this area, you should try to take advantage of it.

Is outsourcing the answer to your social media troubles?

Still not certain if outsourcing is appropriate for you? Here are some extra of the key reasons that would lead you to outsource:

• You don’t have anybody in-house who can efficiently run your business’ social media channels
• Your office space is limited and there isn’t enough room to accommodate a social media marketing team inside of it
• None of your staff members have enough time to deal with your social media on a full-time basis
• Your business does not have the time to stay up to date with the newest social media trends and crazes

In the event that you move to a social media marketing company, you’ll be well on your way to saving time and possibly even cash. In addition, you will get expertise, advancements, and other promoting related endeavours you wouldn’t be able to otherwise get hold of.