We live in a virtual world. The emergence and presence of social media has changed the way businesses capture the attention of their targeted audience.
A study by Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business showed that the marketing budget allocated to social media marketing initiatives is projected to increase to 22.4% in the next 5 years.
Companies are increasingly outsourcing social media activities to outside agencies, growing from 17.4% of all social activities in 2014 to 18.9% in 2016.
There are more and more companies that are dedicated to providing social media management services and this drives business owners to face a critical decision:
Should I manage my strategy and presence in social media or should I hire an external social media management company to do it? And if I do, what tasks should I delegate and which ones should I keep?
There are many factors when deciding if this approach is the best for your business. That’s why we want to help you. This checklist will let you know if you are making the right decision.
1. Does anyone on my internal team have 6 to 20 hours of capacity each week to manage social media?
Social media management can be time consuming. If your marketing team has good leadership, you can spread the workload across multiple people. However, you will not be able to escape the high investment of time and energy that is required for everything to work properly.
2. Does my company have the budget to invest in social media management activities?
At this point you have to consider costs. Analyze how much money you would have to spend on a full time employee to handle your social media efforts, plus healthcare benefits, equipment, paid vacations and training costs.
To reduce costs it may be interesting for you to analyze hiring a virtual marketing assistant overseas.
3. Does my company target a national or international audience?
There’s a big difference between managing a local social media presence and managing social media on a global scale.
Social media efforts are far more effective when creating local content that’s relevant to a small geographic area.
If your target audience is scattered around the world or even across the country, you need to consider how you will compensate for individual local communities.
4. Is the social media management company that I intend to hire able to speak my company language?
Communication with clients or prospects through social media channels is fundamental.
Before hiring a social media management firm you should be sure that this company knows perfectly the products or services you are trying to sell. In addition, it must understand your company’s values, mission and objectives in order to speak the same language.
Now that you have answered these questions, maybe you are clearer about whether or not to hire a social media company to manage your social media efforts.
This subject should not be taken lightly, as we said at the beginning, we live in a virtual world and everything that is done in this sense has to be taken with responsibility and hard work.
If you’ve decided to hire a social media management company or a virtual assistant to manage your social media, you need to know exactly what to delegate, because there’s a specific service that you should never outsource.
