There is a big debate on the social media scene regarding outsourcing social media, and it's a pretty big one right now. It's almost like the debate over having a nanny to watch your children. That issue has been hotly debated for decades, but has a lot of key similarities to outsourcing your social media managment.
One of the key issues within the child care debate is the issue of having someone else raise your children. The similarity to outsourcing your social media content is uncanny. Your children will be raised by someone other than you only if you let that happen. And the same goes for social media management. Any sought after nanny will tell you that they do not take over the role of parent, but rather partner with the parents. That's just like successful social media outsourcing. With successful social media outsourcing, just like with having a nanny or child care provider with the parents as partners in raising the children, the small business owners partner with a social media consultant to successfully manage their brand online.
One of the main reasons why partnering is so important in outsourcing your social media brand management is that the key to social media success is all about engagement. If you're not engaging your friends and followers, you're just talking to yourself. And that means you're not gaining customers which translate to revenue.
Real social media engagement takes time and a great deal of strategy, something many small business owners don't have a lot of. But just as having a child care provider help you with the responsibilities of caring for your children, outsourcing your social media can help you with aspects of your social media branding. It is not a magic pill, however. It still takes a level of involvement and commitment from the business owner in conjunction with the expert social media consultant.
Completely outsourcing all of your social media without the involvement of the small business owner is akin to taking your reputation and flushing it down the loo as my friends across the pond would say.
Because a great deal of our business is social media management, we're often asked what can be outsourced successfully. With our clients, we insist on their involvement as a commitment to their own social media brand management. Here's some ideas of a good outsourcing strategy for your social media presence:
Scheduled weekly updates on interesting, fun content or upcoming events or promotions. Having good continuous content is critical to establishing your expertise on the social media networks. You can schedule quotes related to your industry, great articles or links (make sure to use your bit.ly link shortener) and upcoming events are all items that can be scheduled ahead of time. You can easily outsource this to be written for you and sent to you for approval and loading onto an update scheduler like tweetlater.com (socialmediaoomph).
Once you identify key influencers in each network (Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, etc.), you can outsource monitoring of these influencers. There are many applications that can help you organize your influencers lists so you can easily identify the conversations that will most likely influence others in your industry. This can help you easily identify what conversations you need to participate in via replies and retweets. Adictomatic (adictomatic.com) is a great social media tool, giving you a dashboard of mentions on SMM channels
Blog articles and posts can easily be outsourced. If you only have time to write one article per week, outsource two others on fun topics that can be written by someone else. Or, if you don't even have time to write one article per week, concentrate on topics that are important to your field. Put your own twist on a quirky title and outsource the writing. Once you get the article back, add a paragraph of your own to it to make it in your own voice. You can either post the articles yourself or outsource the posting of your articles for a better flow of content. Having a good mix of video content (either yours or youtube videos that you can create articles on as illustrations) and written content will help your search engine rankings immensely.
Whatever you decide to outsource (or not) be sure that whatever you do is consistent, informative and fun without being offensive. And if you're short on time and are looking to what you can outsource, keep in mind that you need to be active participants in your brand management. Otherwise, who's brand is it?
Link to original post