Social Media Outsourcing – Before You Hire
Your business activities sometimes may create a lot of workload for you that you may not have time to plan and execute a social media strategy to promote your business via social media.
Therefore, you decide to outsource your social media activities. However, before you sign a deal with any social media agency and make them responsible for managing your business social media channels, there are certain do’s and don’t that you need to follow.
Do’s to follow:
- Educate social media agency about your business:
Social media agency that you choose will be your voice on Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms to outsourcing. They will interact with your customers, resolve their queries and engage them to your products/services. Hence, it’s very important that your social media consultant is aware of your business policies and understands your business well. Orient them about your brand so that your social media strategies for outsourcing are in-line with your brand. If you cannot trust them with business related queries, request them to forward any queries to you. - Warn them against “spamming”:
If a social media agency believes in cheap publicity and starts posting about you anywhere, that would give your business a bad name, stay away from such unscrupulous agencies. - Keep a tab on all your social profiles:
Ensure that your social media service providers do everything in your knowledge and are not running an account that you are unaware of. - Review the previous work of the agency for other clients:
Review the quality of work the agency has done for other clients. If you feel the work is good and a similar thing will be beneficial for your brand, the agency must be a good agency. - Make sure that social media agency will honor your guidelines:
Before you finalize the deal with a social media agency and reward the project to them, you should write down instructions, terms, and conditions, and make them read and agree to those guidelines. - See the knowledge of experts:
Ask social media agency who in their staff will be managing your social media account. Interview that person, see his level of knowledge of social media and ask him/her about the strategy he/she is planning to grow your brand’s online presence. - Demand an editorial calendar:
An editorial calendar establishes a social media strategy to optimize results and keep your content on a proactive rather than a reactive track. You should make sure that the calendar is flexible enough to add content when the need arises. - Proof-read the content on your social media pages:
You should personally review nearly everything prior to posting, not only for typo errors and other editorial errors but to ensure the content is relevant, accurate and expressed in an appropriate tone aligned with the brand. The content on your blog/social media channel should not be open to misinterpretation. Your social media “expert” may be a trained and professional wordsmith, but you should still keep a check on his/her activities because nobody can understand your business better than you. - Insist on a monthly report:
Your social media consultant should send you monthly reports, giving you insights about the success of your social media campaigns. You should know how many new likes, followers etc you have gained. Monthly Report would help you keep a track of your online presence progress. - Check if your consultants know about social media tools:
Check if your social media consultants are really the experts that they claim to be. They should be aware of social media tools like Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, BufferApp, and SocialOomph.
Don‘ts to follow:
- Do not get carried away by cheap offers:
Some social media agencies that are unscrupulous hide their clients from you and give you cheap offer to get your projects. Do not risk your reputation by falling for such offers. Always see the reviews/testimonials/feedbacks of these agencies and the work they have done for other clients. - Do not work with an agency that works with your competitor:
Do maximum research on your potential social media manager and make sure that they do not work for your competitor brand . If your competitor pays him more, he might not work for you with full dedication. - Do not wait for report:
It is good if your social media managers are ready to give you a weekly/monthly report to keep you updated about your social media progress. But you should not wait for it. Keep a check on your social media pages regularly. - Do not hire professionals who know nothing about your business:
Make sure that your social media managers understand about your target audience. . It’s only then they will be able to plan a social media strategy that can attract people you intend to target. - Do not operate without analytics:
To keep a track of what is working/not working for your social media campaign, you need to measure few metrics. A detailed data and statistics provide you insight of what you need to do and improve upon to achieve the desired results.
With these five things that should not be done and ten things that should be done, you will never make a mistake in deciding which social media agency you should be hiring to manage your brand’s social media.
