Whether you’re a small business or large, your website will fall short if you don’t leverage social media to drive traffic and brand awareness.
Social media is the perfect tool for sparking interest in your brand when potential customers search online. It is one of the best ways to increase exposure and website traffic, but only with the right strategy. This is why using social media to market your business has become an enormous part of many companies’ marketing strategies.
But, managing social media can quickly become a time suck that leaves you feeling burnt out. Also, you might not understand how to do it effectively, especially if you are the one responsible for it.
If you don’t have sufficient time or resources to handle your social media marketing, outsourcing it might be a better idea. Social Media Outsourcing is a way for businesses to make the most of their social media campaigns and open another floodgate of potential customers.
Brands are increasingly leveraging social media platforms to acquire & engage more customers – with nearly 20% of global brands investing in professional services for this.
So, you might be asking: How can I build scalable website traffic from social media?
This article explores multiple ways to utilize social media outsourcing to scale your website traffic from social media.
Table of Contents
Social Media Outsourcing can help your brand in many ways:
Building Engagement and Brand Awareness
Social Media Outsourcing will help build engagement with your audience by sharing content that is engaging and interesting. This can be done by answering questions that are relevant to your industry or sharing news stories that are relevant to your industry.
Building Relationships with Influencers
A social media outsourcing agency will have experience working with influencers in their niche and understand how to build relationships with them. Most importantly they will know how to reach out to these influencers without looking like they are only interested in them for their following.
Sharing Content That Converts
Social media agencies specialize in social media marketing, so they already know what types of content convert on different platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. They also know how to create content that converts and how often this content needs to be shared for it to reach its target audience.
Tips For Outsourcing Social Media Management
Go In-House Or Outsource?
You may have heard the phrase, ‘you make your money when you buy.’ This is true with real estate and it’s also true with building a business team.
Hiring the wrong person can be expensive. It takes time, energy, and resources to hire someone and the cost of replacing that person if they aren’t a good fit can be even more expensive.
When we talk about social media marketing, sometimes people say, ‘anyone can do it,’ which is not true. It’s important to find the right people to manage your social media marketing efforts. There are two main options for staffing your social media marketing: hiring in-house employees or outsourcing to an agency or freelancer.
Outsourcing social media is a hot topic right now.
In the past, large companies like Starbucks and Ford had in-house teams (10+ people) running social media. Now it seems like everyone from small businesses to large global brands is handing off their social media marketing to agencies and freelancers.
The reason for this trend is simple: social media marketing is becoming too big for an internal team to manage with any degree of efficiency at scale.
In-House Social Media Management Team
The biggest advantage of having an in-house social media management team is that you will have direct control over who manages your accounts and what they post. This gives you the ability to have total control over the look and feel of your brand image on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
However, this can also be a big disadvantage.
If you are a business owner who doesn’t have time to manage the day-to-day operations of your social media accounts, chances are you will not have time to manage the day-to-day operations of your own employees.
Maintaining a social presence is one thing; maintaining employees can be an entirely different ball game. Having an in-house team also comes with other costs such as employee benefits and paid sick days.
Managing your social media accounts in-house can cost you as much as $120,000 per year (assuming you have a team of three people working full-time), or you can outsource the work for as little as $3,000 per month.
That’s a big difference!
However outsourcing social media management has its pros and cons.
Pros:
- Cost-Effective: It is more cost-effective to outsource your social media marketing than to hire in-house staff.
- Expertise: Expertise is a very important factor when it comes to handling social media marketing for your business. Social media has become very complex and uses advanced tools to promote. Outsourcing ensures that you get an expert in the field who will handle all your needs.
- Time Management: Outsourcing social media marketing allows you to manage your time effectively as you concentrate on other aspects of the business without having to worry about the social media section of the business.
- Effective Strategies: Outsourcing social media marketing gives you access to experts who can provide effective strategies for your business, which will help promote it through social media networks
Cons:
- Language and Cultural barriers: One disadvantage of outsourcing is that there may be language and cultural barriers that may affect communication between you and the outsourced company, especially when dealing with international companies in different countries with different cultures and practices.
- Loss of control: Another disadvantage of outsourcing is that sometimes you might feel like you have lost control over how things are done, especially when the outsourced company has more expertise than you.
Find The Right Outsourcing Partner
While social media monitoring tools can help you analyze what is happening online, you must be able to have a plan in place for how to get the most out of this information.
By hiring a team of social media experts, or outsourcing to a freelancer, you can control the entire process. This way, you know that every social media post is being done by someone who knows your industry or niche and will react in a way that will make your business look great.
There are pros and cons to both options:
– If you work with a reputable agency, they have the resources to handle a wide variety of tasks to help keep your social media accounts up-to-date. They may also have the same skills for other clients so it saves you time and money.
– Outsourcing to a freelance person allows you more control over what needs to be done and when it needs to be done. You also need not worry about an employee getting distracted from their job duties.
– Although hiring freelancers proves to be a cost-effective method, they are also relatively more unreliable than agencies.
– Agencies sell and promise you the services of a knowledgeable founder or marketer, but the execution is from someone in their team who is paid less and is probably not equally qualified. So, quality may not match the billed amount.
Set The Right Deliverables
Social media marketing is a matter of trial and error. There are no formulas, templates, or proven strategies that will guarantee success. It all depends on your target audience, the social media platform you choose, the time you spend on it, and other factors.
If you want to outsource social media marketing, it’s important to set the right deliverables.
When outsourcing social media management, it is important that you set accurate and attainable goals with specific deliverables. This will allow you to hire an expert or a team that can help you maintain and grow your social media presence. It also improves the chances that these specialists will provide the most value for their cost, as they won’t be working on projects they aren’t suited for.
My first recommendation would be to hire someone who already has experience in social media management. They will have their own systems in place and know exactly how to get things done.
The second step is to get very clear about what you want to achieve with your social media.
If you don’t have a clear goal, then you can’t possibly create a plan that will get you there. By being specific and clear, you’ll be able to give your outsourcing partner a much easier time at creating content that actually converts.
It is important to measure the performance of the right components as likes and shares don’t mean anything if they don’t contribute to business growth — sales, leads, etc.
Some examples of goals anchored to worthy components could be:
- Build brand awareness and engagement
- Grow an email list with people who will buy later on
- Drive traffic to a particular product or service page with sale ads
Project cost management clearly affects the project success factor.
To manage it well, split the project cost into fixed and variable costs.
Fixed Cost is based on the number of posts, creatives, etc. that your outsourcing partner creates and publishes whereas Variable Cost is based on the performance of those assets and how they helped you get closer to the defined goal.
Also, it’s important to split the project into marketing and post-sales since a lot of social media engagement is also related to customer support. It’s crucial to set benchmarks for NPS (Net Promoter Score) and Customer Satisfaction Ratings.
Use The Right Tools
“I feel the need — the need for speed!”
You’ve heard this line before. You know what it means.
Speed is important in lots of areas of life. It’s important when you’re playing sports, driving your car, or even just trying to get somewhere on time.
It’s also important when you’re doing social media marketing.
An important part of successful social media management is that you choose the right tools for the job. As a business owner, you’re probably already familiar with many tools and how to use them. But when outsourcing your social media management, it’s important to use tools that make it easy for your outsourcing partner to get the job done quickly and efficiently.
When you have multiple stakeholders (creative producers, marketers, etc.), create a common dashboard for your team to house all stakeholders under one roof and run the project seamlessly.
If you’re investing in multiple social media platforms, the above strategy helps you handle distribution across these different platforms if they are handled by different freelancers.
Also, you need to get clarity on who handles the tool cost. Is it included in the project fee or do you provide the tools that your outsourcing partner needs?
Handle Billing Like A Boss
One of the biggest problems that small and medium business owners have when they outsource social media management is billing. The process can be complex because there are so many things to consider: the services rendered, deadlines, payments delivered on time, rates, and so on.
Let’s take a look at some of the most common billing methods for outsourcing social media management. These include:
Retainer
A retainer is a fixed monthly fee for a set amount of work (e.g., three tweets per day). This works best for smaller businesses that don’t need more than a few hours of work each month. It also works well for agencies that want to pay services such as PPC or SEO in bulk but don’t want to keep track of their individual accounts’ spend.
Per hour
This is the most common method for professional service-based companies such as designers or developers who need their clients’ hours tracked for billing purposes (and tax reasons).
The biggest advantage of hiring a freelance social media manager on an hourly basis is scalability. It means that they can work as much or as little as needed without needing to renegotiate the terms of your contract every time there is a change in scope or requirements.
Fixed price per project
Hiring a freelancer for a project means that you are paying for specific deliverables. These deliverables can be anything from detailed reports to analytics, white papers, infographics, etc. For businesses that need something more certain than hourly work, I advise them to go with this model.
It’s also important to have a digital contract with an electronic sign with your outsourcing partner before beginning your work relationship as it is legal in most jurisdictions these days. A legal contract protects you from any funny business that a freelancer or an agency might pull. It also helps keep you and the outsourcing partner accountable, and achieve goals faster and in a more responsible fashion.
I hope you enjoyed my article on social media outsourcing. Social media outsourcing is growing as more and more companies begin to experiment with this method of growing website traffic. Social media can certainly be an effective way to get your message out to the public and we will likely see even more growth in the near future.
Let me know in the comments below. If you have any questions, I’d love to help you out.