Make The Right Move: Who to Hire for Your Social Media
Chances are you’re on at least one of the many social media platforms, and you’re not alone—69% of the American population have a presence on at least one of them. And as a business owner, you also understand the need to get your company out there so by default you also know you’ve got to get on social media.
Where do you start? Facebook has the highest number of users while Twitter’s demographics are largely college educated and live in cities. If your brand does well visually maybe you can benefit from YouTube’s viewership or Pinterest where close to 40% of the users come from a household earning 6 figures. Maybe you’re a restaurant and can’t decide if managing a Yelp account or posting on Instagram is more your speed.
Sounds daunting, right? With so many different things to take into consideration, like demographics, managing engagement and establishing a presence, it can be a challenge to decide which platform is for you.
Ideally you’d start with a series of goals and determine from there what to focus on. Next would be forming a plan, followed by enacting that plan, all while running your business. If you think this sounds hard, it can be. So your options would be to pick from the following three:
- Continue to do your social media by yourself.
- Hire an employee to run your social media accounts.
- Hire an agency to take over.
I’ll list a few of the pros and cons to each of the three to help you decide which option is best for you.
Hold Up, I Got This
Running your own social media accounts can be fun. You have complete creative control of everything that has to do with your account. You get to take all the pictures, create the videos and of course write all the copy. And to top it all off, it’s the most cost effective method of all the three because you don’t have to pay anyone else to do the work. Best of all you know your brand better than anyone else so promoting your brand should come naturally.
Some of the cons to running your own accounts are that you would have to do all the posting, engaging and content creating, along with running your business. If you’re not that social media savvy, you could also be posting at times when you’re not being the most effective, thus falling into the “screaming into a loud room” problem many people fall into.
We’ll Add to the Team
So maybe running your own social media accounts is not the best option for you, but you still understand you need to have a presence. So, you decide to create space in your team to hire an employee to specifically focus on social media. You now have an employee whose main purpose is to attract new customers, increase the engagement, and represent your business online. They’ll be an employee of the company so they’ll understand the voice and culture of your business and be able to create a consistent voice.
Sounds dreamy, right? Now for the other side of hiring an employee exclusively for your brand. For starters they’ll be only focusing on your brand. Which sounds great but in the long run it can be exhausting to create multiple exclusive posts for each platform and handling all the content creation alone. If your company is small that could mean that your employee will likely run out of work to do. They’ve also got to learn the company culture and establish and create a voice, which can take time. Hiring a new employee is expensive, and if you don’t know what you’re looking and what qualifications they have, you could be looking at a financial loss.
In Agency We Trust
If you’re busy running the day to day operations of your business and don’t have time to run social by yourself or hire someone in-house then maybe hiring an agency is the choice for you. There are many benefits of outsourcing to an agency. For starters if you’ve done your research, you can trust that the agency has built a team that has the skills you need to achieve the results you’re looking for. They have a dedicated staff whose purpose is to know social media like the back of their hand. They have also typically invested in social media management software, which allows them to understand the metrics and numbers that go into making your brand be the most successful it can be. Lastly all that content creation is now handled by them. They create the photos, video and write the copy all for you.
But they’re an agency… it’ll feel like you’re trusting your baby to a group of people who might not get your brand the way you’re trying to envision it. You’ve got to trust them to be the visionaries and to promote your brand with little to no hands-on interaction from you. Researching and interviewing agencies can take time, but in the end it pays to find a right agency that you vibe with well.
Last Words
Ultimately this is a decision you’re going to want to think about thoroughly. You want what's best for you and your company so you’re going to want to look at these pros and cons and see how they match with you. Maybe you have some questions about social media or would like help in certain areas like Facebook ads or Influencer Marketing. If you’re ready to reach out to an agency let’s start the conversation and get working on your vision today.