Partner Article

Outsourcing social media: who should have the keys to the digital kingdom?

There is a constant debate around social media and the true benefits to businesses that use it to engage with their audiences.

However, as a small business owner there are so many plates to spin, surely social media can be outsourced or delegated?

As a digital PR agency, we are often approached by business owners who want to hand us the key to their social media kingdom, it is seen as another thing on the “to do” list that can be done bigger/better/faster by someone else.

Social media is a hugely powerful communication tool and can transform businesses, brands and people but it needs to be consciously considered. It needs full buy in from the entire team including the business owner.It’s your shop window and your customer service rolled into one and it needs to be recognised as an essential part of the running of a business.

A social media strategy should be created by the business owner or a senior bod in the business. With regards to prioritising workloads, the day to day running of social media accounts can be looked after by someone else but only with a thorough briefing, an approved plan and timely checks from the senior team.

Devising a strategy for SMEs primarily involves understanding the objectives. Consider what the business needs to achieve from using social media? For example more business leads from LinkedIn or an increase of website traffic via Twitter? It may be that the overall objective is to raise the business profile, but have this in mind before you start.

Another key element within the strategy is establishing your audience; this will help you determine the content shared, tone of voice and the regularity of your communication. This is crucial as without identifying where your target audience is and what they want to hear, your messages may fall on deaf ears.

Content is king when it comes to social media. To build engagement you need to have something interesting to share whether this is about your business, the industry or local community, offering something new and insightful to your audience will help those all-important relationships.

An often-forgotten part of the strategy is choosing the right platform. Once you’ve established an audience and know what you’re going to say, it will be easier to determine which social media channel you should be using.

Many businesses think they should be on Facebook but in actual fact their target audience is much more likely to spend time on Pinterest or Instagram. Facebook is also becoming increasingly more difficult to be seen without paying for advertising or boosting posts.

Consider if you have the budget to support a Facebook account if you decide this platform is right for you.

If you have a B2B service you may want to be targeting industry specific professionals who are active on LinkedIn. Take the time to research your audience and this will lead you to your chosen channel.

When all the plans are in place, it’s important to be able to measure the success of the social media posts, tweets and updates.

There are plenty of monitoring and evaluation tools that are free to use which will help any business consider if their time investment in social media is worth it.

Using dashboard services such as Hootsuite allows a user to access one website to post updates and monitor engagement across different platforms. With in-built analytics, it’s simple to track the success of particular shares or campaigns. Platforms such as Hootsuite or TweetDeck allow posts to be scheduled in advance, where this might be necessary.

Make the most of services such as web-shortening links (e.g. bitly.com) to track clicks to specific links on your website in order to measure an increase in web traffic via social media – particularly if you are focusing on specific areas of the business or website.

Platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn offer free insights into the success of your posts – from the number of people it has reached to how many it engaged with. These are great tools to utilise when monitoring the success of a social media campaign or post and will help to develop your strategy once it is clear what your audience want to hear.

As small-business owners we have a tendency to want to do everything ourselves but social media is often the learning curve that is too steep for someone with better things to do. But such an important and influential communication tool cannot be ignored and it’s worth taking the time to put a plan in place in order to reap the rewards.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Verity Clarke .