If you answer “no” to any of these questions, it could be time to outsource your social media efforts.
Social media marketing is its own beast that requires special attention, creativity and time. Without a proper social media marketing strategy that includes audience insights, community management, content creation and reporting, you could be missing out on the possibilities that social media marketing can present to you and your business. There are many reasons why outsourcing your social media can help your business. If you answer “no” to any of the following five questions, you may want to consider social media outsourcing and working with an outside agency.
1. Do You Have A Social Media Strategy In Place?
If you are looking to build an online presence without a social media strategy, you could be missing out on key insights that will help guide your marketing efforts and indicate how certain content is working. Creating a powerful social media strategy requires specific research, a strong understanding about how different audiences interact with social media platforms, and agility to test and refine.
2. Are You Posting When Your Audience Is Active?
Another important part of social media is knowing when your audience is most active. It’s critical to have an understanding of what content works best for your brand, the specific times of day and week that your audience is online, and any growth you see after posting certain content. Each platform has a certain algorithm in place of how/when content gets shown in the feed. If you don’t have a basic understanding of when your audience is most active, you run the risk of your audience and potential customers missing that post you spent hours creating altogether.
Tip: Figure out when your audience is most active by analyzing your content and its performance. For example, after creating content for your business page, and try posting it at different times of the day for two weeks. Then, use Google Analytics or go into the platform to review the periods when you had the most traffic to your social channels. These insights can be helpful because you’ll know when your audience is present on social platforms.
3. Are You Carving Out Time to Engage With The Community?
Engaging with your audience is a no brainer if you’re hoping to see growth and build loyal customers. People use social media to connect with the community and to find businesses they want to support. When it comes to community management, you should be regularly carving out time participating in discussions, finding new ways to interact with your community as well as listening and responding to customer feedback. These all take time but should be an important part of your overall social media marketing strategy.
4. Are You Creating Tailored Content?
Not every piece of content will have an impact. Creating tailored content that will attract, surprise, and delight your ideal audience and existing followers is the secret ingredient. Your content should be created with your audience in mind, not with your objectives in mind. When thinking of what content to create, don’t just post to post. Instead, focus on quality content pieces that aim to teach, solve a solution or provide your audience with something new.
5. Are You Running Regular Reports?
Without data, you have zero insights into what’s working and what’s not in your digital marketing strategies. Whether you want to see how your overall performance looks on social media, or how a certain piece of content performed, social media reports provide data to help monitor, analyze and improve. Some benefits to running social media reports are:
- Better understand your audience
- Determine what content works best
- Discover which social platform is the best for brand
- Analyze and monitor social media-specific metrics
Planning Your Growth
How many of these questions did you answer “no” to? Handling your business’ social media marketing strategy is a complex process that involves multiple aspects, which can be hard to carry out when you have other responsibilities to manage.
Want to gain a better understanding of where you stand in your social media efforts and where you can grow? Take a look at our Maturity Model benchmarks, developed by VSSL’s subject matter experts. Using this tool, you can plot the most direct course for incorporating best practices into your own operation.
And if you still have questions or need additional support when it comes to social media outsourcing, don’t hesitate to get in touch with our crew.