Many companies are outsourcing their social media marketing programs. Although participation in social media sites is free, your time and your staff’s time certainly is not. Can you afford the time it takes to keep up with a blog, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube videos, and LinkedIn with its many groups?
Even more important, if you dedicate a staff member to this endeavor or decide to handle it personally, do you know what you’re doing? Can you get real, trackable results, because if you can’t, your time and money is being wasted.
For many firms, the solution is to outsource the work. This could be a blogger experienced in SEO writing. It could be a marketing whiz who knows Twitter,Facebook and a million social sites you’ve never even heard of, and all the various strategies for using them successfully. It could be an agency who will set up all your social sites and run the whole program, soup to nuts. Or it could be someone to teach you how to do it yourself.
All of these things are dependent upon your needs, your goals, and of course, your budget. Perhaps you’ve considered hiring an intern, such as a recent college grad. Although most college kids today know social media very well, that doesn’t mean they have any idea how to market on it, so simply hiring a kid out of school is not necessarily the best use of your money.
However, if you armed your recent college grad with Thumbonomics: The Essential Business Roadmap for Social Media and Mobile Marketing, and told him or her to digest it thoroughly and follow it, you might indeed have hit upon an affordable way to keep your social media marketing in-house.
Chapter 15 of the aforementioned Thumbonomics tells you everything you need to know to decide whether to outsource your social program or handle it within your walls – or any combination of the two. It doesn’t have to be one or the other!
Some of the things you might definitely want to outsource are professional profile photos and videos, management of productivity tools to track engagement or ROI, or custom backgrounds for your social pages.
If you do decide to handle social media yourself, either personally or with an intern or marketing manager, Chapter 15 lists essential trainings and conferences that will teach you how to do it right.
To handle your social media marketing like a pro, here are some of the conferences and trainings we recommend:
- • sexysocialmedia.com
- • blogworldexpo.com
- • digidaysocial.com
- • schmoozd.com
- • socialmediastrategiessummit.com
Check out Thumbonomics for a full listing. You can order your copy here. By the way, although the Findability Group is a full service internet marketing agency, one of our favorite things to do is train business owners or their staffs how to “do it yourself.” Give us a call if that sounds like it would meet your needs.
Heather Lutze
Author, Internet Marketing Speaker and Consultant