Committing to any form of outsourcing in simplistic terms means you have to pay for a service. Yet Social Media Examiner’s 2011 survey found that over 72% of marketers still retain in-house control of social media campaigns.
So why consider outsourcing some elements of your social media activity when the whole point is supposed to be about personal engagement of prospects and customers and the creation of deeper relationships?
By paying for external support with your social media you will have to:
1. PLAN: Outline what you want to achieve to a third party which means you will have to provide a written brief detailing what you want social media to do for your business.
2. GOALS: Set objectives that will give you something to frame your activity within, to work towards and to evaluate your success against.
3. ROI: Deciding how success is going to be measured helps to quantify what the return on investment your management can expect to see.
4. CREATIVE: You may not have the creative spark (the big idea), technical expertise (to translate dry product information into high impact lead generating content) or in-house resource to develop a relevant and durable social media campaign.
Going through the process of explaining what you plan to do opens up your plans to scrutiny, which brings clarity. And whilst bringing in the experts naturally creates an additional cost, managed well, you may just execute sharper, focused more creative and more relevant social media campaigns as a result.
Image: Tom Fishburne
