There are essentially two options for supporting social media posting, engagement, and reputation management. One option is to assign an employee the responsibility for posting, monitoring, and engaging with customers through social media. The other is to engage a contractor to do this work.

The benefits of having an employee support social media efforts:

• An employee can make instantaneous posts. If you want a post about a certain product/service/event posted that very same-day, an employee who is currently on site can post it as it occurs.
• Your employee already knows your business’s culture and operational procedures and can respond quickly to check-ins, comments, questions and reviews using personal knowledge of the business.

The benefits of contracting with a digital marketing professional:

• A professional already has the skill set to create engaging, well-written, and edited content.
• A professional can leverage experience gained through providing social support for other businesses and apply it to the needs of your business. They know what works in each platform.
• A professional will be less likely to rush and make misstatements, spelling mistakes, or grammatical errors.
• A professional has more experience in measuring and reporting results so that leadership can make informed decisions regarding the return on investment of supporting each social platform

The cons of having an employee perform the work:

• Most employees are already fully employed with other tasks. Adding this work to their plate is likely to cause stress as priorities must be more closely managed and this can produce less than optimum results in either their existing work or this new work.
• Not all employees have the skill set to write and edit engaging posts and short tweets, take good photos, and respond to customers who may be less than happy. While many employees know how to use social media as a consumer, most do not have experience using social platform tools that are only available to businesses.
• Employees are more likely to use internal language and acronyms and forget to explain things at a lay level that is more accessible to the public.
  Some employees are too close to the processes to be able to handle customers who use social media to denigrate the business. This can result in responses that are too detailed and sound defensive and less professional.
• The cost for building and maintaining skills in posting and managing engagement in each platform is fully borne by your business.

The cons of having a contractor perform the work:

• Requires a separate contract.
• It takes time for the contractor to learn the business’ culture, language, and procedures.
• Still requires an employee of the business to provide some direction, help with scheduling, and overseeing the contractor.

Social media marketing can have a high return on investment. It’s worth having someone do it right. You’ll see the difference it makes in reach, engagement, and conversions.

If you believe you have the right person in-house with sufficient capacity to do more, we can help that employee improve your social media work! We will gladly train your employee(s) to post specifically for your company and how to respond to check-ins, comments, and reviews in social media.

If you do not yet have that employee, we are happy to become part of your marketing team and staff your social media support needs until your business grows to the point that you are ready to bring the work in-house.