Leyl Master Black has an interesting article on Mashable.com that asks Should You Outsource Your Social Media Efforts? (note – The article is no longer available on Mashable.)
Leyl poses four questions to consider when deciding whether or not to outsource your social media activities:
- Can effective social media drive your business growth?
- How well is your social media working today?
- Could outsourcing free up your time to focus on business operations?
- How do you measure ROI?
In addition to these questions, I would add one more – Which parts of my social media activities should I outsource?
Most articles that I read about outsourcing social media address it as if it is an all-or-nothing proposition. I don’t know if this is because of how social media service providers package their offerings or the mindset of their buyers (probably a little of both). Many activities go into using social media as a marketing tactic. Some of those activities are better suited to outsourcing than others.
Here is a scenario that I see played out every day. Business owners who want to learn more about social media will often spend their own time figuring out how tools work and setting up their profiles. It takes time and effort to get set up and get to the point where they can start making connections, having conversations, and building relationships. However, when they get to this point they are often mentally fatigued (it takes energy to learn this stuff) and\or they have to get caught up on all the tasks they put on hold while they where “learning social media”, so they look to outsource their social media activities.
Viewing this scenario with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, it seems backward. It would have made more sense to outsource the mechanical work (i.e. setting up profiles) and used their time and attention for the higher-value activity of engaging in conversations.
A while back I wrote a post about the building blocks of a marketing tactic where I discussed this idea of looking at the different knowledge and skills needed to implement a marketing tactic. I like to use this as a framework for deciding which activities as best outsourced and which should be performed in-house.
If you are deciding whether or not to outsource your social media, remember you also have the option to outsource some but not all of your activities.
