These days, social media is no longer just an option. If your brand or business isn’t on social media by now (and taking it seriously), you’re missing out on lots of brand recognition and revenue opportunities.
It’s not enough to have a pretty Instagram feed or post laughable GIFs to your Twitter page. Strategic social media management allows you to have an active dialogue with your audience—and this can be a game-changer for your business. When done right, social media management can give a boost to your digital marketing strategy and even increase revenue for your brand. Don’t believe us? Here are a few stats you should know:
39% of Facebook users follow business pages to get offers.
60% of users on Instagram discover new products on the platform.
Companies that use Twitter average 2X more leads than those that don't.
62% of companies using LinkedIn for marketing have acquired a customer from it.
While many CMOs recognize the importance of social media, most are still trying to go at it alone. Sure, you can run your own social media management, but you risk falling into the all-too-often worst-case scenario: losing money while damaging your business’s brand. More often than not, having a team of experts will prove to be a much greater resource for turning social media into dollar signs for your business. With algorithm changes across platforms like Facebook and Instagram, it’s becoming increasingly harder for brands to be heard in a crowded social media space and hiring an agency can provide you with a team of experts who understand the technology, terminology, and tools needed to guide you down the right path.
We’re sharing the benefits of hiring an agency for social media management, what questions to ask before you take the plunge, and how to get the most out of your partnership so that you can take your social media game to the next level.
3 REASONS TO HIRE AN AGENCY
1. SOCIAL MEDIA KNOW-HOW (SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO)
Wrapping your head around the different features, ad formats, image requirements, and other nuances for each social media platform can be a headache if you don’t know what you’re doing. Rather than trying to figure it out yourself, an agency can do the legwork for you, preventing you from making sub-par social media campaigns or having to make sacrifices on other important marketing work. Trust us, the difference shows.
Agencies know:
Best practices across different social media platforms
How to create compelling social content that creates engaged communities
Vital skills like social listening, content writing, and graphic design
How to best maximize your budget to help you meet your business goals.
Having this guidance will not only boost your social media presence but also help to level up your own team’s social media skills and clue them in on the inner workings of successful social media management, making them even more valuable for your business.
2. CREATIVITY THAT FLOWS LIKE A RIVER
Effective social media is about standing out in a loud, crowded room and if you’re saying the same thing as your competitors, your message will just go unnoticed.
Agencies can analyze your previous social media campaigns, perform audits, and look for ways to create quick wins and returns while also developing a long-term strategy.
They can also evaluate your competition to see what could work best for your company’s brand and how you can go further to make an impact in your industry. Agencies offer tried-and-true social media strategies that generate success as well as edgy content and campaign ideas that can captivate (and keep) your audience. Having specialists who do this kind of work every day can help you keep new and creative ideas flowing in—so that your social content stays fresh and engaging.
Bonus: By working with an agency, you’ll also likely get access to a wide range of premium paid tools that are vital for social listening, scheduling posts, reporting, and analytics.
3. GUT CHECK FOR WHAT’S DOPE...AND WHAT’S DEAD
Nobody wants to be that brand posting old memes, dead challenges, or emojis that most people associate with sexual innuendos (now you’re wondering if you know them all, aren’t you?) because they’re not keeping up with the times, right? Truthfully, it only takes one bad social media post to completely taint your brand’s reputation. Hiring an agency can help you avoid social media pitfalls and blunders that could cost you thousands of dollars or hurt your brand’s reputation. Agencies are trained to stay on top of trends and capitalize on buzz at the right time. Your social media posts will be more timely, tasteful, and on-message, saving your business from a potential PR nightmare.
QUESTIONS TO ASK BEFORE HIRING AN AGENCY
Anyone can write a tweet or boost a Facebook post, but building strong brands through strategic social media management is an entirely different ball game. If you’re a CMO, here are some questions to ask before hiring an agency to help you root out the genuine experts.
WHAT RESULTS HAVE YOU DELIVERED THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA?
Let’s be real: no one can guarantee results like a certain amount of sales or followers through social media. However, an agency should be able to give you a general idea of what outcomes you can expect with your budget based on previous campaigns, whether that’s increased website traffic, higher engagement, more conversions, etc. When recruiting an agency:
Be clear (and realistic) with your social media goals.
Dig into how the agency plans to use social media to meet your goals.
Set expectations early on.
Get the agency to walk you through a specific campaign or activity and ask for details on the decisions they made, lessons they learned, and what the ROI was.
Go beyond a surface-level account of the social media efforts and get them to really drill down into the specifics so that you can get a good understanding of what they’ve previously accomplished and what’s possible for your brand.
HOW DO YOU MEASURE SUCCESS ON SOCIAL MEDIA?
Successful social media management focuses on reach and engagement. If an agency simply mentions vanity metrics like fans or followers they’ve gained, you can be sure that your campaigns won’t translate into increased brand awareness or help drive revenue for your brand. Sure, new followers can offer some helpful insight into how well your social channels are performing, however, they won’t mean much to your CEO demanding to know the ROI of your brand’s latest big campaign. Metrics like engagement, click-through-rate, web traffic, organic reach, paid reach, and conversions are a lot more meaningful.
Ask the agency to tell you what social metrics matter most to them and how they plan to track them. It’s super important that your agency takes the time to review your analytics every 4-6 weeks so they can identify what’s working (and what’s not), determine whether they’re meeting your goals, and make adjustments to strengthen your social strategy and content.
WHAT IS YOUR CONTENT DEVELOPMENT STRATEGY?
Social media management requires lots of different moving pieces so be sure to dig into the agency’s content development strategy and process. Some content development questions that you should ask an agency include:
What type of content do you plan to create for our social channels?
Do you plan to leverage our blog posts, videos, or other branded assets?
Do we need to send relevant industry news or will you find it for us?
Are you able to create custom graphics?
How frequently will you post content?
Will we get to see social posts before they go live?
Answers to all of these questions will not only let you know what you’ll be responsible for and how much time you’ll need to invest as you start working together, but also ensure that the agency has the knowledge and capacity to do everything that’s needed to create those stellar social posts that will really make your brand shine.
DO YOU HAVE EXPERIENCE CREATING AND MANAGING PAID SOCIAL ADS?
Many social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram are pay to play now. If you’re interested in using social media to help maximize your reach, drive conversions, generate leads, or reach targeted audiences, you’ll want to use paid social ads to supplement your organic social media management. Ask if the agency has created paid social ad campaigns with multiple ad versions and if they have experience with targeting and testing. Make sure that you define how much budget will be dedicated to paid social ads as well as how often the agency will run them.
MAKING A SUCCESSFUL SOCIAL MEDIA TRANSITION
Once you’ve settled on an agency for social media management, it’s time to hand over the reins. There are a few steps you can take to ensure an easy transition so that your social presence stays active, secure, and accessible to your team and the new agency.
SCHEDULE A KICKOFF MEETING
Set up an initial meeting with the agency to ensure that you’re aligned on the social media goals, messaging, content development, and review process. During that meeting:
Set expectations and workflow process
Discuss social media strategy
Review brand tone, voice, style conventions
Confirm industry hashtags
Decide on the cadence for posting.
If there are any helpful resources that the agency can review to get familiar with your brand ahead of content development, be sure to share those with them. Make sure you provide the agency with your brand guide so that they have your logos, brand color codes, font codes, etc. to help them with creating any graphics for social content. Provide them with a list of approved industry publications, relevant topics, and branded assets so that they’re clear on the types of content they can leverage and let them know if there are specific topics or competitors that you don’t want to highlight on your social channels.
GIVE ACCESS TO YOUR SOCIAL CHANNELS AND TOOLS
For platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, you’ll need to add the appropriate agency team members as Admins in order to give them access to the pages and start posting. For platforms like Twitter and Instagram, you’ll simply need to share the login credentials with the agency members. You can use a password manager like LastPass to do this safely and securely. If you use scheduling software like HootSuite or Buffer, be sure you provide them access to those tools as well.
ESTABLISH A PROCESS FOR SOCIAL CONTENT REVIEW
While some businesses may prefer not to spend time reviewing social updates before they go live, it’s an important step in quality control. Ultimately, you know your brand best, and reviewing content before it’s published ensures that all your messaging is on-brand.Discuss how the agency will share ideas or new social content, and how you will review and approve upcoming posts. We’re long-time fans of Airtable because it offers a flexible, robust way to organize content. With the Grid View, we’re able to easily lay out upcoming posts, show the date for publication, post copy, accompanying graphics, and website links. We also use a “Status” column to indicate whether content is ready for review, needs changes, is approved, or has been scheduled to post. We’ve found that this helps create a seamless content review process.
If you’re like most CMOs, you have lots of other responsibilities on your plate. Hiring an agency can provide your social media presence with the undivided attention it deserves and give you the support you need to help your business scale rapidly.