How to Outsource Social Media Marketing

One of the first things that many entrepreneurs like to outsource is social media.

Social media can be powerful if used correctly – but often isn’t the best use of your time.

When you outsource social media, you can be sure that your channels are up to date, your content is being consistently promoted, your customers are being engaged, and your brand is kept active and alive.

In this article, we’ll show you exactly what you need to know before hiring a social media manager.

Why Use Social Media?

Social media can be a powerful tool when used correctly.

Social media allows you to amplify your message and make a connection with your customers (hence “social” media).

It can also be a powerful discovery engine for customers to find your brand. They may even find your social channels before your website.

And on top of that, social channels can act as social proof that you’re a real active company. For example, Facebook pages promintenly feature page followers / likes as well as reviews.

If you choose to outsource social media marketing, you will want to spend a bit of time developing your brand and voice standards.

The freelancer that you will eventually hire will need to understand how to speak, the language to use and the image to portray, and that needs to come from you.

Think about your target customer – What problem are you helping them solve? What style appeals to them?

For example, marketing to mothers may look and feel a lot different than marketing to older men looking to retire.

Identifying this target avatar can help you hone in on the types of posts you’ll make. The more detail you can clarify about your brand, the more successful you will be when you outsource social media marketing.

Picking Your Target Channels

Where does your target market hang out online? If Facebook is where most of your ideal clients are, you probably don’t want to waste your time, energy and money promoting on Linkedin.

If your products and services are best displayed visually, you may be interested in focusing more efforts on image / video platforms like Instagram.

There are so many social media channels to choose from. While it may seem like a good idea to promote across them all, you likely don’t need to.

Typical Responsibilities Of A Social Media Manager

So what can a freelance social media manager actually do?

Here are some of the most common tasks you can outsource:

Creating & Optimizing Social Media Accounts

It may be a good idea to set up your main accounts yourself for security reasons so that you are 100% in control and the owner of the account.

But after they are set up you can give you social media manager access and they can optimize your accounts including:

• Adding cover photos
• Filling out company information
• Uploading photos and videos
• Adding your first few posts

Creating A Content Calendar

Creating a social media calendar will allow you to set the rules on how often to post, where to post and what type of content to post each time. This is something that your social media manager can help set up and collaborate on.

The great thing about a social media calendar is that it is a living document. It may take some experimentation to find out what works best so feel free to start out with a simple plan and tweak as you gain valuable data.

Creating & Scheduling Posts

Your social media manager can create and schedule posts ahead of time, vs. logging in every few hours. This can dramatically help reduce the time spent on creating social media.

Programs like Buffer allow you to not only create a social media calendar, but also post to multiple channels at the same time.

Moderating / Responding To Comments

The point of social media is to be social, so your social media manager can monitor for comments and make sure everyone gets a response!

Creating Simple Graphics & Social Share Images

Spruce up your profiles with attractive images to promote your blog posts, sales, reviews, and more.

Quick tip: One way to make sure everything looks great is to hire a designer to create some image templates for you in a program like Canva. Then your social media manager can modify the templates when you need new content.

Prospecting For Parnters or Leads

Another common task for a social media manager is to prospect channels for potential partners or leads. They can either send messages to start an engagement or collect a list for you to review and reach out to.

Monitoring Results & Reporting

Over time you’ll want to monitor progress to see what is working and what’s not. Your SMM can give you simple reports and walk through how your strategy can progress over time.

For example you may want to analyze:

• Which posts got the most views or engagement
• Which type of content is getting the most reach between video, images, links, etc
• Are there certain days of the week or times during the day that get more reach or engagement?

Setting Social Media Goals

In order to make the most out of social media marketing, you must have clear goals. And these goals will look different based on your business.

An online coaching business may have very different goals with social media than an Amazon marketplace store. It is up to you to come up with your goals and provide them to the freelancer.

Do you want to grow your email list? Grow your private Facebook group? Drive traffic to your website? Make direct product sales?

Come up with concrete goals and give them to the freelancer. With specific goals in mind, the freelancer can determine the strategy and follow key metrics to determine the most effective way to reach your goals.

What To Look For In A Social Media Freelancer

There are lots of different types of social media managers.

At the basic level, you can hire someone relatively inexpensively to just keep your channels updated, share your content, and post statuses.

If you want to take it farther, you might consider hiring someone to actually create content, reach out, and engage your audience and represent your brand.

It’s important to determine your goals first so you know how to judge applicants.

With that said, there are a few things you’ll want to look for in particular when interviewing social media managers:

1. Organization skills: With multiple accounts, post types, content, comments and more, social media can get complicated quickly. Make sure your social media manager is well organized and has a plan & system for execution.
2. Great written English: Social media management is often outsourced to countries like the Philippines where English may not be the freelancer’s first language. Because they will be creating posts on social media to represent your brand, you’ll want to make sure that they have excellent written English (not just spoken English)
3. Creativity: Social media is all about capturing attention, so your social media manager will need to be creative as well as analytical.
4. Social & Customer Service Skills: How do you handle disgruntled customer’s comments and negative reviews? You’ll want to make sure that your freelancer can respond with empathy and win customers back.

Other Roles You Might Consider Hiring

If you already have a strategy in place and you’re looking for executors to fill in the gaps, you might also consider hiring for the following roles:

Content Writer

Content is the core of online marketing, so if you create great content, you can seed it across nearly any channel. But the first step is actually creating the content.

Consider hiring a content writer that can create blog posts, sales pages, product descriptions, and more. After this content is created, the writer can pass off to a social media manager to schedule out.

Video Editor

A video editor can take video content and re-purpose it for social media. For instance, you may have a long-form video that goes on YouTube. A video editor can take that content and chop it into smaller chunks to post to other channels like Facebook or Instagram.

Graphic Designer

If you want to keep your brand on point, consider hiring a designer to make templates for your posts. A designer can create templates for all things social, and your social media manager can just modify them with the content.

Working With A Social Media Freelancer

Even with a skilled freelancer working for your business, you must monitor and check-in frequently, especially in the beginning.

You will want to set up an initial onboarding and dive deep into the materials you’ve provided, your expectations and strategies moving forward.

Set up weekly meetings (weekly 1 on 1s) and ask the freelancer to provide data in certain key metrics.

Together, analyze the data to see where things are going well and where things need to be adjusted. Remember, social media is an art. It takes time to perfect.

Conclusion

Social media marketing can be a tremendous value to your company because it allows you to reach more customers where they like to hang out online.

By outsourcing social media, you can maximize your time to focus on what’s important, while making sure your channels stay up to date!

If you are ready to outsource social media marketing, feel free to set up a short meeting with us to find out how we can help find the perfect resource for your business needs.