Should a small business outsource their social media to an agency, or should they have an internal team manage it?
I have some strong opinions here, but what might surprise you is how I would divide the labor to help you get the most effective results for your small business budget. Social media isn’t a stream of content or a single skill – It requires platform setup and configuration, strategy, messaging, photos, video, graphics branding, audience configuration, budgeting and more. It can be really hard to find one person who is experienced in all of these areas, so this blog digs into what is required for each of these functions and provides recommendations on how to put together a great social program on a budget.
Social Media Functions That Are Best Handled In-House
There are some parts of social media that you just can’t outsource. It might require an insider to be authentic, need to happen in real-time or require a volume that can be expensive to outsource. There are a number of reasons to keep aspects of your social media program in-house. Here is a list of what we find difficult to outsource, along with some workarounds for small companies needing help.
Thought Leadership – Thought leadership isn’t going to come from your ad agency. It’s going to come from your internal thought leaders. To be effective on social platforms, thought leaders need to engage authentically with their audience, and it will be obvious if someone else is trying to do that for them. This usually requires a thought leader who has a legitimate desire to connect with an audience on social platforms, and may just take some training and guidance. An agency can help with aspects of a thought leadership strategy, such as video recording, editing, graphics and posting, but it should always be the thought leader who responds in their own voice.
Customer Service – For businesses that receive customer feedback through social media channels, the absolute best person to speak with them is not someone from an agency or even an internal social media staff member, but a customer service representative from inside the organization who can immediately respond and who is empowered to solve problems. This kind of staffing may be ordinary in larger businesses, but this may not be possible for a small business.
Most small businesses will need to assess the volume of customer service traffic that comes through their social media channels. Is it dozens of messages a day? That’s very different from 3 a week or one a month. What is the nature of the inquiries, and does it warrant an immediate response, or could this be managed once a week?
Here are some different ways to tackle this:
- Pair a social media or marketing person who watches the accounts daily with a customer service team member at a nearby desk so that they can work together to respond as needed.
- Train the social media team on appropriate ways to provide an initial response and then take the conversations offline by asking followers to DM more details. Then the social team can connect the user directly with a customer service rep via phone, text or email.
- For very repetitive types of inquiries, you may be able to have the customer service team create a playbook that an agency or social media team is empowered to use, with escalations happening for anything out of the ordinary.
- For infrequent and non-urgent inquiries, you may be able to have an agency monitor the accounts weekly and forward anything that comes up to an internal contact.
Team Engagement – If your company wants to use or does use social media channels to engage with internal staff and team members, you will want to have that handled by an internal team member. This type of social engagement strategy is usually something that you see in larger companies (larger in term of headcount) and part of an internal communications strategy, or even an HR-focused culture strategy.
Candid Moments – Your external agency isn’t going to catch the candid moments that happen every day within a company. Team celebrations, a client pop-in, networking events and behind-the-scenes moments will need to be captured by an internal team. With a smart phone, a minimal amount of training is all it takes to grab a great photo or video. From there, it is very possible to have an agency help with copywriting and posting. If it’s hard to get a team member to own this function, you can schedule time for an agency to come and gather content on a monthly or quarterly basis.
Social Media Functions a Business Can Either Outsource or Perform In-House
In the green box above, you will see things that I think can be handled by an internal team or external team with comparable results. To handle the tasks in-house, you will need an available team member with the appropriate experience, tools and training. For small businesses without a marketing team, these functions can easily be outsourced.
Corporate Posting – Any small business with social media goals needs regular, pre-scheduled posting. This can easily be handled in-house. A content calendar should be set well in advance, as well as a monthly approval process to review posts and a schedule.
Photography – Authentic photography is critical for successful social media. While it’s possible to be creative with stock art and graphics, showing real people in your social media feeds is important for developing virtual relationships with your users. In-house teams have the advantage of feet on the ground to capture photos in real time. Agencies can be scheduled and effective in gathering a shot list for a quarterly or monthly shoot.
Videography – Video is something that in-house teams or agencies can handle equally well. Candid or moment-in-time videos can be taken with a smart phone. Higher quality capture and editing will require specialized tools and training, but this can easily be done by someone in-house or externally. If you don’t need a full-time videographer on staff but have a marketing person you can support with tools and training, this can be an affordable way to add video into your marketing. If you don’t have someone with that capacity or background, it’s easy enough to outsource. You will pay more per hour, but won’t need to invest in equipment, training or tools.
Reputation Monitoring – Reputation monitoring is an important activity for businesses with profiles on review sites, but it can also be important for any business where customers might be talking about the business online. This activity can range from an annual review to a weekly check-in to respond to reviews and customer service issues. While an external or internal team can handle basic monitoring, high volume might warrant more of a customer service type of approach (see above). For low-volume, non-urgent responses, an agency might be able to handle the monitoring and just coordinate with an internal team member as needed to respond. When it comes to providing strategic overviews that can help business owners understand broader concepts such as sentiment and share of voice, an external team will probably have much more experience and potentially even more access to specialized tools.
Engagement Strategy – An engagement strategy involves interacting strategically with core groups of clients, partners or influencers online. This may mean reacting and commenting on their posts, potentially sharing their posts and even tagging these people and organizations in posts. While it may seem this would be better handled in-house, these relationships are not something a junior social person will be aware of or even know to ask about. The first step involves mining the companies and contacts from the key business leaders within the organization and then listening to uncover ways to develop online relationships with these groups. This will take research for anyone, whether in-house or external. Once an engagement strategy is developed, either external or in-house teams can do a great job furthering it. It just takes recognition that social is about more than just posting.
Social Media Functions That Are Best Outsourced
To understand what I feel is better outsourced, I use a rule of thumb that has everything to do with frequency. People who do things frequently are going to be better at them. For the functions that are shown in blue in the infographic above, most in-house teams don’t do these things more than once in several years, but agencies do them all day, every day. These opinions may make me unpopular with some internal marketing people who are eager to take on something new, but I have quite literally never seen an in-house team do these things well. Let me break them down.
Strategy – Social media strategy as an outsourced project will include clearly identifying specific audiences, goals, setting benchmarks for performance, developing pre-approved messaging pillars and branded templates or guidelines. It should also include a clear reporting strategy and budgeting for advertising. While new additions to a team tend to have lots of ideas and fresh perspectives, most in-house teams hit the ground running and focus on the mechanics of posting and schedules. Very few take the time to establish clear goals and an overarching strategy. They become full-time social media staff members without much direction and the results mirror the lack of strategy. If there is an internal team that is focused on the day-to-day, you can always have an agency come in to develop a strategy. Ideally, the internal person or team will be involved in the process and be able to take over once the strategy is developed.
Social Platform Setup – I have never seen an internal team member properly set up a social account. I have an employee who spends about 10% of her time fixing client social accounts. Companies lose access when employees leave because ownership isn’t clearly established. The accounts aren’t properly linked. The accounts aren’t set up in a business manager. Someone screws up and the account gets hacked and stolen. You name it. This is a real issue. Using an agency to audit, clean up or set up your platforms should not imply that your social media person isn’t competent. It just an acknowledgment that the platforms are complex and they don’t do this kind of setup every day. Once an account is properly set up, it can easily be passed to internal teams.
Branding – Businesses should evaluate the background of anyone doing their branding (internal or external) to make sure they have the required experience to make such critical decisions for a business. Branding is the foundation from which all future marketing will flow, and it is a specialized skill. It requires as much business acumen as design capability, decades of experience and frequent practice. Most in-house teams will have the opportunity to develop branding a couple of times in their entire career, whereas external agencies do this for a living and may be involved in dozens of branding projects every month. An in-house team has much to contribute, and should definitely be involved in any branding process.
Campaign Creative – Unless your business does high-volume advertising, an agency is probably best suited to develop advertising campaigns. This is their day-to-day focus, and they bring experience across channels and industries. Media companies will often roll in creative or offer it at low cost, and they also know what will be effective on their platforms or channels, but they tend to be less brand-focused. Media companies might be less effective in the branding aspect than an agency that is as focused on branding as they are on the campaign creative. This will cost extra but will also give you the ability to use the campaign creative effectively across a variety of mediums and platforms in a way that an individual station, paper or channel will not.
Paid Social Advertising – Most small business social media managers tend to be young people with strong personal social media experience. This can lead to great posting and engagement for a company, but those skills do not translate into paid social media advertising. Setting up social advertising platforms, correctly setting up audiences, determining budgets and creating effective ad campaigns is another skillset altogether that takes several years of experience to develop. If your small business will be doing paid social advertising, you will see better results faster using an experienced agency. Some functions can be brought in-house. I recommend having an agency properly set up advertising platforms, audiences and budgets, and develop initial campaigns to ensure performance expectations are met. Once the setup and strategy are in place, ongoing management can be passed to an internal team.
“For that much, I can have an internal person almost full-time”
Most small businesses look at the cost of outsourcing and think they should bring someone in-house instead of spending the money on an agency. These hires are usually fairly young and lacking in critical expertise. If you are just starting out with social media, you will see much faster and better results by outsourcing with an agency. Once the strategy is set, the platforms are set up, and the social accounts are well-established, you may be able to transition that to a junior person or have an internal person layer in some additional effort. If you have an established presence but lackluster results, it might be worth having an agency provide you with an audit or strategy to see what you might be missing.
There is a reality to running a small business, and you probably can’t afford to have a whole army of social experts in-house. But it is possible to affordably put together a great blend of people with the right expertise in each area to get the best possible results. I hope this helps you break things down and maybe highlights where you might have exciting opportunities.
If you need help establishing or improving your social media presence, we would be happy to assist you. Please contact us for an initial consultation.
