“Should I Outsource My Social Media Strategy?”
That’s a good question. Stop me if you’ve heard this one but the answer is:
It depends
- Do you have someone on the internal team with experience implementing a social communications strategy?
- Are you confident that someone internally is well-versed enough with the currently available tools?
- Does he/she understand how your audience behaves online, and if not, can they figure it out?
- Is the internal team member able to clearly explain the choice of social media sites to use? (“Everybody is on ____” doesn’t count.)
- Is someone on the internal team trying to design a social media strategy, or are they designing a strategy for generating business value…using social media and social communications tools? There is a difference.
To outsource or not to outsource?
There’s no easy answer to whether or not you should outsource your social strategy. But in the end, the determining factor is the same as with any other business decision:
Is anyone inside our company capable of doing this as good or better than an external specialist?
- Some companies choose to handle organic search engine optimization and paid search internally.
- Some hire graphic designers and handle the work themselves.
- Some develop their own website in-house.
But for those companies that try to handle it internally and either hit a roadblock, or find themselves without sufficient knowledge, outsourcing the strategy is probably a good idea.