EDITOR’S NOTE: This post first appeared on LinkedIn.com.
You’ve put up a brilliant fight and the effort hasn’t gone unnoticed.
However, the daily job of managing, monitoring, and creating content for your company social channels is a daunting challenge and quite frankly, your time is best spent elsewhere.
Whether you’re a small business owner, a marketing manager, or anyone pushed into managing social, you’ve witnessed first hand how much time it takes to get social media right. If you’ve been debating (or dreaming) of handing off the social media strategy to someone, then this blog should confirm your thoughts.
Here are 4 Signs It’s Time to Hire a Social Media Agency:
1. You understand the value of Social and you’re ready to take it to the next level: It’s important that you’ve seen the potential and had some success with social. It’s a little bit like working out for two weeks and seeing results. Once you notice the top pair of abs coming in, you’re a work out machine. The same can be said for social media.
Seeing the potential there will have you ready to try new things, spend more money on contests, ads, etc, and unfortunately, all of that takes up even more time. Along with time, having experience running those new campaigns is critical.
That’s where a social media agency comes in. A company like Bad Rhino will help to grow your social communities faster and test different forms of engagement techniques to prod
uce results.
2. Ain’t no body got time for dat: Social media marketing is time consuming. To really get it right, you do need at least 10 hours per week. If you’re spending less than 10 hours, then you’re most likely just floating by, because some blog post told you that it could be done in 30 minutes a day. Yes, 30 minutes a day is enough to get by, but it’s not enough to kick ass.
Are you in the business of getting by or are you in the business of kicking ass?
3. You can’t keep up with how often social media changes: Every month there’s a major change in social media. Every week there’s a minor change. Your strategies need to adapt and I understand the frustration.
The most recent change is also the most frustrating social media curveball we’ve witnessed. Facebook has reduced the amount of eyeballs that see your content. Whether it’s done for the user or for Facebook to make money is up for debate, but we’ll let you be the judge.
The bottom line is that Facebook advertising must be part of your strategy. This means that more time will be spent on the content outline to determine how much to spend and which posts to spend the ad budget on.
Bad Rhino includes an advertising budget in each proposal. We build it in so that you don’t have to worry about spending extra.
4. You’ve tried everything: It’s just not working. You’ve tried it all. Communities won’t grow. Your views are down. Clicks are down. This frustration leads to the idea that it may be time to toss social to the side. Maybe you even feel that your business just isn’t right for social.
Not so fast. There are a number of tricks and strategies that a social media agency could try out to see if that jump starts the community. Don’t take it the wrong way, but unless you’ve been trained in social, you could be doing a few things wrong or need to tweak it up a bit.
We should chat if any of the four signs above are your current reality. Would be happy to talk through any current challenge and offer up a solution. If you’re ready for something bigger, let me know if you’re interested in Bad Rhino Social Media.
