Remember your last birthday? All those posts people wrote on your Facebook wall, all the tweets with good wishes just for you? Nowadays, the new way of saying happy birthday, aside from old school phone calls, is posting good wishes on social networks. If you intend to answer all of them, it might just take you a whole day.
Now imagine this scenario but instead of all the messages being birthday wishes on your personal account, they are posts from your fans and followers of your business social networks. You definitely cannot let them hanging on cyber space, as one of the keys for business success in this area is the interaction with clients. But if you are a business owner trying to make your brand a success, social networking is only one of your several responsibilities.
Community Management not only involves answering posts. It’s also about smartly connecting with your customers, about communicating strategies, about choosing the correct platform, and about optimizing the impact of your brand. So why not leave these tasks to a Community Manager to someone who lives and breathes social media? Even better, why not outsourcing it to someone with the time and talent to get it going at a cheaper rate?
Whether you outsource your community management to a virtual assistant/agency or do it in-house is not an easy decision, this practice is getting very popular. According to the 2012 Deloitte’s Global outsourcing and insourcing survey, when asking business owners
– Save time. Whether you are a small business owner or not, you need to decide where you want to invest your time. Managing your business networks, especially if you don’t have that much knowledge in social media and online marketing can be time consuming. Let someone else worry about posting, tweeting, and pinning. if outsourcing was a standard practice in their company, 60% answered that it is. So, here are four reasons why you should consider it:
– Save money. Who doesn’t want that!? Something that makes outsourcing better is that you will not need to spend money on hiring someone new or buy new equipment for your new employee; you can even employ the service for some hours a day.
– 100% time commitment and smart content. Dedicated day-to-day management will assure that your pages will be always updated and that the interaction with your customers will be constant. Moreover, the community manager that will be dedicated only to manage your social media should be able to know the consumer to be able to create and deliver communicating messages effectively to engage your audience.
– You are hiring a pro. By outsourcing you are guaranteed to be hiring a virtual assistant with knowledge on the subject who truly understands the meaning of community management and has certain experience in that battle field.